Title: The Virgin Suicides
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Genre: Literary Fiction / Modern Classic
ISBN: 1250074819
Publisher: Picador Modern Classics
Publication Date: 1993
Publisher Description: The national bestseller from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humour and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.
Literary Atelier Review: So often mislabelled as a young adult novel, The Virgin Suicides is at its core a tale about middle aged men looking back on a pivotal moment in their early adolescence which they are still struggling to make sense of as adults.
The Lisbon sisters exist in the novel only in the imaginations of the boys as they have very little real contact with them. One of the most notable being their phone call music exchange. A moving scene which will stay with me forever.
The book is built on a sense of nostalgia for a nineteen-seventies American suburbia which may have never existed as the narrators go back in time to explore the events of the suicides of the sisters who lived in their small town and attended their school. Now over thirty years old (and Sofia Coppola’s beautiful corresponding film adaptation is twenty-five years old) Eugenides’ prize winning novel is still as haunting and heartfelt as ever thus its continued cult status is thoroughly deserved.
In September 2023 I was fortunate enough to attend Jeffery Eugenides' talk at the Internationales Literatur Festival Berlin (and have a lovely chat with him afterwards - he was so delightful and charming). One of the things he said that night which really made me think about the wonder of the novel is that this story is not really about the Lisbon sisters. Rather it is about the memory the neighbourhood boys have of the girls and of that fateful year. It is ultimately a book about trying to understand the world through youthful eyes.