The Virgin Suicides has been on my to-watch list for several years now, and before I watched the movie, I found out it was based on a novel. Naturally, being a book lover, I knew I had to read the book first and then watch the movie.

As soon as I read the first sentence, I was hooked. The book begins with the ending, yet I still found myself surprised by how the events transpired.

The story is told through a deliberately vague narrator. It’s a group of men, now approaching middle age, who are haunted by an episode from their teenage years in a suburban neighborhood, when the glamorous Lisbon sisters, a source of captivation for the boys, took their own lives.

The narrator(s) always refer to themselves as “we,” and never “I,” drawing the reader in with them. We don’t know who’s speaking. It could be any of 10-12 boys. I think this kind of first-person-plural narration was an interesting choice of narration. It’s so rare and works extremely well for this book. It allows the reader to actively participate in the mystery and confusion as the boys try to come to terms with the deaths. By the end of the book, I felt just as haunted by the girls as the boys were.

The boys, now well into adulthood, never fully recovered from the events of that year, as evidenced by the carefully catalogued evidence they’ve collected over time: photographs, scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, etc. What the author captures so well is the mystery of the secluded sisters as seen through the eyes of neighborhood boys. This is important to understanding the novel. It’s not necessarily the Lisbon sisters’ story, but rather the boys’ story, and how the suicides affected them.

While reading the book, I kept thinking that the boys and everyone else in the neighborhood knew these girls desperately needed help. So why didn’t anyone truly help them?

The only answer I could come to was this: the girls were never fully seen as people. They were possessions, idols, projections. Objects of fantasy, desire, and obsession onto which the boys projected whatever they wanted. The descriptions for the sisters were always drawn so sexually for them doing the simplest tasks.

Even the boys who were “so in love” with the girls and communicated with them every night didn’t bother with sending help or getting them out. They were too consumed by the fantasy of possibly being chosen by one of the sisters to see them as individuals who were clearly suffering.

Still, there’s one small moment that stayed with me. At one point, the boys notice that one of the girls looks thin and quietly remark that they hope she’s eating enough. It was one of the few moments where the girls briefly felt humanized in the eyes of the boys.

However, I think the novel ultimately places more blame on the culture surrounding the girls than on any one individual person. The mother traps the sisters within a deeply restrictive idea of womanhood that feels both suffocating and degrading. Eventually, the girls are no longer allowed to go to school, leave the house, or maintain connections with the outside world. They become isolated, malnourished, and emotionally trapped. The parents’ extreme religious beliefs: taking apart the television, forcing the girls to burn their rock albums only deepens that isolation and mental deterioration.

One of the most important themes in the novel is the centrality of the male gaze. The story is told entirely through the perspective of teenage boys who idealize the girls while remaining emotionally distant from them. Instead of truly interacting with the sisters, they observe them, spy on them, and romanticize them from afar.

What makes the novel so tragic is that we never truly understand the Lisbon sisters because the story is filtered entirely through the boys. We know nothing about the girls, their inner lives, thoughts, or feelings. In many ways the book doesn’t feel centered on the female experience either. Because that would require actually getting to know the girls and care about their struggles. If anything, the book is about how society IGNORES the female experience, their struggles and their stories.

I also found it fascinating how the book frames tragedy through nostalgia and memory. The boys remember the beauty and mystique of the sisters more vividly than their suffering. They romanticize the girls during moments when they could have genuinely tried to know them. Their voyeuristic perspective turns the girls’ pain into something mysterious and tragically beautiful rather than something real and urgent. They only treated them as damsels in need of saving, but neglected their cries for help. The girls never had a voice in their own stories, even after death.

The whole point is that nobody actually gets to know the Lisbon sisters and what is happening in their lives, either because they’re not interested or it becomes impossible due to their isolation. The novel ends with their realization that they never understood them or truly knew them.

While reading the book, I was reminded constantly of Malèna because of how similarly both stories operate through the male gaze. In Malèna, we never truly know Malèna herself. Only the fantasies, projections, and perceptions placed onto her by men. Similarly, in this novel, we never truly know the Lisbon sisters either. And strangely, that mystery is exactly what keeps both the boys and the readers drawn to them.

This book left me mesmerized, bewildered, and pleasantly melancholic. I loved the writing: the rich symbolism, poetic storytelling, and dreamlike atmosphere that constantly invites deeper thought. The prose is so vivid that you can not only picture what’s being described, but almost smell the air and feel the texture of that suburban world.

I especially loved the symbolism throughout the novel. As the story deteriorates, so do the structures surrounding it. Buildings decay. People become increasingly unstable. Everything slowly spirals toward an inevitable tragedy, moving quietly but relentlessly toward its devastating conclusion.

The poetic style of writing was almost whimsical or dream-like, and allowed me to immerse myself in their town as if I were one of the boys experiencing everything with them. And,  I, too, found myself being captured by the mystique of the Lisbon sisters.Even though we  know the girls are going to die in the end, but that’s not the point of the story.

“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 they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the treehouse, 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.”

The Virgin Suicides is not a book that gives answers or closure. It leaves behind memories, nostalgia, obsession, and the unbearable realization that some people can live beside us and still remain strangers. Long after finishing it, I still find myself thinking about the Lisbon sisters. Not as the boys imagined them, but as girls nobody truly made an effort to understand.

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xo

Yachna

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P.S.

If you loved this, you might also enjoy these reviews on Sidewalks: The Palace of Illusions & Mother Mary Comes to Me

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