Although I’d decided to be a writer at the age of 16, I was never in a rush to get published. Virginia Woolf said that no one should publish a novel before he or she turns 30, and that seemed about right to me. Skip the callow, autobiographical coming-of-age novel, along with any signs of apprenticeship. Bide your time, get better at your craft, and publish something unembarrassing in the early years of your maturity.
That philosophy stood me in good stead throughout my 20s. But as my 30th birthday approached, I began to feel uneasy. “What do you do?” people asked at the New York cocktail parties I went to. “I’m a writer.” “Anything I might have seen?” When I mentioned the one story I’d placed in an obscure literary magazine, my interlocutors nodded uncertainly, and drifted away.
Why hadn’t I published a novel? It wasn’t for lack of trying. By then I’d started and failed to finish at least three novels. I’d written dozens of short stories. Everything I’d laboured on had met with rejection or, as with most of what I write, even now, had been rejected by my own internal editor, so that no one had read a word except for me.
It’s axiomatic that a writer who can’t get published has no idea why. If you knew what the problem was, you’d fix it. In my case, the problem was compounded by its paradoxical nature: it stemmed from an avoidance of the self and a fixation on it. Most of the stuff I wrote as an undergraduate or thereafter wasn’t autobiographical in any way. I wrote stories from the point of view of a Trappist monk, or of Ezra Pound while he was imprisoned in a cage following his fascist radio broadcasts during the second world war. Perfectly good ideas for stories, maybe, if I had been a monk or Ezra Pound.
When I did try to write about my own psychology, I made it more tortured than it was. Without being aware of it, I’d adopted an existentialist view of the human condition. The struggle my heroes were engaged in was the struggle of the self against the void. They didn’t have families. They weren’t from anywhere. If they had names at all, the names were never Greek.
Then one night, on a trip home to Detroit, I got talking to the teenage girl who was babysitting my one-year-old nephew. She was a chatty midwestern girl, seemingly untroubled by life, but in the span of our brief conversation, which didn’t last more than five minutes, she told me, out of the blue, that she and her sisters had all attempted suicide. Shocked, I asked why. “I don’t know,” she said. “We just had a lot of pressure.” That was as much as I learned before my sister-in-law brought in the baby and my family and I left for dinner. I never spoke to the girl again.
The nature of suicide – its suddenness, its violence, its impenetrability – had been impressed on me some 12 years earlier during my freshman year at college. One of the courses I took was called Introduction to Eastern Religions. It was a big lecture class where we sat and took notes. At our weekly sessions, however, we got to discuss the material, and my enthusiasm for the subject matter – I was keen, in those days, on synthesising eastern and western religion – convinced one of the other students that I knew what I was talking about. Enough, at least, that one day he showed up at my dorm room door, unannounced.
He wanted answers to the big questions. Did God exist? What was the meaning of life? I invited him into my room, but he stayed in the doorway, staring at me with his big eyes. He seemed a little intense, frantic to know the truth, but that wasn’t so unusual at college. I told him what I could, which was next to nothing, and he went on his way. The next day, at the restaurant where he worked part-time, he picked up a Yanagiba sushi knife from the counter and disembowelled himself. Only when I learned of my classmate’s suicide did I recognise the state of desperation in which he’d come to see me. He’d been hoping that I might give him a reason to keep living. And I’d missed it completely.
After I returned to New York, I kept thinking about my conversation with the babysitter. The story of a group of sisters who, for mysterious reasons, decide to end their lives en masse, seemed to me a compelling idea for a novel. Nevertheless, as I had no idea how to write such a book – or, apparently, any book – that was as far as it went.
Over a year passed. Then, the following winter, fleeing New York and my arrested literary development, I took a trip to Egypt. My girlfriend at the time and I spent a few days in Cairo, visiting the pyramids at Giza and viewing mummies in the Egyptian Museum. After that we boarded a smallish boat with 30 other passengers for a cruise down the Nile.
One evening after sitting out on deck, watching the palm trees and villages pass by, I went down to our cabin and wrote what became the first paragraph of The Virgin Suicides. That paragraph gave me the whole novel. It gave me its first-person plural voice, which was extremely rare at the time, so rare that subsequent reviewers of the book claimed that I’d invented it, which I hadn’t.
It gave me the plot, announcing in its opening sentence that all five Lisbon sisters had committed suicide in the space of single a year. And it made clear that the collective narrator of the book – the unspecified group of men remembering the events of their adolescence – wasn’t in full possession of the facts. In order to know anything about the Lisbon girls, the boys have to talk to people, to snoop in the girls’ diaries, to spy on them, and to replay in their minds the few occasions when the girls interacted directly with them.
When you’re writing your first book, it helps to give yourself limits. I didn’t have the capacity as a writer back then to go into the girls’ heads and present their inner lives. By renouncing omniscience, I reduced the complexity of what I needed to know. A good thing on the whole, given that my resources were limited.
The other thing the perspective did was to turn my attention outward. Although I knew little about my own psychology, I knew a lot about my childhood neighbourhood and what had happened on our street. I’d grown up going into my friends’ houses and seeing what life was like inside. It was a form of omniscience in itself, achieved not through the sudden acquisition of Tolstoyan powers of insight, but by the simple virtue of having lived in one place and paid attention.
Ironically, in writing about an environment I’d considered unworthy of literary depiction, I came up with something that interested readers for the first time. In literature, you reach the universal through the particular. I may have been writing about an unnamed suburb in Michigan during the 1970s, but when the book came out, readers from the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, the UK and elsewhere told me they recognised their own villages and towns.
I wrote this book before I became “a writer”. No one was waiting for it. No one cared if I finished it or not. It was composed in the purest of states, written in snatches at my desk at my nine-to-five office job, for two hours each week night, and for four hours every Saturday and Sunday. In a certain sense, I don’t know how the book got written. That said, I don’t mean it was dictated to me or was written without conscious effort. It came from discovering things inside myself that I didn’t know were there and from following their implications and shaping them as they emerged.
Not long ago, I received an email from a high-school English teacher in New Jersey. He told me that he’d been assigning The Virgin Suicides for the past 10 years with happy results. Recently, however, some students had taken issue with the fact that I, a man, had presumed to “know” what it was like to be a teenage girl. The teacher asked me what to tell them.
In responding, I said that, however much I disagreed with the injunction to “stay in your lane” as a fiction writer, in this particular case, I hadn’t violated it. The collective narration of The Virgin Suicides is an all-male affair. The boys who obsess over the Lisbon girls know little about them. Their cluelessness is the point.
Many readers who write to me do a similar thing but in a more generous spirit. They ask how a guy like me could understand what it’s like to be a girl. I tell these correspondents the same thing: it only seems that way. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the narrative voice of the novel, and the voyeuristic attention the boys maintain on the girls, creates a negative space where readers can project their own imaginations. The Lisbon girls are never seen from the inside: their mental and emotional life is a matter of conjecture and misinterpretation. Like suicide itself, the truth of their lives is ultimately unknowable.
I don’t know what it is, but readers keep finding themselves in the book, generation after generation, as I found my own self, artistically, 30 years ago. Writing this book didn’t make it any easier to write the book that came after. But from then on, I knew how to go about it: by paying attention to the world at large and by seeing myself for what I am: an embodied soul, specific, created, neither the main subject nor the person in charge.
This is an edited extract of the foreword to the 30th anniversary special edition of The Virgin Suicides, published on 14 September by Fourth Estate (14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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