The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

“We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense.

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

Winter is the season of alcoholism...

We thought only of Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese, stranded in life, unable to speak to us until now, in this inexact, shy fashion.

the shame that has never gone away took over.

people spoke of the Lisbon girls in the past tense, and if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with.

The girls, it turned out, had killed themselves on June 16, the anniversary of Cecilia’s wrist-slitting.

During Mary’s entire stay in the hospital, Mrs. Lisbon appeared only once.

“Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.”

Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.

“Good-bye, cruel world!”

In the distance, at the Lisbon house, the EMS truck sat, flashing its lights. They hadn’t bothered to use the siren.

That was the morning the paramedics appeared for the last time, moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one made the crack about its not being TV.

the girls’ graves did not lie side by side but widely separated,

we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.