Jeffrey Eugenides: I grew up on a street called Middlesex Boulevard, which I used in my second novel, Middlesex, but (in this book) I don’t really name the suburb and I don’t name the city as Detroit. Was your suburb similar to the Lisbon sisters? When I was writing the book I felt very connected to that (teenage) period of life, so I wasn’t creating a world, it was almost provoking a world that I was already quite familiar with.ĭD: You grew up near to where the book is set.

I was hoping that there would be empathy with them. Jeffrey Eugenides: Well, they inhabit the imagination of the collective of boys who narrate the book, so they were a huge focus of my attention. A waistcoat he once wore on a Times Square billboard now has its own parody Twitter account said garment can be reached at Digital: Did you develop a strong bond with the Lisbon sisters while writing The Virgin Suicides? Eugenides is now a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, and has published two more books, the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex (2002) and The Marriage Plot (2011). Six years later, a lyrical film adaptation launched the careers of director Sofia Coppola and actress Kirsten Dunst, who, in the role of Lux, limply allows local guys to lift her sack dress and screw her on the roof of the imprisoning family home.

Along with the wild university bacchanalia of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), The Virgin Suicides refigured the teen-focused novel for the paranoid post-Reagan era as something winkingly mythic and devastatingly romantic. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut novel, the death-driven Lisbon sisters intoxicate the sleepy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with their peachy pungent odour and unplaceable magnetism, before dramatically and ceremoniously topping themselves. For some the 90s were all about sex, but in 1993 there were also five “virgin suicides” that seduced the world over.

The virgin suïcides author