How long does it take to read The Virgin Suicides?
Jeffrey Eugenides, Nick Landrum
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Nick Landrum takes about 4 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 34 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1993. 249 pages, about 68,475 words. Written for young adults.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 37 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 34 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 36 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s. The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at a private school and the mother is a homemaker. The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese. Their lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a stoic and astute girl described as an "outsider", attempts suicide by cutting her wrists. A few weeks later, the girls throw a chaperoned party, during which Cecilia jumps from their second story window and dies, impaled by a fence post. The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the family are popular subjects of neighborhood gossip. The mystique of the Lisbon girls operates also for the neighborhood boys, the narrators of the novel. Lux begins a romance with local heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. After having sex with Trip on the high school football field after the dance, Lux misses her curfew. Consequently, the Lisbons become recluses. Mrs. Lisbon pulls all the girls out of school, claiming that it would help the girls recover from Cecilia's suicide. However, despite her attempt to protect the girls from boys and sex, over the winter, Lux is seen having sex with various unknown men on the roof nightly. A few months after Lux is sent to the hospital because of a pregnancy scare—which her parents were told was simply indigestion—Mr. Lisbon officially takes a leave of absence. Their house falls into a deeper state of disrepair; none of them leave the house and no one visits, not even to deliver milk and groceries. A strange smell coming from the house permeates the neighborhood. From a safe distance, all the people in the neighborhood watch the Lisbons' lives deteriorate, but no one can summon up the courage to intervene. During this time…
Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
- sexual content
- death of a child
- suicide
Subjects: Fiction, psychological, Young women, fiction, Sisters, fiction, Fiction, urban, Michigan, fiction, Fiction, city life
