The Virgin Suicides true story: Jeffrey Eugenides has traced the whole novel to a single conversation

There is no real Lisbon family, no Grosse Pointe case file, and no newspaper archive to match against the book. There is one conversation, and Eugenides has been telling the story of it for thirty years.

The babysitter

Eugenides was in his late twenties, visiting his brother in Michigan, waiting for the family to come down to dinner. Minding his one-year-old nephew that evening was a teenage babysitter — a chatty midwestern girl, he later wrote, who seemed untroubled by anything. In passing, she mentioned that she and her sisters had all attempted to take their own lives.

He asked why. Her answer, as he has quoted it ever since:

"We were under a lot of pressure."

That was the entire exchange. He didn't press further, didn't get names, and didn't start writing for more than a year.

What he did with it

The novel isn't reportage, and Eugenides has never claimed it was. He took the fact of five sisters and relocated it into territory he actually knew — the suburb where he grew up, the era he grew up in, and the vantage point of the boys watching from across the road.

"I took that idea and cast it back into my own adolescence," he told Dazed, adding that he then asked himself what it would have been like if girls like that had lived nearby when he was young.

Hence the book's odd machinery: five sisters aged 13 to 17, a Catholic household, a maths-teacher father, and a narration delivered in the first person plural by grown men still sorting through souvenirs twenty years later. The narrators never find out why either. That's the design, not a gap in it.

Invented outright:

• The Lisbons themselves — Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese have no real-world counterparts.
• Grosse Pointe as a crime scene — the town is real, the events are not.
• Trip Fontaine, the homecoming dance, and the neighbourhood boys — constructed to give the story a witness.
• The one-year timeline — the tidy anniversary structure is a novelist's decision.

Eugenides has also pointed at a slower influence. He told NPR in 2009 that he came to realise the decline of Michigan's car industry had shaped the book: a neighbourhood losing its elms and its economy at the same time as it loses the girls.

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The book, then the film

The first chapter ran in The Paris Review in 1990 and won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the full novel in 1993 — 249 pages, written around a day job. As Eugenides put it in 2023, it was composed in snatches at his desk for two hours a night and four hours each weekend day, with nobody waiting for it.

Sofia Coppola's adaptation, her first feature, was shot in the summer of 1998 in Toronto and premiered at Cannes on 19 May 1999, opening in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles on 21 April 2000. Kirsten Dunst plays Lux, with James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the parents and Josh Hartnett as Trip. Much of the dialogue and narration is lifted straight from the page, and the French duo Air wrote the score.

Critics have long noted the resemblance to Federico García Lorca's 1945 play The House of Bernarda Alba — five daughters, one controlling mother, one locked house. Eugenides has said he gets tired of the Greek chorus comparisons, which he suspects have more to do with his surname than his structure.

One postscript: in April 2025, Belarusian authorities added the novel to a register of printed works deemed harmful to the national interest. Thirty-two years after publication, a book about a suburb nobody could explain is still being treated as a threat.

Earlier we wrote: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: what the title means — Kesey wrote the novel on night shifts at a psychiatric ward