The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides is generally remembered as Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, but before it was a cult classic film, it was a Jeffrey Eugenides novel.

Eugenides has said that the plot was inspired by a conversation with his nephew’s teenage babysitter. She told him that she and her sisters had planned to commit suicide, and when Eugenides asked why, she said simply “we were under a lot of pressure”.

From this strange conversation came The Virgin Suicides, which centers on the lives of the five doomed Lisbon sisters in 1970s Michigan. “Twenty years on,” reads the blurb, “their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them,”. I’ll offer here a trigger warning for suicide (is that too obvious?), and also the mention of a very sad dog death in Chapter 2.

The Lisbons are a Catholic family, with five blonde teenage daughters: Cecilia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Therese (17). They move as a pack, and have very few friendships outside of the family. The Virgin Suicides is ostensibly about all five, but focuses mostly on the younger two, Cecilia and Lux.

The inciting incident comes with Cecilia cutting her wrists in the bathtub. It’s a completely unexpected event, and sets neighbourhood tongues wagging. She survives, and her psychiatrist recommends to her parents that she – and the other Lisbon daughters – would benefit from some social interaction outside the confines of school. They throw a chaperoned party for teens at the Lisbon home, and all seems to be going well, until Cecilia excuses herself and promptly jumps out her second-story bedroom window. She’s impaled on the fence post below, and dies immediately.

This is, needless to say, extremely traumatic for the parents and remaining Lisbon girls. Unfortunately, they seem to lack any appropriate outlets for their grief or tools for managing it. The family gradually isolates itself, becoming more and more insular, including the girls eventually being removed from school and rarely leaving the family home. Only Lux manages to sneak out on occasion for ill-advised sexual encounters (a faulty coping mechanism that only compounds her trauma).

The more the Lisbon girls retreat, the more obsessed the neighbourhood boys become with finding ways to reach them. In fact, The Virgin Suicides is wholly narrated in the first person plural, or Greek chorus style (though Eugenides once complained that “if my name hadn’t been Eugenides, people wouldn’t have called the narrator a Greek chorus”, which I must say sounds like complete nonsense). As grown men, the narrators reflect on their teenage obsession with the Lisbon girls, and how their lives deteriorated after Cecilia’s death, culminating (spoiler, I guess?) in the simultaneous suicides of the remaining sisters almost exactly one year later.

It’s not always clear in The Virgin Suicides what the reader should take as literal and what is metaphorical. There’s a certain unreliability to the narration, the entire story being related through (firstly) the filter of adolescent longing, and (secondly) the faded recollections of older men. It’s a kind of suburban gothic, where the descent of the Lisbon family is mirrored in the decay of their house and their retreat from the outside world, all viewed at a distance with answers only inferred and never confirmed.

There’s also a certain self-fulfilling prophecy to the story of the Lisbon girls. The parents, so desperate to protect their children, end up exposing them to the very harm they sought to circumvent. If you have any sympathy for the angst of adolescence, Mr and Mrs Lisbon read as villains, but to an adult mind, their reaction to Cecilia’s death is very understandable.

For me, it alternates between feeling timeless and feeling quaint. Of course, it was a simpler time back then – there are no smart phones or social media or vaping – but the trials of adolescence and the fears that anchor suburban life are eternal. I’ll note as well that there are moments of (very) dark humour. I chuckled at the passage about the school counsellor who fabricated her qualifications to get the gig, and did a runner shortly after the suicides of the Lisbon girls.

Taken as a whole, I read The Virgin Suicides as a novel about desire. The girls desired freedom and escape from their parents’ fears, the boys desired the girls, and everything is told and understood through the filters of those desires. It’s not one to read when you’re in a dark state of mind, as it might be just enough to tip you over the edge, but it’s a fascinating one to read when you’re comfortable doing so.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Virgin Suicides:

• “who wants to read about a family of young girls who commit suicide? I do if Eugenides wrote it.” – Kathy B Lamos
• “Whatever compelled Jeffrey Eugenides to write The Virgin Suicides–a vile, misogynistic piece of rubbish in which he describes at length, but not in depth, the events surrounding the deaths of five sisters–made me wonder more about the author’s psychology than those of the characters. This is late 20th-century Dadaism at its lowest. Like John Cage, Eugenides has nothing to say, and he is saying it. I threw the book across the room after I finished it, and plan to burn it as soon as I can find an incinerator so that nobody else will feel compelled to read this copy again.” – pegslaw
• “The only positive comment I can make is that the pacing was consistent—SLOW. I’m no quitter, but I’m no fan of self-flagellation either.” – Average Jane
• “Occasionally I found myself skipping ahead looking for a suicide to happen to save me from the how drawn out this book is. I would only recommend this book if you are looking for a sure fire way to put yourself to sleep.” – Leah
• “I couldn’t wait until they finally off’d themselves so I could be done with it.” – WhitDawn