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
At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.
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.