Jeffrey Eugenides
4 p.m. Oct. 29
Madame Cadillac Building, Marygrove College
5 p.m. Oct. 31
Rackham Auditorium, University of Michigan
5 p.m. Nov. 2
Rackham Amphitheatre, University of Michigan
When author Jeffrey Eugenides planned a trip to his hometown, he worked his schedule around the Tigers.
"One of the reasons I decided to come to Marygrove (College) is that I calculated that it would be the day that the Tigers would play the seventh game of the World Series and that's the only way that I could get to Detroit. … Do you have any connections (for tickets)?" asked the metro Detroit native and Pulitzer Prize-winner author, who will speak at several local engagements from Oct. 29 – Nov. 2.
But without any BTL connections, Eugenides plans on hitting a bar and rooting on his hometown team while watching them on TV.
"That's the celebration I'm expecting," he said.
When he's not lecturing or hoping to score Tigers tickets, "The Virgin Suicides" author is busy crafting another novel. But he's not leaking any information about the book yet.
"I'll be having to talk about it when it's finished so I don't want to deplete myself before the fact," he said.
Eugenides' Pulitzer-winning 2003 novel, "Middlesex," features an intersex individual as the main character. The character, Calliope Stephanides, lives the first 13 years of his life as a girl, but lives the rest of his life as a boy and man after his intersex condition is discovered during puberty.
Eugenides worked "as a method actor" in creating Cal. "I imagine if this had happened to me how would my life have been different and I try to work from inside the character as opposed to describing someone from the outside."
The success of the novel may be part of a general increase in knowledge about and interest in gender variance. Eugenides said that he had recently seen an interview with the former director of the Intersex Society of North American in the New York Times magazine.
"It was a long discussion of intersexuality and many of the issues brought up in 'Middlesex' – of course they made no reference to 'Middlesex' at all, but I had a feeling that had the book not been published they might not be featuring the subject in the Times as prominently has they had," he said.
Penning the book helped shape Eugenides' views on the fluidity of gender and he constantly considers the extent to which our gender determines our behavior.
"I'm trying to describe in 'Middlesex' what happens to one person and to emphasize in each person's life there's a measure of free will that is gray and is a kind of freedom, but of course it's a freedom that isn't total. And that's pretty much the conclusion I came to from writing the book," he said.
Eugenides grew up in a period when, in the U.S., it was believed that upbringing almost exclusively determined gender roles.
"It was the time of unisex hair salons and unisex everything," he said.
And, while today people think that gender identity is a matter of genetics, "In talking to geneticists and reading about the subject it seems to me that many of these things are bound up so closely that it's not really possible to decide whether nurture or nature is dominant."
