A good YA story is hard to find
Back when I was fresh out of high school and intent on making the aesthetics of the 1970s along with the discography of Led Zeppelin my entire personality (as the kids say), I watched Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides for the very first time. For many years that followed, I would occasionally find my thoughts wandering to moments in the film that played as vividly in my head as they had once appeared on my clunky laptop from a bootlegged copy I downloaded from LimeWire. I was often haunted by visions of gossamer blonde hair floating above ghostly prairie dresses, a KISS album mournfully tossed into a fireplace, and Josh Hartnett in a puka shell necklace and that ridiculous wig, leaning over a young Kristen Dunst in a dark classroom theater to whisper yearningly in her ear: you’re a stone fox.
That her directorial debut earned Coppola recognition in her own right and later became a cult classic among legions of melancholic teenage girls and young women, is not a surprise to anyone with a taste for — let’s say — the feminine macabre. Even so, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how often I rewatched it. I can tell you it wasn’t all that much. Perhaps it was here and there when I was feeling particularly wistful or contemplative. I feverishly read the novel the film was based on one summer when seemingly all of California was up in flames — a book some may be interested to learn was written by a man, and one I concede to be equally as sublime as the film adaptation. But then I put it on my bookshelf to collect dust until I lost it somewhere along the way moving to and from San Francisco. And as I grew older, busier, and happier, the less preoccupied I became with the Lisbon sisters and their discomforting demise.
When my husband was out of town this past weekend, I woke up earlier than usual on Saturday with every intent to do nothing worthwhile for a few hours before I had to get ready for a wedding. I turned on the TV hoping to catch an episode of the original The Twilight Zone, but instead felt my spine tingle when I saw the newest recommendation tailored to me on Prime Video: there she was, languidly gazing at me, just as beautiful as I remember her.
And so on this decidedly lazy Saturday morning, I hit play as my cat plopped on the couch cushion next to my head, batting at my unruly curls. I felt like a late teen again, alone and replete with a middling high, my cat, and a Sofia Coppola movie. I knew exactly what to expect: a dark comedy that would transport me to an uncanny suburb of 1970s Michigan, one of Neo-Georgian houses that held hazy secrets within of chintzy wallpaper, Virgin Mary lamps, ceramic Siamese cats, crystal perfume bottles, and Chinese paper fans. It was everything that I had remembered and loved about it.
What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was to also feel the same lingering heaviness as I did the very first time I saw those closing credits. For someone who knew the entire movie like the back of my hand, which lines were pulled directly from the book and which Heart or Styx number would start playing at which exact moment, I was surprised to feel so affected all these years later as a 30-something adult who believes herself to be mentally and emotionally above relating to the puerile longings of a teenager.
I suppose it's important to note that I don't believe Coppola meant for anyone to take her coming of age film all too seriously. In spite of how disturbingly the story unfolds, there is plenty of playfulness and subtle comedic bits sprinkled throughout. It is, after all, a story about teenage girls that is clearly catered to the same demographic. But upon my revisitation sometime around a decade after forgetting all about it, I couldn’t help but notice how few and far between we’ve since been gifted with a story for the young adult persuasion that has been so enduring.
Due to a newly revived interest in leisurely writing as an escape from the tedious technical writing I do at my day job, I’ve been researching modern trends in different categories of fiction to see if anything would pique my interest. With this, I recently discovered that there’s been an explosive growth of YA books within the past decade. The meteoric rise of YA is something I’ve only vaguely understood each time I’ve stepped inside a big chain bookstore in the last few years and glanced at their featured displays; I just figured all this time that Barnes and Noble was forever in the throes of a well-intended initiative to make teenagers literate again. So you can imagine my confusion upon learning that 70% of YA books are purchased by adults, many of whom are surely purchasing them for their own reading.
Curious to see what the hype was about, I bought a couple of contemporary books in this category that recently found their place on bestseller lists. Admittedly, my true motive for this was less because I was actually interested in reading these particular books, but more to see what’s currently in fashion and how much I would enjoy taking a stab at writing for this audience myself. Plus, they were on sale! What I noticed just a few chapters in, is that there’s been a stark divergence from the coming-of-age stories that were formative in my own teenage years, to the kinds of stories that are praised by today’s literary critics. And this is something we should talk about when we talk about storytelling — not because I have objections to these two stories alone, but because my reservations with contemporary YA have more to do with what the current zeitgeist considers “moral” storytelling, especially for girls and young women.
The Virgin Suicides explores the short lives of the five elusive Lisbon sisters: Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese, all teenagers one year apart. Both the film and the novel are narrated by a grown man who is presently just as infatuated with the girls as he once was when he knew them in his youth. Cecilia, the youngest, “was the first to go.” She ends her own life by jumping out of her bedroom window and impaling herself on an iron fence. A year later, Therese, Mary, Bonnie, and Lux also take their own lives all on the same night, a suicide pact consisting of asphyxiation and drug overdose that leaves the neighborhood boys forever tormented. But before we follow along in horror as the boys unexpectedly stumble upon one sister's lifeless limbs dangling from the ceiling of the basement, first we are given a peek into the months that followed Cecilia’s suicide—mainly into the life of Lux Lisbon.
