Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Kent Eugenidesis an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. The Virgin Suicides has been filmed, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 March 1960
CityDetroit, MI
CountryUnited States of America
I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.
You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.
Usually my ideas are small.
I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.