Site Presented By
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
"Middlesex" author Jeffrey Eugenides talks about hermaphrodites, ethnic assimilation, Detroit and whether men or women enjoy sex more.
Oct 8, 2002 | Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, "Middlesex," is a fabulous creature of sorts, like those mythical beasts made up of the parts of several other animals. It's partly the coming-of-age story of Calliope Stephanides, who at 13 learns that, chromosomally speaking, she's actually male, though due to a particular recessive gene, her body doesn't respond much to male hormones; in other words, s/he's a hermaphrodite. "Middlesex" is also the globe-spanning saga of Callie's Greek-American family, beginning with her paternal grandparents, who flee Turkish incursions into Asia Minor at the end of World War I (and who manage to escape to America and even to marry -- hiding the fact that they're brother and sister). Callie's parents assimilate and make good in midcentury Detroit, where the family weathers the racial and social tremors of the day and moves up to the posh suburb of the book's title. Then they enroll their daughter in a private girls school, where Callie meets, and falls in love with, her best friend, setting in motion the most tumultuous metamorphosis of all.
Eugenides' first novel, "The Virgin Suicides," tells the story of five sisters from the perspective of a group of boys who live in the same neighborhood. It so captivated readers (some of whom first learned of it from Sofia Coppola's 1999 film version) that "Middlesex" became one of the most eagerly awaited second novels of recent years. Eugenides recently dropped by Salon's New York offices to talk about his new book, the genetic roots of the differences between men and women, the lasting influence of Greek myths, and the weird coincidences that kept him going in the eight years it took to write "Middlesex."
Which came first, the chicken or the egg -- the novel about the hermaphrodite or the Greek family saga?
Both. The book is a hybrid, as you're describing it, and the first part came with the hermaphrodite. I read a memoir of a real hermaphrodite from the 19th century, thinking this would be a wonderful story. It had a lot of things in it that appealed to me: a medical mystery, an amazing personal transformation and a doomed passion at its center. The hermaphrodite who wrote it was a schoolgirl in a French convent, and she fell in love with her best friend. In doing that, she discovered that she was a hermaphrodite. Unfortunately, it was written in 19th century convent-school prose -- very melodramatic, evasive about the anatomical details and really unable to render the emotional situation in any regard. I was frustrated by this and thought, I'd like to write the story I'm not getting from this book.
I started to do a lot of research on hermaphroditic conditions, and the one I landed on was 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. (I always feel like a doctor when I say that.) The salient factor about it being that it only comes in isolated inbred communities. And I thought, Hmm. Isolated inbred communities? How about my grandparents being Greeks living in a small village in Asia Minor under Turkish rule? I saw how I could bring in some of my own family history in a fictional way to write this story. At that point, I realize what I had was a more epic story, a long family saga, not just about a hermaphrodite but about a genetic condition passing down through three generations of a family into the body of the girl who narrates this story of her family and what they went through as well as her own metamorphosis.
Stories about people who are sexually unusual in some way often present them as isolated. And it's true, they often have to cut off ties with their families, as Cal does for a while. But you were determined to embed her story in that of her family, it seems.
I thought of Callie's condition as symbolic of something that we all go through, which is the transformation of puberty and the process of self-discovery. I used the hermaphrodite not to tell a story that was unusual or apart from common human experience but as something that we all can relate to. To write it I drew on my memories of my own adolescence and, as they call it, locker room trauma. I thought of it, actually, as close to all of our memories and experiences.
Callie doesn't seem like a freakish character at all in this book, and that's what you were aiming for.
That's what I was aiming for. Sometimes people hear the concepts of my books -- "The Virgin Suicides": five girls committing suicide -- and they think that they are very strange and outlandish, and they get labeled bizarre or something like that. But I think when you read them, more than making reality bizarre, I tend to make bizarre things normal. I think that if you read "Middlesex," you'll see that what Calliope goes through in becoming Cal is normalized by the way I tell the story. The reason I have so much family history in this is because I wanted the character to be inside a family and inside society, to write the story of a real hermaphrodite instead of a mythical one like Tiresias.
Tiresias was someone who'd been both a man and a woman and he was questioned by the gods about which gender enjoyed sex more.
He was walking one day and saw two snakes copulating, threw his staff at them, and he was turned into a female. Then seven years later he saw the same snakes, threw the same staff at them, and was turned back into a man. The story you're recalling is an argument between Zeus and Hera over which sex has a better time in bed. Strangely, I think, Zeus thinks women have a better time and Hera thinks men do.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
