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. Continue reading →