It was another 10 years before I gave it a try. I thought to myself, rather hubristically, that I'd like to write the story myself. The memoir frustrated my readerly expectations. She's evasive about her anatomical details and unable-or unwilling-to describe her emotional states without resorting to platitudes or histrionics. Unfortunately, Herculine Barbin wrote very much like the convent schoolgirl she was. I expected the memoir to be fascinating, wildly dramatic, as well as revelatory about experiences I myself had no clue about. It was the love story at the center of this memoir-a love story between two girls where one girl isn't exactly a girl-that most intrigued me. Doctors examined Herculine and declared her to be a man. They began a love affair, which was eventually discovered by the school authorities. A teenager at a French convent school, Herculine fell in love with her best friend. On the face of it, Herculine's life story was an amazing one. Foucault discovered the memoir in the French Department of Public Hygiene. Years later, in 1984, I read Michel Foucault's Herculine Barbin: Memoir of a 19th Century French Hermaphrodite. If the novelist's job is to go into the minds of both women and men, if we value most of all the writers who are best able to do this (namely, Shakespeare and Tolstoy ), then telling a story from the point of view of Tiresias (or someone like him) might gain the writer a measure of that longed-for omniscience.Īll this is the soil from which Middlesex would one day grow. How amazing! And how useful, from a literary standpoint. Here was a guy who knew what it was like to be a woman. I also remember being struck by the marvelous utility of this figure, Tiresias. 'Might as well become a writer,' I thought to myself.) (I knew, then and there, not to expect much in life. This was important information for a 15-year-old boy. To adjudicate this matter, they ask Tiresias, who replies: 'If the pleasures of love be as ten, then three times three belongs to woman. Zeus, somewhat surprisingly, says that women enjoy themselves more. We were reading Ovid's Metamorphoses and we came to the part where Zeus and his wife, Hera, have an argument as to which sex has a better time in bed. As far back as 1976, in a high school Latin class, I was introduced to the figure of Tiresias, who'd lived as both a male and a female. It's difficult to pinpoint the moment when Middlesex took root in my imagination. Drop in for a conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides! How did you come up with the idea for Middlesex? What kind of research did you have to do? Now, it's time to get to know the man behind Middlesex a little better. As the family secrets of Middlesex unfold, you get to know Cal and her family on a very intimate level.

Eugenides jeffrey middlesex