News
Mich. babysitter inspired ‘The Virgin Suicides'
By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Thursday, October 27, 2005 9:46 AM EDT
His nephew's 15-year-old babysitter here in Michigan inspired his first novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” Dogwood FIne Arts Festival Visiting Author Jeffrey Eugenides told Union High students Wednesday evening in Dowagiac Middle School's media center.
His 1993 novel made into a movie by Sofia Coppola he's seen three times concerns five Lisbon sisters taking their own lives from the voyeuristic perspective of a group of neighborhood boys.
The author has said both his novels attempt “not to make something mundane strange, but rather, to make something that is somewhat freaky more normal.”
Eugenides, of Chicago, was born in Detroit in 1960 and earned his bachelor's degree from Brown University in the Ivy League. He received his master's degree in English and creative writing from Stanford University in 1986.
Eugenides was a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Whiting Writers' Award. He was also a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
Within 15 minutes of meeting the sitter, “She told me she had tried to commit suicide and that all of her sisters had also. I was amazed by this story and by the fact that she was willing to tell me this when I had just met her. She said, ‘We were just under a lot of pressure.' It remained in my memory. About a year later I sat down and started writing about that idea from the point of view of an entire town - the first-person plural voice I use in the book.
“Those two streams sort of came together,” he said. “The ‘we' voice and this family of girls who were suicidal. Little by little I narrowed the focus to the teen-aged boys in the town who were middle-aged men.”
The Virgin Suicides ranks now as his “speedy” book because it only took three years to write compared to his celebrated second novel, “Middlesex,” nine years later in 2002.
Eugenides was fired while writing The Virgin Suicides for concentrating more on his manuscript than his 9-to-5 job.
The character Cecelia wearing the wedding dress represented to him “the kookie people in my high school. It just appealed to my imagination. It didn't come from anyone I knew and there's no symbolic meaning, though obviously you could read in a connection between virginity and marriage.”
“This was the first time I wrote about my hometown,” Eugenides said. “I published this book when I was 33 and I started writing when I was your age, in high school. For a long time, much of my writing was about myself and very interior. In college I wrote a lot about Catholic monks,” of which he is neither.
”The Virgin Suicides was the first time I actually decided to describe the people I knew in the town I grew up in. I found actually that I had a lot more material than I expected just by virtue of growing up in Michigan. I brought in all sorts of my childhood friends and teachers. That doesn't mean that the story is autobiographical. I did not know a group of girls like the Lisbon girls when I was growing up, but I did know a family of girls who were very attractive and had very strict, religious parents.”
Eugenides said the first time he saw The Virgin Suicides film Coppola screened it for him in San Francisco before its release.
The second time was at the premiere in New York.
Seeing characters born in his imagination on the movie screen “is a hard thing to do if you've written a book,” he said. “You have a clear idea of what a character looks like, and to have her ‘rebodied' into Kirsten Dunst is very jarring for a writer.”
“I always knew the book would be very different from the movie,” Eugenides related. “The novel exists in language in this voice. It's impossible to recreate a narrative voice like that on film. You can have a voiceover with Giovanni Ribisi speaking some of the lines from the book, but you don't get this strange narration where you're not exactly sure who's telling this story. Everything in the book comes from the boys finding something out about the girls, finding their journals, hearing some gossip. It's quite clear that these boys don't really know what these girls are like. They can't get in the Lisbon house to find out.
In the movie on the other hand, “The camera goes into the house and the viewer has to believe this is the truth. of how these girls talked and what they looked like. The point of view shifts in the movie. It's more of a story about the girls and less of a story about the boys,” Eugenides said. “I thought Sofia was very faithful to the book in terms of atmosphere and mood, but films and novels are different animals.”
The last time he saw the movie he was living in Berlin.
“I came home from a party about 3 a.m., turned on the TV and it was playing The Virgin Suicides dubbed in German. I really enjoyed it that night very much,” he said.
So many people ask about the character nicknamed Chapter 11, as in bankruptcy, the author is probably rethinking including what was essentially the punchline on page 522 of an inside joke introduced on page 5.
“Cal hints at what's going to happen to his brother, but it's the one story about his family he's not going to tell. It's a long, shaggy dog joke” that suggests he ran the family business into the ground.
It's coincidence that character appears in the book's 11th chapter.
As for his apparent connection to Hercules and how he knows how to fry a hot dog and make it curl, Eugenides explained, “My father was not in the restaurant business,” but a mortgage banker. “That's fictional. But my grandfather did have a bar in Detroit. My father, a businessman, thought of going into the bar business, but my grandfather talked him out of it. What would my father have been like if he'd stayed in the restaurant business? He wouldn't have been content with one bar and grill. He probably would have gone after a chain. I have a cousin who actually does have a chain of Greek restaurants in San Antonio, Texas, so the ability to grill meats is in my bloodline.”
While he strived to keep the setting of The Virgin Suicides a universal “Everytown USA,” even his publisher's English copy editor recognized “the cracker voice of our local baseball announcer. “ She “knew that meant Ernie Harwell, and hence, it had to be Detroit.” He used Grosse Pointe street names in The Virgin Suicides.
How the novel resonates with audiences he couldn't have anticipated.
“I'd never been published before, so I really didn't have a sense that anyone would read the book. At first, I didn't even trouble myself with changing real people's names. It helped me to visualize and imagine scenes. When it finally came time to publish it, I had to go and create fictional names for all of these people. Not only did I not imagine how it would be read by young people, I didn't imagine it being read by anyone but myself. It has been quite amazing to me the popularity it does have.”
Compared to Middlesex and any books he publishes in the future, “I think The Virgin Suicides will always sell the most steadily because it has for 12 or 13 years. Fifteen-year-olds keep wanting to read the book. That doesn't happen very often and I don't think it will happen with my other books.”
Tapping adolescent memories energized his writing.
“It's a time that lingers for me,” he said. “It's a very fevered and memorable time. It gave my fiction for the first time a kind of pulse I hadn't recognized in my writing before. It was pseudo-intellectual and European-influenced. When I found this route to my own life through the adolescent boys something quickened in my imagination.”
Besides a collection of short stories, Eugenides is writing his third novel, which he described as “very different” from his first two. “It's about a big debutante party. It's more naturalistic and, I think, the structure is more heavily dramatized than Middlesex.” Three years into this project, he's weary of being chided for being a slow writer.
“I was going to do this one quickly, but I'm not close to finishing the new one. I don't think it will take nine years, but I've got a couple more years of work at least.”
A couple of years is how long he reported polishing the opening page of Middlesex. He will write and toss hundreds of pages that don't work laboring to find the “voice” that strikes him as pitch-perfect to convey the tone.
He's big on telegraphing where a novel's going right away.
The Virgin Sucides, “I wrote the first paragraph first and it tells you exactly what's going to happen. With Middlesex, it took a lot longer to arrive at that first paragraph.”
One of his favorite characters is clearly the elderly Greek woman because he based her on his grandmother.
“Some people have said, ‘That's the perfect way to handle your ethnic heritage for an American novelist - you just keep it in the basement.' Middlesex obviously invites the old grandma to come up out of the basement and take over the entire house.”
“When you have a lot of characters committing suicide, there's not much sequel potential,” he laughed.
He recommends writing daily. “When I take a day off, I get thrown out of my rhythm. It's better to write a short amount of time each day and write every day” than to log the occasional 15-hour day.
High school students “are extremely more stylish than I remember from my classmates and I. The school system here seems to be turning out intelligent, well-read and well put-together students,” he complimented DUHS.
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