A Letter To The Lisbon Girls (Fiction)

The following is a "letter" I penned as the father of the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides as part of an English assignment I had earlier this week. I wrote this piece to convince these girls not to contemplate suicide as a means of dealing with distress, for their youngest sibling, Cecilia, killed herself by jumping out of her second story bedroom and onto a spiked fence. Other pertinent background information to keep in mind was that the setting of this book and subsequent movie is Detroit, Michigan in the early- to mid-1970s. The parents of the Lisbon girls were devout Catholics, and the mother was especially strict. It was my objective to remind these girls, as their father, that God would watch over and safeguard them from harm's way. Enjoy, dear reader.