I was straight up obsessed with the film adaptation of this novel when I first saw it 9 years ago. Everything from the dialogue to the costumes to Kate Winslet's volcano performance left a lasting impression on me. So this was the first time I've been able to read the novel it was based on, and I was floored. While it certainly is a critique of the suburban lifestyle that pervaded across the country in the 50s, more so it's a story about the lies we tell others, and ourselves, in order to feel loved; the ways we make others feel important in exchange for that love. It's about fighting for significance in your own life, and desiring for your life to mean something in the world. Throughout the story, the characters uphold their personal delusions, constantly setting traps for themselves and others, and fighting to break free. The novel dares to ask how much a person is willing to lose, especially when that person isn't necessarily aware of what she or he has to lose. More than all of this though, the story is about the prisons women of that time were shackled in; about how everyone and everything kept women imprisoned; the price women have to pay for men's willful inability to listen to them, to acknowledge them as equals. Ultimately, the women are strangled by the societal chains men have wrapped around them, all the while insisting that the women did this to themselves.