Dwight Gardner, in a recent New York Times piece, asked Jeffrey Eugenides what he thought about Cormac McCarthy’s recent “Oprah” appearance, in particular what he thought when Oprah asked McCarthy why he chose not to write about women:

“When Oprah asked him why he didn’t write about women, McCarthy said, ‘Women are tough,’ ” Eugenides replied by e-mail. “He called them ‘mysterious.’ I thought to myself: ‘All I do is write about women.’ It occurred to me that I am a very different kind of writer. I don’t think women are mysterious, or at least I don’t want them to be. That was the whole ‘Star Trek’ idea behind my ‘hermaphroditic’ narrator in the first place. To go where no man has gone before.”

In a Powells.com interview with Dave Weich, Eugenides also says,

“With Middlesex, after a certain amount of trial and error, I came up with a narrative point-of-view that could do anything. And I did want to use a hermaphrodite as the narrator. It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination, since you should be able to go into the heads of men and women if you want to write books. What better vehicle for that than a hermaphrodite narrator? It’s sort of like the dream novelist himself, or herself, or itself — already we’re into the pronoun problem.” 

Do you think Eugenides has a firm grasp on writing from a female point of view? Is Cal a believable character?

During the month of August, we’ll be reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Recently selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, this Puliltzer Prize winner and New York Times paperback bestseller about 14-year-old Calliope Stephanides and her discovery that she is a hermaphrodite is described on Amazon.com as ”a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.”

If you prefer your book discussions in person, please feel free to join us on Wednesday, Aug. 22 at 10:00 a.m. at the Main Library. Otherwise, we’ll be reading and talking about Middlesex here on the blog all August long.

Copies of the book are available at the Main Library’s circulation desk.

More about the book:

First chapter

New York Times review

Salon.com review