Bibliofiles

[September 24th, 2003] "I was born twice," begins the narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, "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." What follows this auspicious beginning is, quite literally, a modern Greek odyssey that charts a recessive gene through eight decades, a fistful of countries and one inbred family.

Only after the gene has survived a ruinous war in Asia Minor, passed hidden through Ellis Island, run liquor from Canada to Detroit, and narrowly avoided death in World War II does it flourish as 5-Alpha-Reductase deficiency syndrome in the narrator's body. Born as Calliope, Cal is intersexed, the term for people who are born with "non-standard" sexual anatomy (hermaphroditism is but one subset). Eugenides helps us, as only the best writers can, understand Callie's/Cal's unique metamorphosis.

Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and numerous short stories, spoke with WW about his surefooted and gorgeously layered novel in advance of his lecture Tuesday.

Willamette Week: Is Ovid the primary source of inspiration for Middlesex, or rather the whole body of Greek and Roman mythology?

Jeffrey Eugenides: Certainly Ovid's a main inspiration for the book. I studied Latin for seven years and read Ovid and Virgil in high school. It was some of the first literature that I encountered in a meaningful way. I think of the book as a comic epic that comes from the tradition of Tristam Shandy through The Tin Drum and Midnight's Children, these kinds of exuberant, comic, fast-moving, heavily plotted books that I loved as a young person. Obviously, the myth of Hermaphroditus is pretty central.

Why did you choose an intersexed person with 5-Alpha-Reductase to narrate this story?

Well, I wanted to be accurate about the biology and find a real condition and not write about some kind of mythical person who switches genders. 5-Alpha-Reductase deficiency syndrome seemed to me to have the most dramatic possibilities. It's one of the conditions where the person changes the most physically. It's also one of the ones that's very hard to detect visually.

It's an interesting metamorphosis, because Cal's a male who always was a male, but is determined by others to be female until it's too obvious.

I don't really think he's always been a male. In questions of identity, there aren't really any absolutes. By virtue of having been raised a girl he ends up living as a man but not being exactly a normal guy, if there is such a thing. It's a way of putting a character in the midst of the debate between nature versus nurture, and showing how this person comes through that fire of creation and becomes who he is. The correlative is adolescence and the change everyone goes through, and the difficulty of finding your own identity, who you are and who you're going to love. It's not a story far from people, but closer than they may imagine.

You had a run-in with an intersexed group in Portland that objected to your use of the word "hermaphrodite." What's been the response from the wider intersexed communities?

The Intersexed Society of North America, based in San Francisco, was positive. In general, the response has been good from intersexed people around the world. I get letters all the time from people thanking me. There's a woman in Austria who actually discovered she was intersexed because of reading Middlesex.