The Virgin Suicides

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Cecilia goes first
2. The sisters as the boys saw them
3. Trip Fontaine and the homecoming dance
4. Lockdown on Hedwig Street
5. The night they all go
6. Who tells it and what bugged me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up The Virgin Suicides because I kept hearing it called a dreamy book about sad girls in a rich suburb, and that sounded too thin for a novel people still argue about. Jeffrey Eugenides published it in 1993 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a short book at 249 pages. It reads fast in pages but slow in mood. In the early 1970s, in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the five Lisbon sisters all kill themselves within about a year. The story is told not by them but by a group of neighborhood boys who watched them, saved their photos and notes, and twenty years later still cannot explain why it happened.

That outsider view shapes everything. You never get clean access to Cecilia or Lux or Mary or Bonnie or Therese. You get what the boys saw from across the street, through windows, at school, in rumors, plus what adults said later to doctors and reporters. I found that frustrating in a deliberate way. You want the girls to speak. They rarely do. They leave diaries and songs and small strange acts, and the boys turn those scraps into myth.

The Lisbons look normal at first. Ronald Lisbon teaches math at the local high school. Mrs. Lisbon is strict, Catholic, watchful about clothes and dates and music. They have five daughters. Therese is the oldest, around seventeen, quiet and good at science. Mary is about sixteen, polite and careful, often called the pretty one in a soft way. Bonnie is fifteen, sincere about religion, shy. Lux is fourteen, funny and bold, the one boys notice first. Cecilia is thirteen, the youngest, pale and withdrawn, already writing in her diary about pain and wanting out. Neighbors treat them as one unit, the Lisbon girls, as if five heads share one body.

Grosse Pointe feels like another character. Brick colonials, tended lawns, country clubs, wealth that wants to look effortless. Dutch elm disease is killing the street trees, so crews cut limbs all summer. A fish fly plague stinks up the air. Parents drink at parties and talk about property values. Boys ride bikes past the Lisbon house to stare at curtains. Nothing looks like a place where five teenagers will die. Eugenides keeps showing how suburbia can be kind and suffocating at once, with neighbors who bring casseroles and also stare.

Cecilia goes first

Cecilia is the first break. The book opens after her first attempt. She slits her wrists in the bathtub while her sisters host a party downstairs. A boy finds her. She lives. At the hospital a psychiatrist named Dr. Horniker asks why she did it. She answers in flat words that get repeated all book, that she saw how painful people were and wanted out. The doctor tells her parents she needs more contact with kids her age. They agree to let the girls hold a chaperoned party.

That party is one of the saddest scenes I have read. The living room fills with awkward kids, chips and soda, records played low because Mrs. Lisbon keeps turning the volume down. Cecilia stays in her long vintage dress and barely talks. She asks a boy to sit with her on the porch. She seems calm. Then she excuses herself, goes to her bedroom, climbs out the window, and throws herself onto the sharp fence post below. She dies in the yard while guests are still inside.

Eugenides does not play it for shock. He makes it quiet. Ambulance lights, Mrs. Lisbon screaming, Mr. Lisbon with his hand over his mouth, the sisters in the doorway. After the funeral the family tries to act normal. They go to church. They clean. Cecilia diary is found, full of short notes about a crushed girl, dying trees, wanting to leave. No one knows how much weight to give it. Was she ill in a clinical sense. Was she sensitive to that house. Was she worn down by being watched at thirteen. The book refuses one cause, which annoyed me at first and later felt honest.

The sisters as the boys saw them

After Cecilia, the other four become even more fascinating to the narrators, and here you have to watch yourself. The boys admit they collected things. A lipstick. A report card. A dance photo. They speak as we, middle aged men looking back at teenage selves, still embarrassed and still obsessed. They cite hospital records, police reports, interviews, as if enough paper will solve it.

Therese gets labeled brainy and plain, always reading biology. Mary gets labeled sweet and polite, the peacemaker. Bonnie gets labeled devout, always with a rosary. Lux gets most attention by far, and here the male gaze problem starts. Lux at fourteen is already sexual in a way that makes boys stare and adults nervous. She sunbathes on the roof. She trades looks in halls. She sneaks out to cars. The narrators quote her measurements and describe her mouth and legs. They know it is creepy. They do it anyway, then apologize in the next line, as if noticing fixes it.

