But all give up, or get spooked, abandoning the sisters to their loneliness, returning across the street to carefully observe the slow decay of the house from afar, for the purpose of gossip, or, in the boys’ case, for love.

There are a few attempts to break through the family’s stony silence, giving the novel its propulsive movements the priest visits, then the high school heart-throb, the local news anchor. The novel may be bleak, but it is frequently hilarious and never cruel She just wanted out of that house.” “She wanted out of that decorating scheme”). Over the course of the next 13 months, as her parents and sisters deal with their grief, they become increasingly isolated, or incarcerated by the neighbourhood’s silent judgment, depending on who the boys talk to (“That girl didn’t want to die. First comes the suicide of 13-year-old Cecilia, the “weir”’ sister who always wears a wedding dress and high-tops she keeps clean with a toothbrush, who writes a diary and cares deeply about the fate of an elm tree in the family’s front yard.

Dumb with longing, we all completely missed the point. I didn’t realise then, but I shared a viewpoint, not with the sisters as I hoped, but with the boys who never got near them. I was as quick as the boys to believe the girls were angels: beautiful, tragically cool. I fell even more deeply in love with the five Lisbon sisters – blonde, long-haired and beloved by the boys across the street, who narrate the novel from a distance. Although I grew up in Orlando, and the novel is set in the suburbs of mid-70s Detroit, where I have never been, the landscape felt so intensely familiar that I read it for the first time as though remembering it. The book soon got passed around the more committed, easily-influenced-by-Tumblr girls. We held bougainvillaea flowers and posed by stinking suburban lakes, hiding behind our hair, always disappointed by the results that turned out too bright, too childlike, too true. Along with many girls in my high school, I wasted hours with digital cameras trying to capture the same dreamy aesthetic as the movie. Fifteen years later, I saw Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation, and my instant messenger avatar became Kirsten Dunst, picking petals from a daisy, stained pink by sunset. T he Virgin Suicides was published in 1993, the year Bill Clinton became president, the first Beanie Baby went on sale, and Cern released the world wide web source code into the public domain.

The virgin suicides first edition