Jeffrey Eugenides This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. MyInKy: Lifestyle

   www.myinky.com/ecp/community/a - [Cached]

   Last Visited: 11/3/2002

   Good Greek boy Jeffrey Eugenides back with an epic MyInKy: Lifestyle
   ...
   Good Greek boy Jeffrey Eugenides back with an epic
   
   ...
   The title is "Middlesex" and the author's name is Jeffrey Eugenides.
   
   Eugenides, expatriate writer, has come "home" to the Greek diner in Brooklyn where he enjoyed tuna melt sandwiches as an unknown writer and now digs into a tuna melt as author of one of the year's most praised novels.
   
   A native of Detroit, the 42-year-old Eugenides has lived the past few years in Germany (he received a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin), but returned to the United States this fall for a cross-country tour of "Middlesex." He has stopped by the diner for an interview, to pay his respects and to drop off a signed copy of his book, now placed against the wall.
   
   ...
   Eugenides got the idea for "Middlesex" after reading a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault that contained a memoir by a 19th-century hermaphrodite.
   ...
   With the freedom of a modern writer, Eugenides describes the biological and spiritual changes of his narrator, of being "ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists and researched by the March of Dimes."
   
   Eugenides' book includes its own wry disclaimer - "I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection," Cal/Calliope confides - but "Middlesex" has literary and commercial appeal. It was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux with a first printing of 75,000 and was cited recently by Book magazine as among the year's best fiction. Early sales have been strong, even if some booksellers have an awkward time presenting its subject matter.
   
   The "freakish" life is more a matter of curiosity than of experience for Eugenides, an investment banker's son, who, like Cal, was born in 1960 and raised in suburban Grosse Pointe.
   
   Greece is his heritage, but his childhood years run deeper in his blood. "The Virgin Suicides," his first novel, documents the fall of a suburban Detroit neighborhood. In "Middlesex," he seeks to demonstrate why his hometown is "emblematic of the American experience."
   
   "You have, No. 1, this great industrial power that has fallen upon hard times," he says. "You have racial conflict that has divided a city and, in some ways, destroyed it. You have a lot of culture coming out of Detroit - Motown and things like that. And you have the most American of all products, the automobile."
   
   Women, too, obviously fascinate him. "The Virgin Suicides," is narrated by a group of neighborhood boys who are mesmerized by five beautiful sisters who end up killing themselves.
   ...
   In "Middlesex," Eugenides writes as a man who once lived as a woman and has special insight into how the sexes differ.
   
   "Women know what it means to have a body," Eugenides writes. "They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public."
   
   Credit the author's curiosity partly to his belief that all writers should be, in a sense, hermaphrodites, able to inhabit the minds and bodies of men or women. But also label it compensation for what he missed in childhood: Eugenides has two brothers, and no sisters.
   ...
   Story telling was another early obsession, and by high school, Eugenides had dedicated himself to a writer's life. He majored in English at Brown University, where he carried a cane in honor of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. After college, he went to San Francisco, wrote for the sailing magazine Yachtsman and studied at Stanford University.
   
   He eventually moved to New York City and worked as executive secretary for the Academy of American Poets, with many a meal taken at Tom's. He also began work on "The Virgin Suicides," which was excerpted in the influential Paris Review magazine.
   
   ...
   Eugenides has joked that completing "Middlesex" was an epic task that took "as long as the Trojan War." But the slow pace had nothing to do with writer's block or sophomore syndrome. It was more about the scale of his project, the research and the personal commitment, the realization he was writing this book as if it were his last.
   
   "I did have the sense I was using everything I had in this book," he says.

2. 2. Stephen Schenkenberg: 2 Paris Review Anthologies

   blog.stephenschenkenberg.com/h - [Cached]

   Last Visited: 12/25/2006

   Vonnegut, Hemingway, Stein, Cheever, Updike, Miller, Sontag, Borges, DeLillo, Faulkner, Eco, Nabokov, Garcia Marquez, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Edmund White, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, James Baldwin, Italo Calvino, Ezra Pound, Oates, Roth, V.S. Naipul, Jeffrey Eugenides, poets Heaney and Pinksy and Collins and Simic and Rich and Brodsky and on and on. (St. Louis makes a good showing with Lou-linked writers Jonathan Franzen, Wash U visiting prof Peter Ho Davies, Stanley Elkin, and Tennessee Williams.) There are long and short stories, brief poems, and - a staple of this literary journal - interviews with writers on their craft. (Nabokov: "No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is wrong; it is Humbert's sense.