I devoured the sedulously constructed dreamscape of Eugenides’s debut novel as only a fantasizing teenager would. That I could be so easily convinced of the sex appeal of suburban Detroit in 1974 is both a credit to the book’s artful prose and an indicator of how green I thought grass was on the other side of wherever I stood. The story is narrated by a group of grown men who as boys were infatuated with the five Lisbon sisters, a brood of peculiar blond teen girls, and who, from the boys’ perspective, were composed almost entirely of feminine mysteries and reedy limbs. Following the suicide of the youngest sister, Cecilia, the girls begin a retreat from the world that eventually culminates in all four of the remaining sisters killing themselves. There are plenty of events in between these deaths: a homecoming dance, lots of sex on the Lisbon household roof, a protest against an ongoing municipal tree removal project, and several phone calls consisting entirely of records playing rather than people speaking. But at its core, the story is fan fiction about girls the boys could never really hope to know.
The Virgin Suicides is also a lie, starting with the title and running through to the very last words. Of the five Lisbon sisters who die by their own hands, there is at least one confirmed loss of virginity and plenty of subsequent sex. The speculative fiction begins soon after in the retelling of Cecilia’s first suicide attempt, but grows more glaring in the lead-up to a party that the Lisbons throw in order to cheer up Cecilia, the reluctant survivor of her own slashed wrists. The men narrating the story are positively horny at the memory of receiving handmade construction-paper invitations to the party. “It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees.” The boys are invited to a party that is designed to save a thirteen-year-old girl’s life, and they deduce that it was their names and addresses the sisters labored over most meticulously in their planning. If the sisters believe that drowning out the call of oblivion that beckons their baby sister toward death with party music is at least a close second, they do not say as much. Cecilia kills herself in the middle of the party, which one might think would render the boys gentler with the objects of their affection. One might think.
Instead, they write of a more urgent obsession: “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 mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander.” As the Lisbon girls develop ever-stranger wanderings of mind and body, the boys obsess more actively about their interior lives and speculate accordingly.
I recall a craving to be precisely this kind of object of infatuation when I was a teenager reading the book. I wanted a boy to look at me and see the mystery of my suffering and, instead of being repulsed by my emotions, to want to draw closer, to know more. But what the boys call observation feels much more like surveillance when rereading the text. My teen misery was mostly of my own making, a nagging sense of being incomplete but without any tangible loss to justify such feelings. The boys’ preoccupation is with the very private grief of losing one of your own. I know that as an adult woman, I should forgive the indelicate ways teen boys treat teen girls, even in their own speculations. I know, too, that they are fictions dissecting fictions. And yet I cannot stop myself from becoming fifteen again, staring down the prospect of a whole lifetime ahead of me without my sister and not screaming at the crude and incompetent analysis that would understate the loss of my sister, the girl whom even my infant self wanted to emulate so badly that I snatched her birthday. She is no less a part of me than my own beating heart. As an adult woman, I am eager to protect young girls from these crude and incompetent analyses, even if they are fictions dissecting fictions.
Though the boys never admit as much, it is crucial that the Lisbon sisters are all thin and beautiful within reason. There are a handful of imperfect features among them but nothing that would make the sum of each one’s parts less than desirable. In the safety of being attractive, their eccentricities are as precious as their bodies. Their bodies protect all eccentricity from becoming “strange” or “gross” in the way similar predilections are characterized when possessed by heavier or uglier girls. From the distance at which the boys spy on them, everything about the girls is a source of fascination. They are blank canvases onto which they can project their own stories of perfect love and trust and see it reflected back at them.
These half-formed ideations are flawless because they are incomplete, perfect only because they are so ill-conceived. The girls are mysterious but long to be known. They are (mostly) chaste, but they also crave. And above all, they are dead. And dead girls don’t write stories. The last year of the Lisbon sisters’ lives is instead governed on paper by the wandering imaginations of boys at their periphery—or, rather, the men the boys become. They narrate the story of the girls as a group of adults loving what they couldn’t have, seeing the sisters only from the distances between suburban windows and adjacent lockers. The men who narrate are softened by their surrender to age and hardened to the women they married for having aged into the fullness of living real human lives. They resent these women for forcing them to reckon with the full humanity of women in a way that the dreamy Lisbon sisters never forced them to. The Lisbon sisters died before they ever came close enough to reveal their second and third dimensions. Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are phantoms twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men’s aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.
The turning point in the novel is when Lux has sex with Trip Fontaine after homecoming, prompting her mother to withdraw the girls from all interaction outside the house that will become their catacomb. Lux begins taking lovers on the roof of the Lisbon house under cover of night while her beleaguered but loyal sisters keep watch. The boys take this as an opportunity for off-label sex education. “For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn’t know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of ‘yodeling in the canyon’ and ‘tying the tube,’ of ‘groaning in the pit,’ ‘slipping the turtle’s head,’ and ‘chewing the stinkweed,’” they explain. This is perhaps meant to demonstrate their juvenility but inadvertently betrays the extent of their surveillance. That is a lot of sex acts to have witnessed.