Archive for the ‘Jeffrey Eugenides’ Category

I was born twice: first as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. So opens Eugenides’ epic novel, Middlesex. Calliope “Cal” Stephanides was declared a girl when she came into this […]


Once upon a time (in the 1970s), there were five sisters: Cecilia, Therese, Mary, Lux and Bonnie – the Lisbon girls. But Cecilia, the youngest, killed herself. And then, by the end of that one year, there were none. The Virgin Suicides, written by a collective ‘we’ (as opposed to ‘I’, or in third person), […]