Jeffrey Eugenides | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Eugenides in October 2012 | |
| Born | (1960-03-08)March 8, 1960 (age 65) Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Education | Brown University (AB) Stanford University (MA) |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Notable works | Middlesex (2002) |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2003) |
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives | Kallie Branciforte (niece) |
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels:The Virgin Suicides (1993),Middlesex (2002), andThe Marriage Plot (2011).The Virgin Suicides served as the basis ofthe 1999 film of the same name, whileMiddlesex received the 2003Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for theNational Book Critics Circle Award, theInternational Dublin Literary Award, and France'sPrix Médicis.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides was born inDetroit, Michigan on March 8, 1960. He is of Greek descent through his father and English and Irish descent through his mother. He has two older brothers.[1] He attendedGrosse Pointe's privateUniversity Liggett School and thenBrown University (where he became friends with contemporaryRick Moody).[2] He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe, during which time he also volunteered withMother Teresa inCalcutta.[3] Of his decision to study at Brown, he said, "I chose Brown largely in order to study withJohn Hawkes, whose work I admired. I entered the honors program in English, which forced me to study the entire English tradition, beginning withBeowulf. I felt that since I was going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know something about it."[2] In 1986, he earned anM.A. in English andCreative Writing fromStanford University.[4] Eugenides knew he wanted to be a writer from a relatively early age, stating,
"I decided very early; during my junior year of high school. We readA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that year, and it had a big effect on me, for reasons that seem quite amusing to me now. I'm half Irish and half Greek—my mother's family wereKentuckians, Southernhillbillies, and my paternal grandparents immigrants fromAsia Minor—and, for that reason, I identified withStephen Dedalus. Like me, he was bookish, good at academics, and possessed an 'absurd name, an ancient Greek'. [...] I do remember thinking [...] that to be a writer was the best thing a person could be. It seemed to promise maximum alertness to life. It seemed holy to me, and almost religious."[2]
Of his earliest literary influences, he cited "the greatmodernists.Joyce,Proust,Faulkner. From these I went on to discoverMusil,Woolf, and others, and soon my friends and I were readingPynchon andJohn Barth. My generation grew up backward. We were weaned on experimental writing before ever reading much of the nineteenth-century literature themodernists andpostmodernists were reacting against."[2]
Eugenides was raised in Detroit and cites the influence of the city and his high school experiences on his writings. He has said that he has "a perverse love" of his birthplace: "I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music,Motown, theMC5, house, techno."[5] He also says he has been "haunted" by the decline of Detroit.[6] In 1983, after graduating from Brown, he moved toSan Francisco with the intention of becoming a writer and lived onHaight Street.[7]
In 1986, he received theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesNicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit." After living a few years inSan Francisco, he moved to Brooklyn, New York and worked as secretary for theAcademy of American Poets. While in New York he made friends with numerous similarly struggling writers, includingJonathan Franzen.[8]
From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides lived inBerlin, where he moved after being awarded a grant from theGerman Academic Exchange Service to write in Berlin for a year.[9][10] Since 2007, he has lived inPrinceton, New Jersey, where he moved after he joined the faculty ofPrinceton University's Program in Creative Writing.[11][12]
Of teaching creative writing, Eugenides remarked in an interview withThe Paris Review, "I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you're writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you'll never dumb things down. You won't have to explain things that don't need explaining. You'll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don't wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not 'audience.' Not 'readership.' Just the reader."[2]
In 2018, Eugenides joinedNew York University's Creative Writing Program as atenured full professor and theLewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters.[13]
Eugenides met his former wife, photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi, at theMacDowell artist's program.[14] They got married in 1995 and later had a daughter named Georgia Eugenides.[15][16][17]
After being raised in a nominallyGreek Orthodox household, in 2022 Eugenides was received into theCatholic Church.[18][better source needed]
Eugenides' 1993 novel,The Virgin Suicides, has been translated into 34 languages. In 1999, the novel was adapted intoa critically acclaimed film directed bySofia Coppola. Set inGrosse Pointe, Michigan, the novel follows the lives and deaths by suicide of five sisters over the course of an increasingly isolated year, as told from the point of view of the neighborhood boys who obsessively watch them.[2]
Eugenides published short stories in the nine years betweenThe Virgin Suicides andMiddlesex, primarily inThe New Yorker. His 1996 story "Baster" became the basis for the 2010 romantic comedyThe Switch. Eugenides temporarily putMiddlesex aside in the late '90s to begin work on a novel that would eventually serve as the basis for his third.[2] Two excerpts of what became Eugenides's work-in-progress third novel afterMiddlesex also appeared inThe New Yorker in 2011, "Asleep in the Lord" and "Extreme Solitude." Eugenides also served as the editor of the collection of short stories titledMy Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead. The proceeds of the collection go to the writing center826 Chicago, established to encourage young people's writing.
His 2002 novel,Middlesex, won the 2003Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for theNational Book Critics Circle Award, theInternational Dublin Literary Award, and France'sPrix Médicis.[19] Following the life and self-discovery of Calliope Stephanides, or later, Cal, anintersex person raised a girl, but genetically male,Middlesex also broadly deals with theGreek American immigrant experience in the United States, the rise and fall of Detroit, and explores the experience of an intersex person in the United States.
After a nine-year hiatus, Eugenides published his third novel,The Marriage Plot, in October 2011. The novel follows three young adults enmeshed in alove triangle, as they graduate from Brown University and establish themselves in the world. Eugenides is currently at work[when?] developing a television screenplay of the novel, which was a finalist of theNational Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2011; aNew York Times notable book for 2011; and one of the top books of the year according to lists made byPublishers Weekly,Kirkus Reviews, andThe Telegraph.[20]
In 2017, Eugenides publishedFresh Complaint, a collection of short stories written between 1988 and 2017. He described the work as "a very mixed bag of stories, quite different, not all arranged around a certain theme".
He has suggested that a fourth novel will be published at an unspecified future date: "I have an idea; I don't know if it's going to work. But it's going to be a larger canvas, many more characters than in [The Marriage Plot]. Again, I'm going to respond to a very small directive. It's going to be written, well, I'm not going to say — but I know how it's going to be written and what the structure's going to be, and it's going to be quite different thanThe Marriage Plot."[21]
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Uncollected short stories.
