Recommended Reading: The Virgin Suicides

Sofia Coppola (director of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and daughter of The Godfather's Francis Ford Coppola) first came to Hollywood fame with her movie version of The Virgin Suicides by Christopher Eugenides. It is a hypnotic, beautiful book which tells the story of the tragic lives of the Lisbon sisters, each of whom kills herself as a way out of the torment of adolescence.

Haunting and tender, with brilliant flashes of humour, The Virgin Suicides is the story of the disintegration of a captivating American family in 1970s suburban Michigan. The five Lisbon sisters are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who, twenty years on, recall their adolescence: the sisters' gauche but breathtaking appearance on the night of the homecoming dance; the brassière belonging to the beautiful, promiscuous Lux, draped over a crucifix on the wall; the records the boys played down the phone, trying desperately to penetrate the sisters' isolation; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched fragile lives disappear...

Here is a brief extract from the novel:

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized.

But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.