From the Bookshelf of The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge…

The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides

Start date: February 1, 2021

Finish date: February 28, 2021

Discussion: Book Discussions (Archive)

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 90 topics — 2,126 comments total

Book Discussions (Archive)

November 2025 Group Read Nominations
By Ashley , Accidental Mod · 14 posts · 128 views

last updated Oct 20, 2025 02:55PM

2025 Group Reads: August | Flowers for Algernon
By Ashley , Accidental Mod · 8 posts · 58 views

last updated Aug 26, 2025 08:55AM

showing 2 of 2 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Sep 21, 2017 Jenna rated it liked it

Shelves: read-in-2017

The Virgin Suicides was my first Jeffrey Eugenides. I've seen the movie (though it has been awhile) but I'd never gotten around to reading it. I saw Eugenides at Wordstock this year in Portland, and he got asked lots of questions about this book. It piqued my interest and I figured it was time to get around to reading it.

The Virgin Suicides is about the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters, from the perspective of neighborhood boys. After the youngest daughter, Cecilia, commits suicide, the famil ...more

11 likes · Like · see review

Jan 05, 2021 Ron rated it really liked it

The Lisbon sisters are five overprotected teens living a strange life in a Detroit suburb. The youngest attempts suicide at the beginning of the book, and we know from the book's title and the early narrative that all five will eventually be lost to suicide. So we know who and what, we just do not know when or how or why.

The narrator's perspective is an interesting gimmick. He is one of the Lisbon girls' curious neighbors, he never gives his own name, and he speaks in first-person-plural, relati The Lisbon sisters are five overprotected teens living a strange life in a Detroit suburb. The youngest attempts suicide at the beginning of the book, and we know from the book's title and the early narrative that all five will eventually be lost to suicide. So we know who and what, we just do not know when or how or why.

The narrator's perspective is an interesting gimmick. He is one of the Lisbon girls' curious neighbors, he never gives his own name, and he speaks in first-person-plural, relating the memories and opinions of a group of coming-of-age adolescents, remembering their shared experience in the early 1970's from the vantage point of the then-present, the early 1990's. This allows the heavy subject matter to be presented with a light, and even humorous, touch. It also gives the book a strong secondary theme of 1970's nostalgia, and an intimate view of the experience of living in an affluent Detroit suburb at the time of Detroit's steep decline.

One must compare this work to Eugenides's more popular novel, Middlesex. Middlesex makes a more ambiti0us attempt at historical fiction, telling the story of Detroit for a whole century, with an implausible involvement of some member of the author's extended family in most every significant historical event. The Virgin Suicides is more focused on the 1970's (and some of the early 1990's), and it offers more in the way of little details rather than big events. The characters eat Kool-Pops, they listen to Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again" and Carole King's "You've Got a Friend." They go to a "party store." They drink Boone's Farm. They use stumps from chopped-down Dutch Elm disease trees as baseball bases. But nobody accidentally witnesses Watergate or dies in Vietnam.

This is a more appealing nostalgia than the forced Forrest-Gump-involvement-in-history used in Middlesex. Of course, maybe only I think so because I was also a coming-of-age adolescent at the same time in history and in a different Detroit suburb, so I could pick up on the subtleties of the nostalgia. I ate Kool-Pops, I drank Boone's Farm, I used a sawed-off stump of a Dutch elm disease victim as third-base in my back yard. I listed to Gilbert O'Sullivan (and Carole King, and Simon & Garfunkel). The book reminded me of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine more so than Thirteen Reasons Why -- thank goodness. I have read both of the other books, and I have much more taste for nostalgia than for consciousness-raising about suicide. ...more

Like · see review