Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Week three: writing Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 17.55 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/25/book-club-middlesex-jeffrey-eugenidesWhen I started Middlesex, I didn't know that the book would end up being anything like as long as it turned out to be. I did know, however, that I wanted to treat my hero, Cal Stephanides, in a new way. Traditionally, literary characters who change sex have been mythical figures such as Tiresias, or fanciful creations such as Virginia Woolf's Orlando. I wanted to write about a realistic person and be as accurate as I could with respect to the biological facts. Therefore, my first course of action was to spend time at the Columbia Medical School library, reading the surprisingly multiform varieties of "pseudo-hermaphroditism". The one I chose to use – 5 alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome – is distinguished by the dramatic physical shift that occurs in those affected. People born with the condition appear female at birth but then virilise at puberty. The salient fact of the syndrome is that it results from a recessive genetic mutation, occurring only among inbred populations in isolated regions of the globe. When I learned that, my conception of the book changed in an instant. Instead of a slim fictional autobiography of an intersex person, the novel would tell a much larger story, following the transmission of this mutated gene as it passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family. The story would begin in 1960, with the birth of my narrator. It would then go back to 1922 to tell the story of Cal's grandparents in Asia Minor, the Greco-Turkish war, and the burning of Smyrna. Finally, it would follow the gene across the ocean to America, where the recessive mutation would be inherited in turn by Cal's parents, until two copies ended up in Cal's own body, and he began to tell the story of his unusual life. The entire structure for the novel appeared in my head, fully formed, as ravishing as a crystal palace on a distant hill. I remember leaving the library that day, passing into the sunshine on the green, overwhelmed with the grandeur of this design and filled with a sense of personal magnificence, and this euphoria lasted for another minute until I realised that I had no idea how to write such a book.
