BOOK REVIEW: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Find the book here: The Virgin Suicides

I avoided this book for a long time for two reasons. People either love it in a near-creepy fetish way, or hate it because it’s overly sexist and objectifies the girls. Both camps overhyped their opinions, and made me disinterested.

Both camps are wrong.

This book is actually pretty genius in its narrative. Yes, the story revolves around the girls and is told exclusively through the eyes of the boys around them that sexualized and romanticized them, but that is the clever bit. The girls all suffer from various states of depression and feeling invisible or forgettable, so having their horrendous story told by everyone but them is brilliant.

I think The Virgin Suicides speaks to teen girls so much because of the erasure. Most girls learn that society wants them to hate themselves somewhere between ages 12 and 15, and to drive the plot through the very eyes of the people that make the girls feel self-loathing and hated makes the unsaid feelings of the female characters more relatable and palpable to the girls and young women reading.

If you hated The Virgin Suicides when you read it the first time, I recommend rereading it and looking deeper. Pay attention to what we aren’t hearing from the girls, and that is where the story lies.