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. When Eugenides asked why, the babysitter only replied, "we were under a lot of pressure." Eugenides talks about this inspiration in his YouTube interview with The Paris Review.[2]
Eugenides told 3am Magazine: "I think that if my name hadn't been Eugenides, people wouldn't have called the narrator a Greek chorus".[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.[4][5][6][7]
