Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.

The Virgin Suicides

Stas

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.

They lost their high heels on the way kissed us in the humid darkness, and then slipped away to throw up demurely in the outside bushes.

The National Bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot With a New Introduction 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 humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. 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.

A Novel

The Virgin Suicides (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition)

Paige Leitner

"'At thirteen, Cecelia should be allowed to wear the sort of makeup popular among girls her age, in order to bond with them. The aping of shared customs is an indispensable step in the process of individualization.'"

juana de arco si estuviera cronicamente online

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

"’but why do you care? it’s not a contest.’” "’yes, it is. you just can't see it because you've always been the winner.’”

Gisselle Vazquez

None of the teachers insisted on their participating, with the result that all the healing was done by those of us without wounds. 

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 humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. 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.

angie

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

 They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

 She smiled then, a loose, clumsy smile, genuine, unpretty. 

She took one more step and her face reappeared. For a second it didn't seem alive: it was too white, the cheeks too perfectly carved, the arched eyebrows painted on, the full lips made of wax. But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.

and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had. 

Often, in today's world, the extended child- hood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. 

 "I don't know what you're feeling. I won't even pretend."

We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

Nele Braeger 

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.

Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-siècle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents' group donated a bench in the girls' memory to our school.

Mrs. Lisbon's mother, Lema Crawford, mentioned during that same crackling phone call to New Mexico that she had given Mrs. Lisbon most of her summer pickles and preserves (she had hesitated saying "summer" because that had been the summer Cecilia had died, and all the while the cucumbers, strawberries, and even she herself, seventy-one years old, had gone on growing and living).

[…]; his sallow complexion dying in sympathy with them; and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had. 

Brittany

It was compelling at the start but lost its pacing a little and I found myself getting bored during the middle, but it picked up towards the end and I enjoyed the last few pages.

kittie

This book has wrecked me. Do not read this if you're not in a good mental state because this book will absolutely crush your spirit. 

While I originally chose this book for it's links to my dissertation research, I'm very glad I read it for other reasons, as well. It will open your eyes to the cruelty of humans and the importance on relying on community. It will show you how bleak the world can become without leaning on and communicating with others. As I was reading, the gender disparities cannot be ignored, but oddly enough, that's not what stood out most prominently with this novel. This book is real and grim and really difficult to read at times. But, with all that said, it was fantastic. I'm not sure if I could point out a time when a book last made me feel this unnerved. 

If you're in a healthy mental state, give this book a read (it is a contemporary classic for a reason). Just be aware going in that it is not a light hearted novel. 

This book has wrecked me. Do not read this if you're not in a good mental state because this book will absolutely crush your spirit. 

While I originally chose this book for it's links to my dissertation research, I'm very glad I read it for other reasons, as well. It will open your eyes to the cruelty of humans and the importance on relying on community. It will show you how bleak the world can become without leaning on and communicating with others. As I was reading, the gender disparities cannot be ignored, but oddly enough, that's not what stood out most prominently with this novel. This book is real and grim and really difficult to read at times. But, with all that said, it was fantastic. I'm not sure if I could point out a time when a book last made me feel this unnerved. 

If you're in a healthy mental state, give this book a read (it is a contemporary classic for a reason). Just be aware going in that it is not a light hearted novel. 

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”

Oh what I would give to read this book from the point of view of the sisters.

Jillian Roberts

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”

Oh what I would give to read this book from the point of view of the sisters.

to be a woman is to perform or whatever that quote was

Uomini si chiederanno cosa voglia dire essere una ragazza e non troveranno risposta…..

Cédric Yorke

Maureen

“The Lisbon girls, on the other hand were ‘like something behind glass. Like an exhibit.’”

***

Elusive bodies constitute male desire. This is my key takeaway from the novel. We never learn who the Lisbon sisters truly are because information about them is delivered in fragments through the narratives of the neighborhood boys-turned-men. Essentially, the novel epitomizes the male gaze: the Lisbon sisters are reduced to objects of sight. Because of how much traction their family gained due to their unorthodox lifestyle, the girls’ ‘virgin’ suicides were treated as mere casualties in the end—prone to oversimplification not only by the boys but the suburban community as a whole.

