Posts
To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; battles ranging from the fires of the Turkish wars, the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and the man named Cal who she is to become. ~review
Interview with Author
I've known Jeffrey Eugenides for several years and in several contexts — first as one of his readers, then as a student of his at Princeton, and now as a friend. From the beginning of his novel The Virgin Suicides to the end of his most recent email, I've always been enamored of how vivid Jeff's mind is and how clearly he seems to know what it is he wants to say. All of which made me excited not only to have an early look at his forthcoming novel Middlesex but to hear some of his ideas in this more formal context about writing and life.
In The Virgin Suicides, the narrative voice was a first-person-plural "we." Middlesex is told by a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl and later started living as a male. Obviously you like to complicate the narrative voices in your fiction. Voices you don't hear every day. The "we" voice in The Virgin Suicides came easily, however. It was the first thing I had, really. The first paragraph was told by this collective narrator and the book grew from that. With Middlesex, it was different. I had a story in mind but I didn't have the right voice to tell it with. The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate the epic stuff, the third-person material, and it had to be a highly individualized first-person voice, too.
For a long time I didn't believe what I was writing, but then I gave Cal permission to zigzag between first and third person, and then I did believe it. A lot of time passed while I was screwing around with all this, but then I finally had my starting point. All I had to do was write another 530 pages. ~by Jonathan Safran Foer
Hermaphroditus
In The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, the god Hermaphroditus is "a double-sexed being ... with womanish breasts and long hair." Classicists gush that he/she was as handsome as his father (Hermes) and as beautiful as his mother (Aphrodite). One assumes that this mythic model would render the Greeks benevolent to their double-gendered offspring, but no... They invariably destroyed them at birth, as the Romans later did. Two-to-three people out of every one thousand are born hermaphroditic (claims Robert Edgerton's 1964 study published in American Anthropologist), and almost every culture tries to "fix" this minority.
