On Monday, a chockablock Cemex Auditorium greeted Jeffrey Eugenides, who spoke at length about the process of writing Middlesex.
A few talking points:
- While pursuing his MFA at Stanford, Mr. Eugenides also pursued a beautiful poet, but was forced to stop when they discovered that she was allergic to his sperm.
- An anecdote about the dapper blue suit that Mr. Eugenides wore to the lecture, which claimed that Mr. Corneliani himself had offered to tailer it personally while the writer was at a conference in Mantua with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, was later admitted to be a fabrication.
- The above placed doubt on the likelihood that the first sentence of Mr. Eugenides’ next novel was, as he claimed: “Three months after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, President Obama appeared on the roof of the White House in a Corneliani suit.”
- The writing of Middlesex was accompanied by a number of odd coincidences, including the arrival of a picture of Mr. Eugenides’ grandparents at the precise moment that he needed to recall the image, the seemingly random appearance of a book titled “Smyrna 1922” at an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs just as Mr. Eugenides had decided to research the topic, and an accidental visit to the endocrinologist who wrote the study that had originally prompted Middlesex.
- The author stated that the structure of Middlesex appeared as “a crystal palace in my mind.”
- The Obscure Object was both the love interest of Middlesex‘s narrator Cal and Mr. Eugenides himself, who was similarly obsessed with a girl on Brown’s campus in the ’80’s. By chance, he met the same woman during his fellowship in Berlin some twenty years later.
- Of contemporary fiction, the writer claimed, “all books require technical innovation—some are just more showy in how they do it.”
(’13, English / Creative Writing) — ‘12-‘13.