Icarus 🕊️

By Jeffrey Eugenides.

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Icarus is a quiet, haunting memoir that sits with grief rather than trying to solve it. In this deeply personal book, Jeffrey Eugenides returns to the life and death of his father, Gus, who died in a small plane crash in Florida in 1994.

More than three decades later, Eugenides revisits the story not to sensationalise it, but to understand the man behind it.

Gus was a first generation American who rose from Detroit’s east side to financial success as a mortgage banker and real estate developer. His life reads, in many ways, like a classic American Dream narrative, shaped by ambition, optimism and relentless forward motion. Yet that same drive ultimately led to loss and ruin.

Eugenides gently explores the question that lingers throughout the book. Was his father undone by bad luck, by the systems around him, or by his own refusal to stop pushing forward.

What makes Icarus so affecting is its emotional honesty. Eugenides writes more directly here than in his fiction, allowing himself to be fully present on the page. He does not shy away from contradiction. His feelings toward his father are layered and unresolved, moving between admiration, frustration, tenderness, gratitude, pity and love.

This complexity gives the memoir its weight. Gus is neither mythologised nor diminished. He is allowed to be fully human.

I have not experienced the loss of a parent, but having lost a father figure (step-father and grandfather) in recent years, this book resonated deeply. It felt like a bittersweet reminder of lives well lived and the lasting imprint people leave on us, even when their stories end in uncertainty.

There is something profoundly moving about the way Eugenides captures how parents, despite their flaws, try to protect their children from the hardest parts of life.

One of the most heartbreaking elements of the book is the inclusion of transcripts between Gus and air traffic control during his final flight. Reading or hearing these exchanges strips away any distance. They are calm, procedural and devastating, grounding the memoir in a moment that cannot be undone. It is here that the title fully lands. Not as spectacle, but as a quiet fall.

Icarus is not just a book about loss. It is a meditation on ambition, masculinity, inheritance and the stories we tell ourselves about success. Above all, it is an act of love. A son bearing witness to his father’s life in all its contradictions, and finally allowing himself to sit with the truth.

Beautiful, restrained and deeply human, this is a memoir that lingers long after the final page.

The book is available on Audible and you can buy it here.