Teenage Daydream
Teenage Daydream: The enduring spell of The Virgin Suicides
The Male Gaze
The Virgin Suicides is a tale that relies entirely on the male gaze, narrated by a collective "we" of neighborhood boys who don't simply watch the Lisbon sisters but are hypnotized by them. They retrace, obsess, spy from the bedroom, windows, and collect anything the girls have touched: “In the trash can was one Tampax spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon sisters… it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something.”
Jeffrey Eugenides was 29 when he wrote the opening paragraph of The Virgin Suicides during a Nile cruise. The novel emerged from a five-minute conversation with a teenage babysitter who casually mentioned that she and her sisters had all attempted suicide—"We just had a lot of pressure," she too simply explained. That single encounter, combined with memories of a college classmate's shocking death, gave Eugenides his entire novel in one revelatory moment: the first-person plural voice, the plot, and the aging men with "thinning hair and soft bellies,” desperately trying to untangle a tragedy that had eluded them for decades.Eugenides has reflected on criticism that he, as a man, presumed to understand teenage girls: "I hadn't. The collective narration of The Virgin Suicides is an all-male affair. The boys who obsess over the Lisbon girls know little about them. Their cluelessness is the point." He believes this creates "a negative space where readers can project their own imaginations"—since the girls are never seen from within, their "mental and emotional life is a matter of conjecture and misinterpretation. Like suicide itself, the truth of their lives is ultimately unknowable." This deliberate mystery explains the novel's enduring power as "readers keep finding themselves in the book, generation after generation, as I found my own self, artistically, 30 years ago."
Gilded Cages
Sofia Coppola discovered The Virgin Suicides in her mid-twenties, enchanted first by "all this blonde hair" on its cover and then by Jeffrey Eugenides' tender grasp of the teenage experience—"the longing, the melancholy... I loved how the boys were so confused by the girls,” Coppola says,” and I really connected with all that lazing around in your bedroom.”
At 15, the loss of her eldest brother Gio in a boating accident gave Coppola personal resonance with the story's themes of grief, inspiring her to honor rather than "dumb down" teenagers' emotional complexity. In casting 16-year-old Kirsten Dunst as Lux, she found the perfect embodiment of this vision: "I remember being struck by her bubbly, all-American cheerleader look—and then this depth in her eyes, a wise sadness combined with all her effervescence." Despite Paramount's fears that the film would inspire copycat deaths, leading to a limited release, the movie's ethereal beauty, anchored by Air's haunting soundtrack, eventually found its lasting audience.
The Virgin Suicides' 1999 debut sparked two decades of gloriously feminine films marked by Sofia Coppola’s fascination with gilded cages—whether Marie Antoinette's Versailles or Johnny Marco's suite in the Chateau Marmont. Coppola captures emotional isolation with grace, her melancholic characters inhabiting dreamy, pastel worlds where loneliness feels luxurious rather than pitiful. From Lost in Translation to Priscilla, her films shimmer in liminal spaces between intimacy and isolation, fame and anonymity, adolescence and adulthood.
Suburban Lawns
Decades after publication, The Virgin Suicides has found new life among Gen Z readers, drawn by their obsession with 90s and 00s culture but staying for something deeper. Dr. Melanie Kennedy suggests the work's "sense of timelessness through its own use of nostalgia"—a 1970s story created in the 1990s—allows it to speak to "anxieties, fascination, and glamorization of girlhood" across any era. Young women like Rachel, interviewed by Dazed, find validation in a story that acknowledged "how complex, dark, and sorrowful a young woman's inner life could be" without glorifying or dismissing it.
As the immigrant Old Mrs. Karafilis observes, suburbia's insistence on cheerfulness creates a "tyranny of enforced happiness"—evidenced by Mr. Lisbon stringing Christmas lights despite his daughter's demise. This predates our internet age, where both suburban lawns and social media feeds become stages for manufactured bliss, spaces where keeping up appearances matters more than authentic living. The Lisbons' deteriorating home in post-industrial Detroit becomes a character itself, the outer decay reflecting the inner turmoil of those who choose propriety over genuine human connection.
Written before social media but deeply understanding its flaw, the novel shows us the cost of living as objects of observation rather than subjects of our own stories. The Lisbon girls, trapped between others' fantasies and their own hidden realities, become mirrors for anyone who has ever felt seen but not known, watched but not understood. Like the boys who spend their lives trying to understand the Lisbon girls, we are invited not to solve but to witness, not to fix but to feel.