MIDDLESEX – Novel by Jeffrey Kent Eugenides

He knew he wanted to be a writer from a relatively early age. Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist, and was born in Detroit, to a father of Greek descent He attended Grosse Pointe’s private University Liggett School and took his undergraduate degree at Brown University. From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides lived in Berlin, Germany, where he moved after being awarded a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service to write in Berlin for a year. Eugenides’ 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, has been translated into 34 languages, and his 2002 novel, Middlesex, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.” Several reviewers considered Middlesex to be overly verbose, but Middlesex is a bestseller, with more than three million copies sold by May 2011. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides’ life (and observations of his Greek heritage). The author decided to write Middlesex after he read the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin, and was dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions. Eugenides worked on Middlesex for nine years (starting to writ during his short-term residence at MacDowell Colony in United States, and finished the novel in Germany). The novel starts with a narration by its protagonist Cal, also known as Calliope. He recounts how 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (a recessive condition), caused him to be born with female characteristics. Middlesex is written in the form of a memoir, and switches between the first and the third person in several spots. https://www.amazon.com/Middlesex-Novel-Oprahs-Book-Club/dp/0312427735