📝 Jeffrey Eugenides’ Writing Routine

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The Virgin Suicides was lyrical and claustrophobic. Middlesex was sprawling, exuberant, and epic. The Marriage Plot was intellectual, ironic, and intimate. Across three decades and three novels, Jeffrey Eugenides has written with the precision of a stylist and the ambition of a historian. His books are rooted in adolescence, gender, family, and form — told through narrators that are anything but typical.

Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, an affluent suburb of Detroit. His first two novels, though wildly different in tone and scope, both return to that geography: The Virgin Suicides is a suburban gothic narrated in the first-person plural by a group of haunted men; Middlesex is a generational saga that follows a Greek-American family from the burning of Smyrna in 1922 to the Detroit riots of 1967, narrated by an intersex protagonist reflecting on the genetic and social legacy that shaped him.

With Middlesex, Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize, gained a massive new audience when Oprah picked the novel for her book club, and spent nearly a decade on the road. “The book was my jailer and we became friendly,” he told Jonathan Safran Foer in BOMB. “I was like Patty Hearst with her Stockholm Syndrome. Little by little the book expanded to fill every inch of my consciousness.”

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