The Virgin Suicides' Sweet 16

Sixteen years after Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut novel The Virgin Suicides was published to acclaim, he talks to Nadine Rubin about getting fired for writing it and getting his break from George Plimpton.

Impossible as it may be to believe, Jeffrey Eugenides had so little faith in his ability to get The Virgin Suicides published that he filled it with the names of people he knew. “I was a virtually unpublished writer just playing around,” he says on the phone from Berlin, where he is spending the summer with his wife, the photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi and their 10-year-old daughter. “I had no ostensible hopes for it. My writing was a private exercise to please myself.”

Sofia Coppola was so taken with the story of the five “glittering” sisters in their homemade dresses that she wrote the screenplay despite not actually owning the rights to the book.

Still, he had studied with the likes of Rick Moody, who was beginning to get published, and while Eugenides maintained himself by working as an executive secretary at the Academy of American Poets in New York, he wrote for two hours a night, four hours on the weekend and at every chance he could get during the workday. He was eventually fired for writing on the job, so he submitted the first chapter of his “private exercise” to The Paris Review as a short story. That was almost two decades ago. Today, the novel that resulted from that short story has been republished in paperback and holds its place as a modern American classic.

The Virgin Suicides. By Jeffrey Eugenides. 256 Pages. Grand Central Publishing. $13.99. Former Paris Review editor James Scott Linville remembers receiving chapter one of what would become The Virgin Suicides. He had seen Eugenides’ writing before. About six years earlier, Eugenides had sent in a short story called "Capricious Gardens." An intern had fished it out of the slush pile and handed it to Linville. “It was terrific, but it wasn’t right for us,” remembers Linville. “So I wrote Jeff a letter and told him to send it to the Gettysburg Review.” In the succeeding years, Eugenides sent Linville “about a dozen stories,” but none were published. But this new story was completely different from anything he’d written before. “It had this very unusual choral voice and was quietly insinuating,” recalls Linville. “It was a story about how men can feel left out of women’s lives in some ways, that there is something unknowable about women, something men first notice as teenagers.” Linville took the story to his then-editor-in-chief, the late George Plimpton and, as if a magic wand had been waved, Eugenides was published in The Paris Review and introduced to Lynn Nesbit, one of New York’s most powerful literary agents. Soon after, he signed his first book deal.

In 1993, the same year that Eugenides turned 33, The Virgin Suicides was published in its entirety as a 249-page novel about five suicidal sisters and the boys who never get over their deaths. Michiko Kakutani called it a “piercing first novel,” and described it in her review in The New York Times as “by turns lyrical and portentous, ferocious and elegiacal…a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel.”

The music of that opera has never stopped playing. The Virgin Suicides has been translated into more than 15 languages, and for the past 16 years its tune has beckoned high-school and college-age readers, Pied Piper-style, to continue to pick it up. The novel now appears on English literature curricula at high schools and colleges around the country.

Sofia Coppola heard the novel’s golden-voiced call, too. She was so taken with the story of the five “glittering” Lisbon sisters in their homemade dresses that she wrote the screenplay for the film despite not actually owning the film rights to the book. (Her father warned her not to waste her time.) But with the same enthusiasm that Eugenides had received from Linville and Plimpton at The Paris Review, she secured the rights from their original owner and completed her dreamy Virgin Suicides film in 2000. Yet while the film—which has the look and feel of a looped MTV music video and has since inspired countless fashion editorials—added a glamorous edginess to the book, it didn’t replace it. Instead, there is a continuous call and response between the two.