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.
You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.
Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs, maidens with golden hair dripped sea blue tears into the books spine, grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered spieces list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.
Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.