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.

Books like the virgin suïcides