“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

 ~ the neighborhood boys, speaking about the mysteriously beautiful Lisbon sisters

The narrators in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides were neighborhood boys fascinated by the five Lisbon sisters’ lives-Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, Therese. Set in suburban America during the Vietnam War, the boys closely investigated the girls’ mundane yet mesmerizing existence to know everything about them, most especially in what led to them taking their own lives, one after the other.