The novel is written in first person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths.

Cecilia's death also heightens the air of mystery about the Lisbon sisters to the neighborhood boys, who long for more insight into the girls' lives.

After winning homecoming King and Queen, Trip persuades Lux to ditch their group to have sex on the school's football field.

Through the winter, Lux is seen by the anonymous teen boys having sex on the roof of the Lisbon residence with unnamed and unknown men at night.

After many months of strict confinement, the remaining four sisters reach out to the boys across the street by using light signals and sending anonymous notes.

Upon entering the house they are met by Lux, who invites them inside and tells them to wait for her sisters while she goes to start the car.

In the morning, the authorities come for the dead bodies, as the girls had apparently made a suicide pact: Bonnie hanged herself, Therese overdosed on sleeping pills, and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning after sealing herself inside the garage with the car running.

Local newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides came exactly one year after Cecilia's first attempt and describes the girls as tragic creatures who were so cut off from life that death was not much of a change.

20-something years later, as middle-aged men with families, they lament the suicides as selfish acts from which they have secretly not been able to emotionally recover.

The inspiration for the plot of the book came to Jeffrey Eugenides when his nephew's teenage babysitter told him that she and her sisters had planned to commit suicide.

[3] Several writers have also noted the similarities between The Virgin Suicides and the 1945 play The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca.