Books We Can’t Quit: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Chosen by: Dawn West

First Published in Hardcover: April 1, 1993.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

256 pgs/$10.99

“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

 “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides sewed a black, sinewy tale onto the septum of my teenage heart in the mid-2000s. I read it in a fevered rush before gobbling up the film adaptation, renewing them twice each before returning to the library. After those weeks of reading and watching, I realized that what I felt when I read every other favorite book was nothing. This was the book that was everything. This was my new North Star.

The “narrator” is a modern revolution of the classic Greek chorus, close but not quite, a plural first person gathering of once-teenage boys who commune with the now-dead girls in the only way they’re able—cataloging the year the girls killed themselves and released the poison in the air. Exhibits #1-97 are all that is left of the Lisbon girls. The most trivial list of mundane facts.

The Lisbon girls (Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia) and their neighborhood boy-voyeurs live in a calm Detroit upper-middle class suburb in the 1970s, their peripherals saturated with the dying auto industry, amidst families of ill elm trees. We know they are going to kill themselves. We know right away, and we’re still keen. Jeffrey Eugenides’ prose is intoxicating. His command of detail and atmosphere still colonizes me, years later, technically grown up. The man knows how to conjure a mood. The fish flies, the heady smells, a pilfered photograph of Mary Lisbon blow-drying her hair, Bonnie Lisbon’s votive candles that become an amalgamated shrine, tears in Lux Lisbon’s voice and eyes, dark green pamphlets with white lettering, and all that gut-pretty and bone-sad ‘70s music. It both reveals and transforms suburban middle-American life, in a time when my mother was around the age I am now, except living a state below the Lisbon girls, in Ohio, leading a distinctly different life, but listening to the same music and flipping through the same magazines the girls do when their mother locks them away and the girls are taken in by the mysterious fatal melancholy that seems to be the patriarch of the Lisbon family.

 

Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquility that they had stood mesmerized.But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself:  blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon’s razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water.  The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn’t say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.

Cecilia survives her first attempt long enough to succeed on her second, after excusing herself from a party her psychologist encouraged the strict, deeply religious Mrs. Lisbon to arrange. One neighbor, Mr. Buell, watched Cecilia open her bedroom window, but just missed her stick her head out the window, into the pink, humid, pillowing air, to leap. When Father Moody comes calling:

 

Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it. Because Mrs. Lisbon had stopped doing laundry or even buying detergent, the girls had taken to washing clothes by hand in the bathtub, and when Father Moody passed their bathroom, he saw shirts and pants and underthings draped over the shower curtain. “It sounded quite pleasant, actually,” he said. “Like rain.” Steam rose from the floor, along with the smell of jasmine soap (weeks later, we asked  the cosmetics lady at Jacobsen’s for some jasmine soap we could smell).

It’s difficult to ignore the tangled mess of motivations behind adoring a book like The Virgin Suicides. Many of us have and do, according to its national bestseller and simultaneously cult status. Sofia Coppola certainly helped, but what truly hypnotizes us is the story, the feelings it exposes, the girls the girls the girls, the resilience of obsession and sex and death, the way we want to be young but not really, the way we remember things but not really, the way we wanted to steal some of our first crush’s hair, or anything of theirs, like Lux Lisbon’s bra, kept with the other ninety-six Exhibits, once hanging from a crucifix in her bedroom.

 

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased.  Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in midstride, look  down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with its timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps… Woody Clabault saw Lux Lisbon talking to a motorcycle gang outside Hudson’s. One biker asked her to go for a ride, and after looking in the direction of her house more than ten miles away, she accepted. She hugged his waist. He kicked the machine into life. Later, Lux was seen walking home alone, carrying her shoes.

 

When Mrs. Lisbon shuts the house in maximum-security isolation, a measure in response to Lux disregarding the girls’ curfew, the sightings of Lux making love on the roof began, and the girls become more dreams than flesh-and-blood. Moreover, as fall turned to winter, the trees in the yard drooped and thickened, concealing the house, even though their leaflessness should have revealed it.

This period of the novel is where I become even more interested in the history of Mrs. Lisbon. Nothing about her background is explicitly stated, but from what little Eugenides shows us, one can conjure, like assuming personality based on literary tastes, hairstyle, signature scent. What makes Mrs. Lisbon so draconian, so fearful, so in denial? Mrs. Lisbon maintained that her decision was never intended to be punitive… “The girls needed time to themselves. A mother knows.” When I first read that, it burned me. Something my mother would say after refusing to allow me to go see some boy “too many days in a row.” The keys in her hand, an effort in her crusade for chastity. A mother knows. Whether I really wanted to see that boy or not, I battled. I just wanted to be mine, like any teenage girl, who isn’t usually her own in this world, particularly her body. My mother wanted mine at the altar of God, for instance. The Lisbon girls were certainly their own in the end, for better and worse, forever changing the neighborhood boys, who became men who were scarred forever, happier with dreams than wives.

When the girls call for them, the neighborhood boys come, dreaming of highways, but the girls have other plans.

 

 Already we knew the rest—though we could never be sure about the sequence of events. We argue about it still. Most likely, Bonnie died while we were in the living room, dreaming of highways. Mary put her head in the oven shortly thereafter, on hearing Bonnie kick the trunk out from under herself. They were ready to assist one another, if need be. Mary might have still been breathing when we passed by on our way downstairs, missing her by less than two feet in the dark, as we later measured. Therese, stuffed with sleeping pills washed down with gin, was as good as dead by the time we entered the house. Lux was the last to go, twenty or thirty minutes after we left. Fleeing, screaming without sound, we forgot to stop at the garage, from which music was still playing. They  found her in the front seat, gray-faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm. She had escaped in the car just as we expected. But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.

 

This story is a part of me, like all of the books that have changed my life. It’s hypnotic, profound, singular, lyrical, era-defining, and shorthand for both how I felt as a teenage girl and how nostalgia is in everyone’s bones like minerals. Somehow both fantastical and macabre, The Virgin Suicides is, for me, the definitive coming-of-age novel. When I finished it I hugged it to my chest the same way I did back then. I probably always will.

Note: Want more TVS?

Please enjoy: You’re My Favorite Flavor, a screenshot moodboard by me.

Strange Magic, an 8tracks mix by Tavi Gevinson.

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Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio

Have a book that you just can’t quit?  Send it to Amye (at) Pank Magazine (dot) com.