Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories, essays, and three novels: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film. At the same time, 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.

Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a father of Greek descent and a mother of English and Irish ancestry. Eugenides is the youngest of three sons. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University, Liggett School, and Brown University. He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe and volunteer with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India.

Eugenides remarked on his decision to study at Brown, "I chose Brown largely to study with John Hawkes, whose work I admired. After that, I entered the honors program in English, which forced me to study the entire English tradition, beginning with Beowulf. I felt that since I was going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know something about it." In 1986, he earned an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University.

Eugenides was raised in Detroit, Michigan, and cites the city's influence and high-school experiences in his writings. He has said 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, the MC5, house, techno." However, he also says the decline of Detroit has haunted him.

In 1986, he received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit." After living a few years in San Francisco, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, and worked as a secretary for the Academy of American Poets. While in New York, he made friends with numerous similarly struggling writers, including Jonathan Franzen.

From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides lived in Berlin, Germany, where he moved after being awarded a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service to write in Berlin for a year.[8][9] Eugenides lived in Princeton, New Jersey, since the fall of 2007, when he joined the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.

In an interview with The Paris Review about teaching creative writing, Eugenides said, "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 want to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not "audience." Not "readership." Just the reader."

In 2018, Eugenides joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured full professor and the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters. Eugenides met his former wife, photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi, at the MacDowell artist's program. They got married in 1995 and later had a daughter named Georgia Eugenides.

Eugenides' 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, has been translated into 34 languages. In 1999, the novel was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Sofia Coppola. Set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the story follows the lives and deaths by suicide of five sisters over an increasingly isolated year, as told from the point of view of the neighborhood boys who obsessively watch them.

Eugenides published short stories in the nine years between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, primarily in The New Yorker. His 1996 story "Baster" became the basis for the 2010 romantic comedy The Switch, temporarily putting Middlesex aside in the late '90s to begin work on a novel that would eventually serve as the basis for his third.

Two excerpts of what became Eugenides's work-in-progress third novel after Middlesex also appeared in The New Yorker in 2011, "Asleep in the Lord" and "Extreme Solitude." Eugenides also served as the editor of the collection of short stories titled My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The collection proceeds to the writing center 826 Chicago, established to encourage young people's writing.

His 2002 novel, Middlesex, won 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. Following the life and self-discovery of Calliope Stephanides, or later, Cal, an intersex person raised a girl but genetically a boy, Middlesex also broadly deals with the Greek-American immigrant experience in the United States, the rise and fall of Detroit and explores the experience of an intersex person in the U.S.A.

After a nine-year hiatus, Eugenides published his third novel, The Marriage Plot, in October 2011. The story follows three young adults entangled in a love triangle as they graduate from Brown University and establish themselves in the world. Eugenides is currently at work developing a television screenplay of the novel, which was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2011; a New York Times notable book for 2011; and one of the top books of the year according to lists made by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and The Telegraph.

In 2017, Eugenides published Fresh Complaint, a short story collection between 1988 and 2017. He described the work as "a 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 will be a larger canvas, with many more characters than in [The Marriage Plot]. So, 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 will be, and it will be quite different than The Marriage Plot."