The paramedics can easily navigate this last attempt because what should be shocking-a young girl’s suicide-has become, in the strange logic of the Lisbon family, routine. “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese-the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” From the very first line, the reader understands the Lisbon girls-“daughters”-will all die. It was exhausting to live that way, believing in the significance of every feeling, tracking every minor emotional shift. The world of “The Virgin Suicides” was gothic and mundane, just like the world of teen-agers, with our desire to catalogue and make meaning out of any sign or symbol, even the mildest of occurrences taking on great portent. Even the five Lisbon sisters seemed like some mirror of me and my four younger sisters-I knew the peculiarity of a household filled with girls, the feverish swapping of clothes, the rituals and ablutions, experiencing adolescence like some long-standing illness from which we all suffered.

It’s a book I’ve read many times now, but I still remember that original encounter, how it felt like a flare from my own secret world, all the inchoate longings and obsessions of being a teen-ager somehow rendered into book form. I still own the copy of “ The Virgin Suicides” that I first read in high school, the evidence of my teen-age self on its pages: water-rippled from many hours in the bath, stained with juice from the tangerines I used to eat in great quantities.

The virgin suicides full book