The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

spattered forearms and pagan nudity.

“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“They’ll grow out. Fingernails keep growing. She can’t bite them now, dear.”

The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

“None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house.”

as though her soul escaped through her lips, as the Renaissance believed.

“They’re just memories now,”