The Fictional Suicidal Girls I Loved, But Had To Let Go

“There was something familiar about wanting to haunt a story rather than tell it.”

Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed

There exists a photo of me as a teenager kneeling on my friend's living room floor wearing a white nightgown, holding a kitchen knife with the sharp end halfway in my mouth. A coral bra is visible under the nightgown and I look into the camera trying to be both provocative and frightening, but not managing to pull off either one entirely. I was at a The Virgin Suicides–themed party, one of many offbeat parties my friends and I would host in our late teens, each theme an attempt to one-up our last party's strangeness. It was a time when I was both a virgin and, for the first time in my life, suicidal.

While I spent my entire childhood entertaining generally self-destructive thoughts, this was a decided turn from thoughts to impulses. Hypothetical escape routes from my life emerged in my mind as I entered the early phases of adulthood. Peculiarly, my literary fascinations regressed from the melancholy adult women I had admired as a child to a very particular kind of suicidal teenage girl. While literature is awash in young women who end their own lives in dramatic final chapters, my preoccupation was with girls who committed suicide early on in their respective stories. To end one's life at the end of a story is usually because all other options have been exhausted. To commit suicide in the beginning or the middle of a story was to radically refuse to participate in the narrative as anything but a ghost. There was something familiar about wanting to haunt a story rather than tell it.

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My first fixation on this character type was Cecilia, the youngest of the five Lisbon sisters in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. Though the book brims with dark moments, there was something especially enticing about a 13-year-old that only successfully commits suicide when she tries a second time. Because suicide is often attempted by young women but most often completed by men of middle age, there was a decidedly grim adult conviction to her suicide. When Cecilia succeeds in ending her life with the assistance of an open window and an iron fence, it means that she meant it all along. In the sickness of suicidal ideation that was only beginning to wander to that place, I saw a resoluteness in Cecilia's despair at the world that I lacked. As the mind betrays itself so cruelly, there is a brutal kind of comfort in comparing yourself to a child who is better at misery than you.

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