He later earned a living writing for the American Academy of Poets in New York City, and pushed to complete his opus when he learned that his position with the organization was soon to be terminated. Eugenides also wrote part of his first novel while traveling down the Nile through Egypt. When an excerpt from
The Virgin Suicides was published in the celebrated
Paris Review in 1991, it won that literary journal's Aga Khan Prize for fiction the same year.
The Virgin Suicides
The idea for The Virgin Suicides came to Eugenides when he was visiting his brother's house in Michigan and chatting with the family's baby-sitter. The young woman mentioned that at one point, both she and her sisters had all attempted suicide. When Eugenides queried as to why, she replied simply, "Pressure." The theme of inexplicable adolescent trauma in the midst of a placid suburban landscape gave birth to the plot of the novel. The Virgin Suicides is set in an unnamed affluent suburb that shares remarkable similarities to Eugenides's hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and is told in the collective narrative voice of a group of men who were obsessed with the sisters while teenagers.
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