The virgin suicides

Amina

I first read this book 11 years ago—it was 2013, I was 13 and on tumblr and that’s enough info for you to know what kind of person I was like back then. and so ofc back then I too was like the narrators and fetishized tf out of the lisbon girls. it’s only now realizing as an adult that the whole point is how these men were just the original incels lmfaooo. this book is fucking phenomenal.

so many reviews here are filled with people still speculating the suicides and it just proves that they can’t think outside of the narrators. it’s really not hard to understand why the girls did it—their lives fucking sucked. what made it unbearable to them is that nobody ever understood them, not just the boys but their entire community. they were constantly just interpreted as some abstract, mysterious creatures, when really, they were just girls.

glória

it’s literally impossible to be a woman 

Eugenia 

armoni mayes

** spoiler alert **
           I did think this book would be a five star read but it just didn’t meet that bar tbh. but i did find the book interesting because it gave us the perception of how the town saw the five lisbon girls, so we will never really know what they experienced in the time that cecila committed suicide and their own. i think we can only conjure up in our minds what they went through, considering we would later find out that their parents never cleaned up the party they threw for cecilia. the torment of not being able to leave the house on top of it falling apart/not being clean must’ve taken a massive toll on them along with their younger sisters death. i can only speculate that this along with other issues in their personal lives led to their suicides. i don’t want to sit here and point fingers at the parents but they definitely did not support their daughters in the way they probably should have after cecilia’s death, even though it must’ve been hard for them too.

isabelle

I loved how it was told from the male gaze. It meant that the story was haunting and we know very little about the Lisbon sisters.

Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola and starring Kirsten Dunst, this is the story of the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood.

Marz 

The title of the virgin suicides made me curious hence I decided to read it. 

While I enjoyed various aspects of the book such as the portrayal of the male gaze through the boys that narrate the story or the impact of growing up in a religious house as a young girl, I ultimately did not enjoy reading this book. 

The writing was slow paced, it felt like nothing at all was happening, even events which should have an impact just felt flat to me. The book constantly goes on tangents speaking about random things in unessacary detail. 

Also while I understand this book came out in the nineties the ableism and racism in this book is so off putting. The description of a character named Joe in chapter one was so horrid I nearly stopped reading then. I only continued because online readers insisted it was just one weird passage. 


In summary the virgin suicides reads like your weird cousin telling you a story from years ago.

Oliver Magnanimous

the blurry hasty pace of me speeding thru this book matched the hazy fog-like pace and ambience of the book. to be immortalised in the eyes of immature men as something divine when we’re just humans is the way men overcompensate for their lack of emotional growth when they were teens as well. 

Kira L

Emma Cline writing the into for the anniversary edition of this book was everything I never knew I needed

Grace M

cool use of narration, ethereal/timeless/drifty writing, but didn’t really catch me otherwise. I can see why this grabbed everyone when it came out, and Eugenides is indeed the goat when it comes to telling us how things look and smell and taste, but the rest of the book was bland and lacking traction in not a good way. I read it, probably won’t read it again.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Maddie Kayani

steady, meandering, seamless, lurid, continuous prose. learned a lot of new words (lol), boring at times, but still very very good prose. i’m a fast, greedy reader that enjoys moving on and finding out but i found myself going back to the beginning of a sentence or paragraph a lot especially the last one wow. 

i liked it. i “liked” it. i Kind of liked it.

it’s honestly pretty problematic LOL. written from the perspective of a nameless infatuated high school boy (who i don’t think even gets to speak to the sisters), there is a weird observer/subject  relationship that is inevitably creepy and depraved. the boys keep an archival record of the lisbon girls— we hear of pictures, diaries, outfits, objects, interactions, anecdotes— we spend a lot of time on the surface probing in without success. the descriptions are precise, keen, specific. the novel indulges in its voyeurism. there is so much on the surface that in the end says so little. 

during their confinement, the girls and objects within the house blend together, their objectification becoming clearer as the boys simply don’t know them as people. the girls become objects of intrigue, mystery, infatuation, lust— mostly i think because of their unattainability— but they never become people. the narrator seems surprised when the girls talk back. i loved the few interactions we get from the girls, the few glimpses of interiority and personhood (which btw shocks the narrator every single time it happens), and this me realize i am becoming one of these nameless observers... 

