Our summer 2007 Oprah’s Book Club pick, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, grabs you from the first line: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”
The novel takes us back through three generations of the Stephanides familyfrom a tiny Greek village overlooking Mount Olympus to the motor city of Detroit through war, Prohibition and even race riots.
The book’s narrator, Calliope, is a typical American teenager who finally discovers the shameful family secret that explains why she is not like other girls. Genetically, she is a he.
It took Jeffrey nine years to finish the novel, but when Middlesex finally arrived, the literary world awarded it the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Middlesex has sparked a lot of conversation, which Jeffrey says is very moving. “You don’t consciously intend that, obviously, when you start writing a book,” Jeffrey says.
“I was writing a love story in my mind. I was writing a love story about two girls where one was not exactly a girl. That seemed to me to be an interesting subject and everything came out of that.”
Jeffrey says he got the idea for Middlesex from a memoir by Herculean Barbin, an intersex person who lived in the 19th century, but he was first inspired after reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis in high school.
One of the stories in Metamorphosis details an argument between Hera and her husband, Zeus, king of the gods, about whether men or women have a better time in bed. Zeus says women do, and Hera says that men do.
“They go back and forth and finally they bring on Tiresias because he’s been both a man and a woman to judge the matter, and he says ‘If the pleasures of love be as ten, three times three belong to women. One belongs to man,'” Jeffrey says.
“I was 16 when I read that, so I knew there wasn’t much to hope for as a man. I decided to become a writer at this point.”
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