It ruins everything.īut too bad, because the alternative is wandering around with your eyes closed, and that’s how you wind up falling off a cliff and breaking all the bones in your body.Īnyway, this is all to say that a lot has happened in the last 25 years (honestly, even in the last 25 weeks), and much of it has rather affected the way I view the tropes that are essential to The Virgin Suicides.

I taught an undergraduate writing course a couple of years ago organized around the representation of female characters in general and of female warriors in particular (one of my students referred to our classes as “feminist chat time,” which seemed fair, if not something I would tell my supervisor) and at the end of the semester, several students complained that while the class was great, I had simply ruined too many things for them. It’s not just me, and it’s not just my generation, either.

(Due both to social norms evolving and me personally wising up.) Some I can still enjoy, in light of their other charms ( Buffy the Vampire Slayer stands up despite Xander’s relentless idiocy and Whedon’s weird penchant for punishing the non-virginal), and others have become more difficult (does every episode of Friends really need a horrified, pearl-clutching gay joke?). That if I read it again, I would somehow lose it.Īfter all, plenty of pieces of culture I loved as a teenager-and even more recently than that-have revealed themselves to be sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise problematic. That in 25 years it had grown stale, or trite, or offensive. I was worried that I would find that this book, which I also remembered that I loved, had aged badly. Uh, oh, I thought, already hooked on that early image of Cecilia gouging her initials into the “foamy layer” of dead fish-flies she finds coating a Thunderbird. I had read the novel in high school ( after seeing the Sofia Coppola adaptation, I’m sorry to say, but what do you want from me, I was 14), and I remembered it as gauzy and claustrophobic I remembered it was about teenage girls killing themselves in gruesome fashion I remembered that the girls were sexy I remembered that the novel was written by a man. They are very good first pages.Įven so, I read on with some trepidation.

I picked it up and idly read the first three pages I knew after that I would read it through to the end. To be honest, when I re-read the novel earlier this month, I had no idea that it had a big anniversary coming up I was just in-between books, trying to decide what to read next, and came across an old copy on my shelf. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides’s dreamy debut novel about five teenage sisters who all kill themselves over the course of a single year, turns 25 this week-an age, I am contractually obligated to quip here, that the Lisbon sisters will never reach, no matter how yellowed the pages that hold them get (single tear: wiped).

The virgin suicides jeffrey