Finally, by the time I wrote The Marriage Plot, I had forgotten that my story, “Air Mail,” had as its protagonist one Mitchell Carambelis. So you could say that I saved “The Oracular Vulva” from oblivion in order to ease my pain.

I managed to use bits of the third-person version in Middlesex but most of it had to be discarded. I had about 150 pages of each potential book and then went on to write and finish only one of them. Early on in the composition of that novel, I had two separate manuscripts, one narrated by Cal Stephanides, who narrates Middlesex, and another written in the third person. “The Oracular Vulva” isn’t an alternative ending for Middlesex but an outtake from an alternate version of the book. Yes, the first chapter of The Virgin Suicides was published in The Paris Review, but I always knew it would become the first chapter of a novel. Do the stories serve as experimental sites for the novels? Do you tend to work with ideas, motifs and characters first?Ĥ Jeffrey Eugenides: There’s no method to my madness. Mitchel Grammaticus, from The Marriage Plot, is the protagonist of “Air Mail” (later reprinted in Fresh Complaint ).

Your collection of stories, Fresh Complaint, includes an alternative ending for Middlesex, whose early chapters also appeared in magazines. The interview was conducted by email between May and October 2020.ģ Jérémy Potier: The first chapter of The Virgin Suicides was first published as a short story in The Paris Review. He has taught creative writing at both Princeton and NYU.Ģ In September 2018, Jeffrey Eugenides was a guest of the Festival America in Vincennes, France, where he kindly agreed to discuss his work with me. Eugenides is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. First published in various magazines ( The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, etc.), Jeffrey Eugenides’s short stories were collected in Fresh Complaint in 2017. The Marriage Plot (2011), his third novel to date, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix Medici. It has since been translated into thirty-four languages and adapted on screen by Sofia Coppola. 1 Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major critical and popular acclaim in 1993.

Middlesex eugenides review