Leonardo said that small rooms concentrate the mind. I thought it would be my dream studio, but actually the glass is distracting, so I end up using a dismal bedroom upstairs. It’s mostly glass and looks onto the garden. Questions were revisited by phone, and many answers were clarified, or rewritten, by hand on hotel stationery-evidently during moments of turbulence-as Eugenides flew between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Toronto. As we reviewed the transcripts, Eugenides began an extended book tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe. Our interview was conducted over two sessions last August in Eugenides’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and daughter. The story of three bright, restless characters on the cusp of adulthood, The Marriage Plot is in some sense a novel of ideas, but ideas that matter only as they bear on the messy business of living.

By that time, he was deep into The Marriage Plot, a novel that looks back at his college years at Brown in the eighties, dramatizing the collision of radical French theory and the orthodoxies of New Criticism. In 2007, Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club, making Eugenides a household name. To understand who he is-socially, biologically, and genetically-the grown-up, male Cal not only revisits his childhood memories of the sixties and seventies but also reconstructs, as best he can (and at times fancifully), a family history that moves from the early twentieth century in a Turkish mountain village to Detroit during the boom years of the automotive age. Raised a girl, Callie Stephanides decides, after a tumultuous puberty and several visits to a creepy specialist in Manhattan, to cross the divide of gender and live as a man. The story of five sisters and their gruesome deaths is told in the collective voice of their would-be suitors, now older but still haunted by the girls’ suicides.Įugenides’s use of the first-person-plural voice in The Virgin Suicides was an audacious gambit no less risky was his choice of an intersex person to narrate Middlesex. The Virgin Suicides takes place in Grosse Pointe (“our waterlocked spit of land French explorers had named the ‘Fat Tip’”). These two settings-the once-proud, dying city and its affluent suburb, separate yet inextricably linked-are rendered as vividly as the characters in these two books. His first two novels, The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), are rooted in Detroit and the adjacent suburb of Grosse Pointe, where he spent much of his youth. Interviewed by James Gibbons Issue 199, Winter 2011īorn in Detroit in 1960, Jeffrey Eugenides lived through the city’s last glory years as the heart of the American auto industry.

Eugenides jeffrey middlesex