Mr Lisbon begins to see children as “only strangers you agreed to live with”, and the family home becomes an extension of its occupants’ relationships, emitting toxic smells, of “bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film … the singed smell of drilled teeth”, or as one of the boys quips, “the smell of trapped beaver”. After the suicide, the parents lose hold of the children, and the girls lose their small freedoms. Before Cecilia, the “weird” sister, makes the swan dive into the yard that sparks off the suicides, the Lisbon family is at least a whole unit their house is odd, ugly, but still functional. The Virgin Suicides cleverly fakes being a book about teen suicide, but its real exploration is into the delicate dynamics that keep a family together. As the girls try to integrate into normal life, the boys collect the pieces of information that will make up a lifelong investigation: reports from the orthodontist that Mary visits in the hope of fixing her teeth, inventories of mysterious feminine toiletries found during reconnaissance, memories of touch and conversation archived like rare historical documents. Over the course of a year, the book’s narrator and his friends bear witness as four Lisbon girls attempt to survive the suicide of Cecila, and its effect on the already startlingly spartan rule of their mother. Their mother is an unfeeling, stifling disciplinarian, their father is weak and adrift in the sea of women around him. Parental overindulgence is not something Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Cecila and Lux experience in their short lives, which we encounter through lovingly collated pieces of evidence by a group of boys from their suburban Michigan community. The Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides don’t share this problem. You ruined me for real life, I tell them. I like to tease my parents about this photo. Around me is so much swag that some of it towers above me, while an array of smaller boxes make me a little Godzilla, stomping around my city of gifts.

I am somewhere between a baby and toddler, and still my parents’ only child, a title I would keep for another three precious years. It is at its core a mystery story: a heart-rending investigation into the impenetrable, life-altering secrets of American adolescence.There is a photo of me at my second Christmas. A story of love and repression, fantasy and terror, sex and death, memory and longing. In an ordinary suburban house, on a lovely tree-lined street, in the middle of 1970s America, lived the five beautiful, dreamy Lisbon sisters, whose doomed fates indelibly marked the neighborhood boys who to this day continue to obsess over them.

The virgin suicides review book