The Virgin Suicides


The Virgin Suicides is the debut novel by the American author, Jeffrey Eugenides. The fictional story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five sisters, the Lisbon girls. The novel is written in first person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths. The novel's first chapter appeared in The Paris Review in 1990, and won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Eugenides told : "I think that if my name hadn't been Eugenides, people wouldn't have called the narrator a Greek chorus". The novel was adapted into a 1999 movie by director Sofia Coppola, and starring Kirsten Dunst.

Plot summary

As an ambulance arrives for the body of Mary Lisbon, a group of anonymous neighborhood adolescent boys recall the events leading up to her death.
The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s. The father, Ronald Lisbon, is a math teacher at the local high school. The mother is a homemaker. The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.
Without warning, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. Fortunately, she is found in time, and survives. A few weeks later, the Lisbon parents allow the girls to throw a chaperoned party at their house in hopes of cheering Cecilia up. However, Cecilia excuses herself from the party, happening in the basement, and goes upstairs and jumps out of her second-story bedroom window. Cecelia is impaled on the fence post below, and she dies almost immediately.
The Lisbon parents begin to watch their four remaining daughters more closely, which only further isolates the family from their upscale community. Cecilia's death also heightens the air of mystery about the Lisbon sisters to the neighborhood boys, who long for more insight into the girls' lives.
When school begins in the fall, Lux begins a secret romance with the local heartthrob, Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to the homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three sisters as well. After winning homecoming King and Queen, Trip persuades Lux to ditch their group to have sex on the school's football field. Afterwards, Trip abandons Lux, who falls asleep and misses her curfew. In response to this incident, Mrs. Lisbon withdraws the girls from school and keeps them home. Mr. Lisbon also takes a leave of absence from his teaching job, so that the family can be together for the time being.
Through the winter, Lux is seen by the anonymous teen boys having sex on the roof of the Lisbon residence with unnamed and unknown men at night. The tight-knit community watches as the Lisbon' lives deteriorate, but no one ever intervenes. After many months of confinement, the remaining four sisters reach out to the boys across the street by using light signals and sending anonymous notes. The boys decide to call the Lisbon girls and communicate by playing records over the telephone for the girls to share and express their feelings.
Finally, the one night the girls send a message to the boys to come over at midnight, leading the boys to believe they will help the girls escape. The teens meet Lux, who is alone. She invites them inside and tells them to wait for her sisters while she goes to start the car. As the boys wait, they explore the house. In the Lisbon basement the boys discover Bonnie hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling rafters. Horrified, the boys flee.
In the morning, the authorities come for the dead bodies, as the girls had apparently made a suicide pact: Bonnie hanged herself, Therese overdosed on sleeping pills, and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning after sealing herself inside the garage with the car running. Mary attempted suicide by putting her head in the gas oven, but failed. Mary lives for another month, before she ends her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The adults in the community go on as if nothing happened. Local newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides come exactly one year after Cecilia's first attempt and describes the girls as tragic creatures so cut off from life, that death was not much of a change.
After the funerals, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon leave Grosse Pointe, never to return. The Lisbon house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area. All the furniture and personal belongings of the Lisbons are thrown out or sold during a garage sale. The narrators scavenge through the trash to collect mementos. Later, as middle-aged men with families, they lament the suicides as selfish acts from which they have not been able to emotionally recover. The novel closes with the, now grown, men confessing that they had loved the girls, but that they will never know the motives behind the suicides.

Film adaptation

wrote the screenplay for and directed a 97-minute film version, which was shot in the summer of 1998, and released on May 19, 1999 at the Cannes Film Festival. The Virgin Suicides was Sofia Coppola's feature directional debut. The film then opened on April 21, 2000, in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The film starred Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner, and Josh Hartnett. The film is faithful to the novel; much of the dialogue and narration is taken verbatim from its source. The film received favorable reviews and was rated R for strong thematic elements involving teens.
The French band Air created the score to the film, also entitled The Virgin Suicides.

Background

The inspiration for the plot of the book came to Jeffrey Eugenides when his nephew's teenage babysitter told him that she and her sisters had planned to commit suicide. When Eugenides asked why, the babysitter only replied, "we were under a lot of pressure." Eugenides talks about this inspiration in his YouTube interview with The Paris Review.