Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.
Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
boys, ghosts, girls, masculinity, the-virgin-suicides