I kept thinking how little we learn about what the girls wanted apart from Lux wanting air and Cecilia wanting out. Therese liked science. Bonnie liked prayer. Mary liked being kind. Those are labels, not lives. The boys fill gaps with fantasy. They picture the girls brushing hair in unison, sharing code, sleeping in a pile. Real sisters fight about bathrooms and get bored. The book knows the boys invent. It drops hints that the girls were lonelier and angrier and funnier than legend allows. Mary writes about heaviness. Bonnie asks a boy if he believes in God and sounds desperate, not pious. Therese snaps at a teacher. Lux laughs in a mean way at a bragging boy. Those flashes felt more real than pages about hair.

Trip Fontaine and the homecoming dance

Trip Fontaine is the local legend who briefly cracks the house open. He is a senior, handsome, confident, a little thoughtless in the way popular boys can be. He notices Lux in class and decides he must have her. He charms his way into the Lisbon living room, wins over Mrs. Lisbon who almost never bends, and gets Mr. Lisbon to let the four sisters go to the homecoming dance, the book version of prom, as a group with chaperones and early curfew.

The dance is the most alive section. For one night the girls look almost free. Therese dances stiffly but smiles. Mary looks pretty under gym lights and dances politely. Bonnie stays near the wall but sways to music. Lux is the center. She and Trip slow dance, drink from a flask, slip away. The narrators, there as younger kids on the edges, remember every song. They remember Lux smeared lipstick, lost shoe, laugh too loud.

What follows is ugly and central. Trip takes Lux to the football field after the dance. They have sex on the grass. Trip later says he loved her in that hour and then felt cold and empty. He leaves her half asleep and walks home. Lux misses curfew by hours and walks in at dawn to Mrs. Lisbon waiting. That night ends the opening. Some readers blame Trip for all of it. Some blame Lux for risking it. I blamed the setup most. A fourteen year old with almost no unsupervised time, raised where desire is sin, meets a boy told he can take what he wants. No one taught either how to handle that night with care.

Trip appears years later as an adult, interviewed by the narrators. He says Lux was the only girl he loved and he ruined it.

Lockdown on Hedwig Street

After the dance, Mrs. Lisbon shuts the house. The girls leave school. Curtains stay closed. The lawn grows shaggy. Mr. Lisbon, who had been softer, the joking teacher who allowed the party, folds. He drinks. He loses force at school. Mrs. Lisbon orders groceries by phone, screens calls, locks doors from inside. Neighbors call it the lockdown.

This middle stretch dragged for me in a good way. Days pass with almost nothing, and that nothing is the horror. The boys keep watch. They call and hang up. They play records over the phone hoping the girls listen. Lux answers sometimes. Mary answers sometimes. Their voices sound flat. Gossip fills gaps. One rumor says Mrs. Lisbon made them burn rock records. Another says Mr. Lisbon wanted counseling and his wife refused. Another says the girls stopped eating. The narrators admit they never knew what was true inside. They knew the outside. Peeling paint. Piled mail. The wagon in the driveway with leaves on it.

Eugenides does not make the parents monsters. Mrs. Lisbon is harsh and fearful. After Cecilia and after Lux staying out all night, fear hardens into control. She believes the world will ruin her daughters. Mr. Lisbon loves them but cannot face his wife or his own low mood. They pray. They clean. They call it protection. From outside it looks cruel. From inside, as far as we can guess, it felt like panic. That does not excuse it. It explains why no one knocked the door down. Grosse Pointe respected a family right to handle trouble privately. The street watched and whispered and did little useful.

Lux rebels in small ways even locked in. She goes to the roof at night. She meets boys there for quick joyless encounters. The narrators count partners and describe acts with too much detail and too little insight. They miss that Lux sounds numb, not free. She quits schoolwork. She stares at ceilings. Mary writes about sleep and weight. Bonnie talks of confession. Therese reads about mold and rot. The house smells of laundry and old food. The boys keep playing music through the phone, thinking they save the girls, when they only soothe themselves.

The night they all go

The end comes fast after slow rot. The boys get a call, likely from Lux, to come at night and help the sisters escape. They imagine romance. They borrow a car, bring cash, plan to drive out of state. They slip inside through a basement door. What they find is not an escape. It is a house already gone.

