Jeffrey Eugenides

American · born 1960

Born Jeffrey Kent Eugenides on March 8, 1960, in Detroit, the youngest of three sons of a Greek American mortgage banker and an Irish English mother, he grew up in the suburbs of Grosse Pointe at the leading edge of the city's long collapse. He read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at sixteen, identified with Stephen Dedalus and his absurd Greek name, and decided to be a writer. He went to Brown University to study under John Hawkes, took a year off to travel in Europe and volunteer with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and graduated in 1982. He moved to San Francisco, lived for a while on Haight Street, then to New York, where he worked as secretary to the Academy of American Poets and befriended Jonathan Franzen. The Virgin Suicides (1993) was his first novel, the story of the five doomed Lisbon sisters of suburban Michigan narrated in the first-person plural of the neighbourhood boys who could not save them, made into a Sofia Coppola film in 1999. Middlesex (2002), the four-hundred-page family epic spanning the burning of Smyrna, Detroit's twentieth century, and the life of Cal Stephanides, an intersex narrator born a girl, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and sold three million copies. The Marriage Plot (2011) followed three Brown undergraduates through the year after graduation. He spent the years between novels in Berlin on a writer's grant, then moved to Princeton, where he holds a chair in creative writing. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2022 and lives in Princeton with his family.