TW: Suicide ‼
Society talks about small town mysteries so much that no one is surprised when something horrible happens in a smaller community. Desensitization is real. We watch TV series and read books where the horrors are glamorized and made to be exciting thrillers.
Jeffery Eugenides wrote a book about a small town mystery in 1975. Except this story is not made for pleasure or excitement, although the viewpoint may twist it in some ways. It takes the gruesome reality of suicide and presents through a lense too often looked through.
Jeffery tells the story through the naiive eyes of a group of young men. They obsess over the Lisbon girls, recreating the story through collected items, interviews, and foggy memories.
The Lisbon girls’ story is heartbreaking as well as morbidly interesting, in all its sadness and eerie confusion. Unfortunately, these young men treat the girls’ memory as if they own it. Creating their own version of the story and all its grief.
This small town watches as the seemingly normal Lisbon family faces the shock of a suicide attempt. This attempt was made by Cecilia, one of the five Lisbon sisters. Not long after, she makes another attempt and succeeds.
The Male Perspective:
The viewpoint through which we see these events unfold is an unusual one. In the eyes of the boys we see a more detached, male perspective. We also see the way women and girls are thought of and talked about by the young men of that generation. We see the objectification and dismissal. The lust and carelessness.
They were viewed as objects to collect, or challenges to conquer.
We watch the girls struggle to find individuality and fight against or give into the way the are lusted after, especially Lux Lisbon.
It is difficult for us to truly know the girls at all because of the way they are romanticized in the eyes of the boys. We struggle to see depth and to find the real reasons for all the girls eventual suicides.
The Girls’ Pact:
After Cecilia’s death we watch the girls and the Lisbon house fall into disarray and grief. We have no window into their minds or the home but we glean details from the boys of the Lisbon’s depression, confinement, and starvation.
We see the boys obsession grow and they eventually make a plan with the girls through clandestine communication to run away. The boys enter the house and Lux distracts them. As they fantasize about running away with the girls, one by one, each girl commits suicide.
Hanging, overdose, carbon monoxide, a gas oven.
These girls each chose their own way out of a life devoid of genuine love, care, and meaning. They all searched for love but found only grief, lust, and emptiness.
The boys still don’t understand why the girls killed themselves. And they still hold the memories of them, not as people, but as bodies to lust after and idealized enigmas to hold onto.
No one can ever truly know what was going on in the girls minds. No one really tried. We are presented with clothes and makeup and fantasies. Beautiful wraith-like ideas of what the girls really were.
Although this story is fictional, I still grieve the loss of the girls and their true story. Jeffery, whether intentionally or not, showed us what the male gaze does to women and their struggles.
Let this book be a reminder to us all that mental health is not a trend, a fetish, a romantic ideal, or an exciting mystery.
The Lisbon girls were only characters but their stories were as real as you and me.