Middlesex
A gene carried across a century of Greek-American history finally surfaces in Cal, who must tell the whole family story to explain himself.
The Long Inheritance
Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner follows Cal Stephanides, who narrates from the present day backward through three generations of his family. His grandparents fled Smyrna, settled in Detroit, and carried a recessive mutation that travelled through two more generations before expressing itself in Cal, born externally female and living as a man by adulthood. The novel is simultaneously a Greek-American immigrant saga, a meditation on genetic determinism, and a study in how identity is made rather than found.
Reading Middlesex
Inheritance
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Book
"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.'
"Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides spent nine years writing Middlesex, researching Greek-American history, the Detroit race riots of 1967, and the biology of intersex conditions. He said the challenge was making the personal history as compelling as the family saga.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003 and was an international bestseller. Eugenides has said he deliberately structured it to resist easy categorisation as any single kind of novel.