The Virgin Suicides
The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s. The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at a private school and 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. Their lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a stoic and astute girl described as an "outsider", attempts suicide by cutting her wrists. A few weeks later, the girls throw a chaperoned party, during which Cecilia jumps from their second story window and dies, impaled by a fence post. The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the family are popular subjects of neighborhood gossip. The mystique of the Lisbon girls operates also for the neighborhood boys, the narrators of the novel. Lux begins a romance with local heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. After having sex with Trip on the high school football field after the dance, Lux misses her curfew. Consequently, the Lisbons become recluses. Mrs. Lisb
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about The Virgin Suicides
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Twenty years later, a chorus of grown men in 1970s Grosse Pointe, Michigan tries to piece together what happened to the five Lisbon sisters, daughters of a high school math teacher and his strict Catholic wife. The novel opens with thirteen-year-old Cecilia's first attempt and the year that follows.
Yes. Sofia Coppola's 1999 film adaptation was her directorial debut. The film is widely considered a faithful and atmospheric adaptation of the novel's collective-narrator gaze on a 1970s Michigan family.
The Virgin Suicides is narrated by an unnamed we (a group of neighborhood boys looking back as adults) trying to understand the suicides of the Lisbon sisters. The collective first-person narration is one of the novel's defining features.
The Virgin Suicides was written by Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 1993 by Libro.
The Virgin Suicides is 249 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Virgin Suicides takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
The Virgin Suicides is a standalone novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, not part of a series.
The Virgin Suicides is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.