Surely inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita, Lux is the focal character. She strikes a familiar yet unsettling balance between childlike innocence and seductive womanhood, and her budding sexuality places her front and center in the minds of all the teenage boys and grown men alike. Although she becomes the youngest Lisbon girl after Cecilia’s death, she is the most confident of all her sisters. Gum-smacking, cigarette-smoking Lux is also the de facto leader, including on the night of the girls’ suicides, distracting the neighborhood boys so that her sisters are able to kill themselves first. She falls in love with Trip Fontaine, and he abandons her in her sleep on the football field after taking her virginity on homecoming night. After this event, which leads her controlling mother to put all her remaining daughters on house arrest, Lux becomes promiscuous and self-destructive. Her subsequent suicide is especially tragic, being that we see her as the only sister to have had so much as a microscopic glimpse into what it means to live and love freely, and yet she chose to die anyway.
Cecilia is the only other Lisbon girl to be characterized as an individual of her own. She doesn't resemble her sisters in appearance and unlike the other girls, who are full of gossip and laughter, she is always quiet and serious. At thirteen years old, she first attempts to kill herself by slitting her wrists in the bathtub, and when told by the treating doctor that she is too young to know how painful life really is, she retorts that he has never been a thirteen year old girl. Cecilia successfully kills herself during the party her parents throw for her after her release from the hospital, and it’s worth noting that this happens immediately after she witnesses her eldest sisters and invited guests repeatedly taunt a mentally challenged kid. In the book, she keeps a newspaper item of new entries to the endangered species list, finely suggesting that perhaps she really did understand how painful life could be after all.
Evidently, some of today’s popular YA stories seem to serve a new purpose in the form of escapism for adults. These are books supposedly written for tweens and teens that are not-so-discreetly packaged to appeal to a specific kind of grownup: the kind who is wholly uninterested in — even disdainful of — anything considered “the classics,” for a multitude of reasons. And to clarify, this is not to say that adults should never read books written for children (I still love reading children’s stories myself) — only that it’s seemingly rare for today’s leisurely reader to branch out and engage in more challenging literature from time to time, perhaps written by someone we may not identify with on a superficial level, but nonetheless surprises us in our core ability to relate to others who live lives exceedingly different than our own.
What’s bleaker still is this latest fad to dispel or subvert conventional femininity altogether in favor of a heroine who is intrinsically strong and stoic— one who has a traditional boy’s name, who would never wear a floral dress of her own volition, or develop a crush on a peer who didn’t immediately appreciate her behemoth of an intellect. Even the timelessness of fleeting, fickle teenage love is now considered “cringe.” And yes, it goes without saying that we don’t actually want girls to idolize fictional ones like Lux or Cecilia Lisbon, for their sake and for our own as we approach the anxieties of parenthood. But this modern-day fixation on eschewing the feminine for traditionally masculine traits is neither empowering nor badass (speaking of cringe, this is the one trite descriptor I can’t help but flinch at every single time I see it). There is real power in being vulnerable and tender and feminine, and to still allow people to explore all these feelings without shame.
In The Virgin Suicides, it’s apparent through the narrative and depiction of not only the neighborhood boys, but also Mr. Lisbon, Cecilia’s doctor, Trip Fontaine, and all the other male peripheral characters, that not a single one of them had any clue who the Lisbon girls really were beyond their mythic outward appearances. The portrayal of the three eldest sisters as being virtually indistinguishable from one another is blatantly revealing of how the boys and men in their lives were incapable of understanding them as individual people. Lux and Cecilia were only unique insofar as one was a sex kitten and the other a social misfit who stuck out like a sore thumb. Even their own father could not see them as single entities, mistaking Bonnie in her nightgown for the ghost of Cecilia.
There is palpable irony in the narrator referring to the girls’ suicides as “the outrageousness of someone only thinking of herself.” While the neighborhood boys gathered around to obsess over all the lustrously girly items that belonged to the Lisbon sisters and to daydream about rescuing them from the stifling control of their mother, the girls themselves were rotting away just across the street, longing for any kind of real human connection. I’ve always wondered: while perhaps Cecilia was destined to end her own life, could the other girls have been saved? And this is something we’re never too sure of. It’s a coming of age story about five sisters who actually never come of age, and the reader or moviegoer is left to grapple with what could have been had the men in their lives been kinder and less self-serving. And this is all suggested without ever being too on-the-nose. There is no implication that the audience is too dimwitted to figure this out without being beaten over the head with overt moralizing on feminist theory.
That I find new intricacies and revelations in this work of art every time I revisit it is a testament to powerful storytelling, of a shared female condition of feeling boxed in, overlooked, or molded into someone else’s idea of what one should be. And yet simultaneously, it’s a testament to how boundless and transcendent we are when we embrace what makes us girls. We will never know the Lisbon sisters for who they were or who they could’ve been, but that’s the beauty of a tragic ending, and we do our children, teenagers, and young adults a profound disservice when we no longer tell stories that gently nudge them to reflect on the universality of tragedy and beauty, and how these things are both equally reflected in reality. All of our realities.
☁︎
