Jeffrey Eugenides came to Prague an author and left a Pulitzer Prize winner

Jeffrey Eugenides takes a breather after an intense three days in
Prague, during which he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex.

By Kristin D'Agostino ( features@praguepost.com )
For The Prague Post
(April 17, 2003)


Room 116 of the Hotel Josef houses a double bed with a bright-orange
spread, one uninviting chair and writing desk, and one exhausted
Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Jeffrey Eugenides, sprawled across the
bed with his shiny black shoes on, does not rise to meet the reporter.
He politely excuses himself, explaining that he hasn't slept a wink in
the past two days.

Eugenides, an American author currently living in Berlin, is winding up
an appearance at the Prague Writer's Festival. Since leaving his wife
and 4-year-old son three days earlier to attend the gathering, his life
has changed dramatically. On Monday, April 14, his second novel,
Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Muses were no doubt compensating the 43-year-old author for the nine
years he spent crafting Middlesex, which debuted in 2002 to rave
reviews. Eugenides' talent for telling strange, otherworldly tales was
evident in his first book, The Virgin Suicides (1993), which told the
story of five sisters who are driven by societal frustration and
psychological turmoil to commit suicide. Middlesex takes on an equally
offbeat and shocking theme. Driven by the desire to conquer a subject he
believed no writer ever handled successfully, Eugenides created an epic
story of a Greek immigrant family, narrated by an engaging hermaphrodite.

Eugenides' own Greek background shows in his dark eyes and thinning
black hair. Managing never once to rise from his relaxed sprawl, he
nonetheless talked energetically about how he was able to bring a
seemingly ineffable subject into the mainstream.


The Prague Post: How did you find out you had won the Pulitzer Prize?

Jeffrey Eugenides


Jeffrey Eugenides: I found out in this hotel when I came home the second
night of the [festival]. A photographer came up to me and said,
"Congratulations. I'm from AP." I figured it had to do with the
festival. And then he said, "You've won the Pulitzer Prize." I didn't
believe him -- maybe he thought I was somebody else. I needed some
confirmation.


TPP: And what did you do after you got confirmation?

JE: I was fairly calm about it. [Canadian author] Yann Martel was with
me and apparently when he won the Booker prize, he got on the phone and
called everyone in the world. Reporters were calling here and I wasn't
taking their calls and he thought this was amazing. [Other writers] were
here; they brought out champagne, and I felt that was the way to
celebrate the moment instead of leaping immediately into the media
maelstrom.


TPP: It took you nine years to finish Middlesex. Was it a difficult book
to write?

JE: It was a very, very difficult book. The time frame covers about 80
years, and it has to move back and forth without seeming awkward or
losing the reader. There was a lot of history involved and a lot of
genetics -- the debate about how gender identity is constructed or
whether it's determined genetically or by environment. And then there
was the personal story of an intersex person coming to grips with his
intersex condition, and that's of course something that hasn't really
been written about before.


TPP: How did the idea of writing about a hermaphrodite come to you?

JE: I'd read the memoirs of an actual intersex person in 19th-century
France, and I was just intrigued by the life of someone like that. But
the book was very badly written; I was quite frustrated by it. The first
impulse to write Middlesex was to write the story I wasn't getting from
that book.


TPP: The main character, like you, is Greek-American. How much of your
Greek background influenced the story?

JE: I brought the Greek heritage in because it would help to tell the
story I wanted to tell. At that point the book ceased to be about a
hermaphrodite. ... [It's] narrated by a hermaphrodite, but it's only
half about a hermaphrodite. The other half is really about this family
and their immigration and all these things that happened in Detroit.


TPP: You've written about difficult themes: adolescent girls and now a
hermaphrodite. Did you do a lot of research on those subjects?

JE: No, I don't do any research. I research facts, but as for people, my
life has been the research for that. The Virgin Suicides is about
teenage boys who are obsessed with girls, which wasn't hard to do, since
I was an adolescent boy who liked girls. I didn't have any sisters, so
when I went to girls' houses I was like a zoologist. I was like Darwin
on the Galapagos Islands, checking out what kind of cosmetics they had
and if their rooms were messy.


TPP: You've said that Vladimir Nabakov influenced you a lot, and that
with Lolita he was trying to put readers in a state of "aesthetic
bliss." Do you have a similar aim with your writing?

JE: It sounds a like a feat to say what you're after is aesthetic bliss.
But the fact is, it's closer to what I aspire to than any kind of
didacticism. ... I want to seize the reader as strongly as I can and
hold [him] as long as I can in the spell of the book.


TPP: Are you working on any new projects right now?

JE: Yeah. One of the reasons Middlesex took so long is that I wrote half
a book of short stories and about 100 pages of another novel. My short
stories have been published in The New Yorker and other literary
magazines, but the novel I don't want to talk about yet.


TPP: Any plans to move back to America, or have you made Germany your home?

JE: I don't see us living in Germany for the rest of our lives. I speak
very bad German. We're always planning to go back. I just don't know
when it will happen.


TPP: The theme of the Writers' Festival discussion last night was
American influence on European culture. You said that you don't see it
as a negative thing. Could you elaborate on that?

JE: I was basically talking about what Europeans think of American
culture, in the monolithic way that [Europeans] think is making everyone
act a certain way. It's probably hit its pinnacle, and that's why
everyone was worried about it. But I don't think it's increasing. The
McDonald's in my neighborhood in Berlin closed down because no one was
eating there. If people don't like it, they won't eat there and it will
go away. There's no reason to break the windows because you disagree
with George Bush.


TPP:The title for the discussion group was "Great Dream of Heaven."
Were you asked to interpret that in your own way?

JE: Yeah, that's right. ... It was an impossible situation. The
moderator was turning it into the American Dream: America trying to
impose its way of life on the rest of the world. That was the
moderator's bias, so it became that. It could have been a different kind
of talk. I was trying to get out of that panel before I came. I said I
didn't want to do panels.


TPP: What did you think of the festival overall?

JE: It was great to meet the writers. Arundhati [Roy] was a pleasure and
Irvine [Welsh] was great. ... There were some Greek writers, and I
enjoyed meeting them all. Any festival where you win the Pulitzer is a
fine festival in my opinion.

Kristin D'Agostino can be reached at features@praguepost.com