Bonnie hangs in the basement from a beam, still in good clothes. Therese lies in her bedroom, dead from sleeping pills, a water glass beside her. Mary lies in the kitchen with her head in the gas oven. Lux sits in the car in the garage with the engine running, dead from exhaust. Cecilia death had been violent and public. These are quiet and spaced, each sister in her own place. The boys move room to room, calling names, touching shoulders, realizing no rescue was needed.

Mary is the complication. She is found still breathing, taken to hospital, kept alive for weeks. She thins down. She barely speaks. She returns to a house with tape and reporters and neighbors bringing food, and about a month later she takes sleeping pills and dies too. Some summaries put her death on the same night. The book makes her linger, which is worse. She sees empty rooms, the basement cleaned, the car towed, then follows her sisters anyway. That broke me more than the discovery. The wish did not lift with shock or care. It stayed.

The parents leave town. Mr. Lisbon tries to sell. Kids break in for souvenirs. A young couple finally buys, guts the inside, paints white, plants new shrubs. Street trees keep dying and get replaced with saplings. Life goes on. The boys grow up, marry, work, drink at reunions, and keep a file box they cannot throw away.

Who tells it and what bugged me

The we voice is the strangest choice Eugenides made. Instead of one boy looking back, you get a chorus. We remember. We collected. We still wonder. They list exhibits like a case file. A diary page. A photo.

That distance lets Eugenides show suburbia watching itself. The boys know the dentist, the priest, the teachers. The boys think enough pieces will show the shape. It never does. They end still listing reasons. Bad parenting. Too much religion. Chemicals. The seventies. Being a teenage girl.

I admired the refusal of one cause while still showing clear harms. Control harmed them. Isolation harmed them. Grief with no help harmed them. Being turned into symbols harmed them. But none alone explains four planned deaths one night a year after a fifth. The narrators want science or faith to close the gap. Eugenides leaves it open. Some readers hate that. I thought it respectful. To claim full knowledge of why a thirteen year old dies on a fence would be false. Sitting with not knowing feels closer to how suicide lands, with loved ones holding notes that do not add up.

The fair criticism is one the book invites. The male gaze is everywhere. Lux is described in sexual detail from fourteen on. The boys steal her things, watch her with binoculars, describe Mary and Bonnie bodies as if that explains death. It does not. It turns suffering girls into objects for sad boys. Even as adults the narrators admit they loved the idea of the sisters more than the real girls. They say so. Then they keep describing bodies. That loop made my skin crawl, and I think it is meant to.

You can read that two ways. One says Eugenides is guilty of what he shows, using dead girls as lovely mystery with no full inner life. The other says he exposes that habit, showing how a street and a culture watched girls and never asked what they needed. I landed between. The exposure feels deliberate, sharp when the boys admit they never asked Therese about her prize or Bonnie about her faith in a serious way. But deliberate does not erase the queasy thrill of roof scenes. If sexualization of minors is hard for you, even in critical frame, this book will be hard. It was hard for me.

Other faults felt smaller. The prose can run lush, with long lines about light on lawns and insects in air that slow plot. Some neighbors blur. Trip, for all his charm, is thin past hair and teeth. Grosse Pointe in the seventies sometimes feels built from playlists and yearbooks, though elm disease and fish flies and kitchen detail ground it.

What stayed with me was plain sorrow. Cecilia asking for help in the only words she had. Mary trying to be polite at a dance while grieving. Bonnie praying into silence. Therese reading about decay as her house decayed. Lux trading her body for an hour of air because the front door was locked. They get small light, a shared joke, a loud song before Mrs. Lisbon lowers it, stars from a roof for an hour. Then the house shuts. The boys keep their files, visit the empty house, call Trip, write this account, still saying we as if group memory guards against guilt. Did they fail by watching not acting. Probably. Did adults fail more. Yes. Would a knock have saved anyone. No one knows, and the book does not pretend else. That lack of comfort felt true and stayed with me longer than many louder books.

FAQ

When was The Virgin Suicides published?

Jeffrey Eugenides published The Virgin Suicides in 1993 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The first edition runs 249 pages and the ISBN is 9780312427739.

Who are the Lisbon sisters?

Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux and Cecilia range from about seventeen down to thirteen. Cecilia dies first, then the other four die together about a year later.

Who narrates The Virgin Suicides?

A group of neighborhood boys, now middle aged men, narrate together as we. They piece the story from interviews, diaries, photos and rumors, and they often misread the girls.