during prom, therese says “we just want to live. if anyone would let us.” i think this signals as a kind of hyperawareness of surveillance that the girls know they are subjected to. in addition to a strict mother, these boys keep crazy tabs on them which we know they’re aware of. they literally kill themselves in front of the guys so it’s hard for me to imagined they liked them. the ending to me feels like resentment, projection. he calls the girls selfish, too in tune with their own pain to see people calling in from the outside. maybe they just want u all off their dick? lol? i could be reading this super wrong. 

lux’s hypersexualization was also soo weird because she’s literally 14…

also some weird random racist parts and he drops the hard r once which was kind of jarring

i think this is a book about how much the surface can contain and how little it can say. liked what he did here but got a bit weird for me. also looked up a picture of the author and that’s exactly the kind of guy i imagined wrote this book.

chiara

steady, meandering, seamless, lurid, continuous prose. learned a lot of new words (lol), boring at times, but still very very good prose. i’m a fast, greedy reader that enjoys moving on and finding out but i found myself going back to the beginning of a sentence or paragraph a lot especially the last one wow. 

i liked it. i “liked” it. i Kind of liked it.

it’s honestly pretty problematic LOL. written from the perspective of a nameless infatuated high school boy (who i don’t think even gets to speak to the sisters), there is a weird observer/subject  relationship that is inevitably creepy and depraved. the boys keep an archival record of the lisbon girls— we hear of pictures, diaries, outfits, objects, interactions, anecdotes— we spend a lot of time on the surface probing in without success. the descriptions are precise, keen, specific. the novel indulges in its voyeurism. there is so much on the surface that in the end says so little. 

during their confinement, the girls and objects within the house blend together, their objectification becoming clearer as the boys simply don’t know them as people. the girls become objects of intrigue, mystery, infatuation, lust— mostly i think because of their unattainability— but they never become people. the narrator seems surprised when the girls talk back. i loved the few interactions we get from the girls, the few glimpses of interiority and personhood (which btw shocks the narrator every single time it happens), and this me realize i am becoming one of these nameless observers... 

during prom, therese says “we just want to live. if anyone would let us.” i think this signals as a kind of hyperawareness of surveillance that the girls know they are subjected to. in addition to a strict mother, these boys keep crazy tabs on them which we know they’re aware of. they literally kill themselves in front of the guys so it’s hard for me to imagined they liked them. the ending to me feels like resentment, projection. he calls the girls selfish, too in tune with their own pain to see people calling in from the outside. maybe they just want u all off their dick? lol? i could be reading this super wrong. 

lux’s hypersexualization was also soo weird because she’s literally 14…

also some weird random racist parts and he drops the hard r once which was kind of jarring

i think this is a book about how much the surface can contain and how little it can say. liked what he did here but got a bit weird for me. also looked up a picture of the author and that’s exactly the kind of guy i imagined wrote this book.

destiny

4.5 this was so beautiful and heart wrenching

Finally! I! got! to! finish! this!

Will edit this review soon

noelle

Ann Gabrielle

I usually don't really know what to write whenever I review a book. But the Virgin Suicides touched a nerve within me that I thought I had buried after emerging from fresh adolescence, or the same years the girls were. A particular line stands out as to why this book feels very special to me:

"We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time."

I feel as though the appeal of this book doesn't come from the mysteries of why the Lisbon girls did what they did, but how despite no explicit explanation from the girls, we already know. Those who have suffered under depression or some similar mental malaise in their teenaged years know the struggle of wanting to break free and live to only be told that their pain was just dust. Eugenides deserves the praise that he gets because he touches on adolescence with respect and even sacredness. Like Coppola, he treats his younger audience not as oversized children with petty complaints of the world, but as conscious individuals with serious grievances. David Bowie says it better, 

"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware of what they're going through."

Besides that, there is also the subtle jab at the male gaze being used against itself. The narrator, whoever he is, is insistent on his portrayal of the girls as a virgin 'congregation of angels', wishing desperately to capture them and 'feel them up'. He laments about the elusiveness of these girls, and yet we catch moments of individuality from the girls here and there when he least expects it, always commenting on such moments of shock. As they drove their way out of the neighborhood to prom, the narrator was surprised at how the girls knew of stories about neighbors and made comments about their affairs. What was more shocking to me was that they didn't expect such agency from the girls, as if they were only meant to be objects to be seen rather than fellow people who saw as well. The elusiveness had only come from them, and the incessant whining about never knowing the girls comes from their own failure to come into terms with their humanity.

The Virgin Suicides

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