The Book That Made Me Cry on a Subway Platform

A prince, a exile, and a war nobody really wants to fight

Here’s the setup, and I promise I’m not going to spoil the parts that matter. Patroclus is an exiled prince, awkward and unimpressive by his own account, shipped off to the court of King Peleus after an accident back home that his father never forgives him for. There he meets Achilles, golden and terrifyingly gifted, the kind of kid who’s clearly going to be a legend before he’s old enough to grow a beard. They become friends. Then they become something else. Then Helen gets taken to Troy and every king in Greece who swore an oath has to go to war, and Achilles, prophecy-bound to be either forgotten or immortal-through-glory, has to decide which one he wants to be.

If you did any Greek mythology in school you know where this goes. Miller isn’t hiding the ending from you, she tells you early and often that this does not end well. That’s the trick of the book: it’s not a mystery, it’s an inevitability, and the whole novel is about making you love these two people enough that the ending, which you saw coming from page one, still guts you.

What actually works, and the one thing that doesn’t

What works is Patroclus as narrator. Miller made a genuinely smart choice here, because the Iliad barely gives him a personality, he’s mostly there to die and set Achilles off on his rage arc. Miller builds an entire interior life for him: gentle, observant, a little bit of a coward by his own harsh self-assessment, endlessly generous toward a man who is objectively kind of a golden-boy nightmare half the time. You believe Achilles loves him specifically because Patroclus is the one person who isn’t dazzled by him.

The middle section, though. Look, I have to be honest, the years on Mount Pelion with Chiron are lovely but the pacing goes soft, and once they land at Troy the book settles into a rhythm of “camp politics, another death, Achilles broods” that repeats a few more times than it needs to. I don’t think it’s a slog exactly, but it’s not as tightly wound as the first hundred pages, and I say that as someone who loves this book without reservation everywhere else.

And then Briseis shows up, and I’ll admit I went in ready to be annoyed, because “war captive becomes the emotional third wheel in a love story” is a setup that usually goes badly. It doesn’t here. Miller uses her to widen the book past the two boys’ bubble, to show what the war actually costs the people who aren’t heroes, and Patroclus’s protectiveness toward her is some of the best character work in the whole thing.

I read most of this on a work trip, in a hotel room in Ohio of all places, and I remember getting to the scene with Achilles and Thetis on the beach and having to put the book face down on the comforter for a second. Not crying yet. Just needing a beat. The actual crying came later, on a subway platform back home, at the part everyone who’s read this book knows is coming, and I want to say I’m not a crier but I absolutely was, in public, holding a paperback like it had personally betrayed me.

I do wonder sometimes if I love this book as much as I think I do, or if I’ve just absorbed how much everyone else loves it. I’ve reread it twice since and cried both times in the same place, so I think it’s real. But it’s a fair question to ask of any book this hyped.

If you want your own copy to argue with, here it is on Amazon, and yes, buy the one with the arrow on the cover, you’ll know why later.

Name one hero who was happy.

About Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller studied Latin and Ancient Greek for over a decade, taught high school Shakespeare and Homer for years, and then apparently decided the only reasonable thing to do with that education was write the two best Greek mythology books published this century. The Song of Achilles took her about ten years to write, which honestly explains why every sentence feels considered rather than dashed off. She followed it with Circe, which somehow might be even better, and has been publicly, almost stubbornly devoted to giving voice to the people Homer treated as scenery. She writes like someone who has spent her whole adult life annoyed on behalf of side characters, in the best way.

If this wrecked you, read these next

Circe by Madeline Miller, same author, arguably sharper, a woman instead of a doomed boy at the center, and you get to watch her actually win for once.

The Iliad, the Emily Wilson or Robert Fagles translation, because reading the source material right after hits different once you know what Miller was working with and against.

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, if you want more mythology-retelling-through-the-overlooked-woman’s-eyes in this same emotionally devastating register.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, for the war from every angle Achilles never bothered to consider.

For your book club

1. Patroclus insists throughout that he isn’t a hero. Do you agree, and does the book actually believe him?
2. How does knowing the ending from the start change the way you read the middle of the book? Did it ruin tension or build it?
3. Thetis is furious about her son’s relationship with Patroclus for most of the book. Is she wrong to be afraid, given how things end?
4. What does the book gain by narrating the Trojan War through the one person history mostly ignored?
5. Achilles chooses glory over a long quiet life more than once. Do you think he’d make the same choice if he could do it again?