And of course, now it seems even more pertinent than ever. auto industry seemed to be booming where I thought I had written that line, and it was now out of date.
There was a time in the '90s when the U.S. I did pick up on the line you quoted from the book and from the voiceover in the film about the auto industry. EUGENIDES: I certainly didn't think about that. It's almost as if you wrote that book in a way where it could very easily be translated onto film. RAZ: And of course, it's about 10 years since the film of your book by Sofia Coppola came out, a film that really - it's really loyal to the book. Otherwise, I probably would still be working on it. So, I had to publish it because I was collecting unemployment. I was also - I got fired in the midst of writing it. And I used to - I had a nine-to-five job, so I worked at night, two hours every night and four hours on the weekends in a pretty regimented way, and about three years. And I had started other novels before, but for some reason, this one was the one I was able to finish. So, I was in a state of increasing anxiety as I began to get older with nothing to show for myself and began writing "The Virgin Suicides" some time in that period. And by this time, I was almost 30 with only one publication to my name. And I, you know, I decided to become a writer when I was fairly young, 16, 17 years old. EUGENIDES: I was working at the Academy of American Poets as an executive secretary and earning a very small salary and living out in distant Brooklyn. RAZ: Where were you in life when you wrote "The Virgin Suicides"? What was going on? JEFFREY EUGENIDES (Author, "The Virgin Suicides"): Hello. Jeffrey Eugenides is in Princeton, New Jersey, where he now teaches. And in 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his second novel, "Middlesex." Since the original release, Eugenides has managed to win critical acclaim and sell a lot of books. "The Virgin Suicides" came out in 1993, and it's just been re-released in paperback.
That it took place in suburban Detroit and tracks the decline of a family and then a neighborhood might be seen as an allegory. When Jeffrey Eugenides wrote that novel, he set out to capture the weird and repressed world of 1970s suburbia. RAZ: The dialogue and language in Sofia Coppola's film came directly from the novel on which it's based. Even then, as teenagers, we tried to put the pieces together. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, and the continuing decline of our auto industry.
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) Everyone dates the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. (Soundbite of film, "The Virgin Suicides") There's a line right near the beginning of the film, "The Virgin Suicides," when the narrator captures the eventual trajectory of metro Detroit. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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