WWJD

I've been thinking a lot about The Virgin Suicides lately, and how it is sort of a coming-of-age story, not in the repetitive adolescent revelation//prom//angst way, but in the sense that it addresses each of those quintessential coming-of-age ideas and critiques them until each Lisbon girl is dead. The way in which the book is written leaves no inevitable conclusion — it does not force any nuggets of wisdom pertaining to the American suburban life onto you; rather, it leaves you to question the exact reason the Lisbon girls wanted to die; the exact origin of the "disease" Cecilia spread to her sisters after slitting her wrists. It makes you think.

The explanation for the suicides is complicated and full of secrets, just like the girls. You wonder about Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, and if they were the ones who spawned their own daughters' death wish as they trapped the girls within a rotting house, confined to a strict no-nonsense sentiment bred through a fear of the unknown. Though the girls (namely, Lux) did not die virgins in the traditional sense, their lack of proper experience in the "outside world" is what made them virgins. The girls lived their lives through what they saw on television, and read in the exotic travel catalogues they idly flipped through each day. They lived off the unattainable and the unrealistic, possibly pushing them to a more hopeless state. Lux's only real "experience" was an effort to retaliate against her parents, fueled by pent-up frustration at living a sheltered life. It wasn't genuine, and even mimicked something you might see on an evening soap opera, or read in a dated novel full of myths and cliches — Lux sneaking out in her nightgown before bed-check to smother Trip Fontaine in kisses, using salad dressing and Coca-Cola as birth control (parroting the expression,"no erection without protection!"), writing unsigned notes to the neighborhood boys in shaky handwriting. But ultimately, these schemes would never lead to anything as long as they were kept under the watchful eye of their parents. However, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon could not control the girls' desire to commit suicide. Death was their one attainable fantasy.

P.S. Tim Weiner sort of looks like Matt Hitt.

whaaaaat.