Eugenides Dispenses Advice to Aspiring Writers at Advocate

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Princeton student smoke, but just look at all of you here,” remarked Jeffrey Eugenides—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Middlesex” and “The Virgin Suicides”—of the cigarette smoke that veiled the audience and room at an event at The Harvard Advocate last Tuesday. After reading a passage from the novel that he is working on, Eugenides—a creative writing professor at Princeton and alum of Brown—answered questions from a crowd that spilled into the kitchen and onto the stairs. Eugenides mainly fielded questions about his writing process—revealing the difficulties, pleasures, and surprises that he encounters on the way.

“The hardest thing is when you have a new idea while writing something else. Sometimes, I take the adulterous route and write a short story—the equivalent to a literary fling. Certain stories just seize you and you feel compelled to go write them,” he said.

Eugenides articulated this delicate juggling act of being disciplined enough to complete a work, yet flexible enough to abandon a nonviable idea for a more captivating one. For Eugenides, this discipline also means being able to let go of a story.

“I was living in Berlin at the time so my editor flew in and took Middlesex off of my desk and back to America,” Eugenides recounted. “I tend to doubt my work a lot. I’m always reading it through for flow and messing with it again. It’s not the most effective way, but I enjoy writing that way… I wrote ten openings for “Middlesex” before finding the right one. That was eight hundred to a thousand pages in the trash.”

But, though Eugenides is an extremely meticulous writer, he recalled how good fortune prodded him into writing “Middlesex”—a novel brimming with themes of fate and destiny. “I was at the artistic colony Yaddo, trying to write the opening with the burning of Smyrna in 1922 without having done my research. But it just sounded so false. I was desperate; I thought I had to give [“Middlesex”] up, so I wandered downstairs where there was a stack of books left for anyone’s use on the table. One was Smyrna 1922. I picked it up, went back to my room to read it, and started writing again.”

Though Eugenides is half-Greek and “Middlesex” is centered on the ancient traditions of tragedies, epics, and myth, he confessed that the novel is less autobiographical than might be expected—drawing from his personal background more for literary authenticity than plot.

“With ‘Middlesex,’ I was writing about a character who was very different from me,” he said. The main character, Cal, has a genetic mutation and is intersex. “I had to find connections to my own life to make him seem credible so I invested Cal with details about me—he grew up in Detroit where I grew up and was born the year I was born. I needed an autobiographical ground to build this fictional narrative.”

In the novel he is working on now, Eugenides has used this same technique. The story takes place at a college in 1982—and Eugenides himself graduated from Brown University in 1983. But he also discussed the difficulty in treading the line between credibility from autobiographical aspects and the creativity and distance needed for a successful narrative.

“I took a year off from college and spent it in Calcutta working with Mother Teresa. I’ve tried to write about it for 20 years and I’m now doing it. I’m having such difficulty. The passage just gets shorter and shorter—maybe it will disappear altogether. It’s just so hard to write about yourself—easier to imagine another life because then everything has equal weight. This is why I don’t trust memoirs—I believe they need fictionalizing to write.”

While Eugenides’ characters in successive novels remain in youth—from boys dealing with a town tragedy in “The Virgin Suicides,” to Cal coming of age in the flux of 20th century America, and to college students studying semantic theory while carrying on a passionate affair on the side—he continues to be surprised about how much can remember from his own recent past.

“Semantic theory, which I learned and grappled with at twenty-two, still affects how I deal with writing. Books are generated by other books. In college and right after was when I was most voracious with books,” he said. He advised aspiring writers in the audience, “Take them and digest them within you to form this nutritive bed.”

—Staff writer Kristie T. La can be reached at kla@fas.harvard.edu