Virgins on the Verge

The idea for Jeffrey Eugenides' first novel came from a casual encounter with a baby-sitter from his hometown, Grosse Pointe, Michigan. "She was completely—seemingly—well adjusted," he says. "She had a little pink sweater on with red hearts. And 1 was talking to her and she said that she and all her sisters had tried to commit suicide. That was all. I asked her what brought her to it, and she said just a lot of pressures." In The Virgin Suicides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a literary 90210 narrated by a group of adolescent boys, the five Lisbon sisters commit suicide. The boys are left to piece together the mysteries of each death. And Eugenides, 32, keeps things deliberately elusive. "When I started writing the book I had a hard time because I didn't want to be pat about the reasons why the girls were committing suicide," he explains.

Though the book is indeed about suicide, it is more about repressed sexual yearnings—something Eugenides, who had wanted to be a monk, wrestled with for many of his teenage years. A postcollege stint in India with Mother Teresa changed his plans. "I'm too surly to be a good-natured priest," the author admits.

To prepare for writing about adolescent angst, Eugenides spent lunch hours at a coffee shop near the Dalton School. "It was full of teenage girls and boys smoking," he says with a long, slow smile. "I would just sit in the midst of their smoke and hormones."

LESLEY JANE SEYMOUR