The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

The Virgin Suicides is so vivid and dreamlike that it comes across as a sort of prose poem. Were you very conscious of the Updike-Cheever tradition of suburban fiction while writing it?

EUGENIDES

Not really. I was aware that you weren’t supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else. I’d been writing for years before I wrote The Virgin Suicides. But The Virgin Suicides was, oddly, one of the first things I set in my hometown, even though I didn’t name it.

Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the -results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological -dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna. I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest. I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first time, produced something that interested adult readers.

INTERVIEWER

Suburbia is designed to be a safe, uneventful place, and yet, of course, some basic human impulses, and especially the unruly energy of adolescence, work against that. The Virgin Suicides takes shape around this tension. The setting occasions a particular sort of longing and, inevitably, its disappointment.

EUGENIDES

The Virgin Suicides is about the city, too. It’s about Detroit in an indirect but crucial way. It was years after writing the book that I came to understand this. When I was born, Detroit was the fourth-largest city in the -country. The population stood at more than a million people. But people were -already -beginning to flee, and in 1967, when the riots occurred, the trickle turned into a flood. My entire childhood coincided with the demise of Detroit. I grew up watching houses and buildings fall apart and then -disappear. It -imbued my sense of the world with a strong elegiac quality—a direct experience of the fragility and evanescence of the material world.

That was what I was really writing about. I had imagined a family of suicidal sisters, five brief lives, and I’d put them in an atmosphere of ruin and decay—the dying automobile plants, the dying elm trees—but the source of all this, psychologically and emotionally, had to do with the impermanence of everything I knew as a child.