Looking forward to this evening. Thought you might like to look at these snippets from the author beforehand.
Right, got to get back and finish the damn thing... see you at 8.
- Where did the Hermaphrodite idea come from?
Nabokov said that great novels are great fairy tales. And what better fairy tale could there be than a story of metamorphosis, of changing from one thing into another? The original impetus for the book came from a literary disappointment. Years ago, I came across Michel Foucault's "Herculine Barbin: The Memoir of a 19th Century French Hermaphrodite." The story, on face value, seemed to me irresistible. It had everything: an overheated convent atmosphere, forbidden love, miraculous physical change. The problem was that Herculine Barbin couldn't write. Her memoir was a melodrama studded with exclamation points and evasions of the physical facts. Middlesex began as a simple spasm of self-aggrandisement on my part. I thought to myself: I could do it better. So I gave it a whirl. For the next nine years.
The character of the hermaphrodite has a long history in literature, from Ovid right down through Virginia Woolf. I see it as a classical subject. I chose to write about gender identity for the reasons people have always written about it. Plato spoke of the original human being as hermaphroditic. These two halves were sundered and therefore now we have to make reservations for dinner on Valentine's Day. I've always been fascinated by case histories of hermaphrodites and, from what I can tell, a lot of other people are too.
What drew me to the hermaphrodite as a subject was the chance to write about something fantastic that was, in fact, verifiable. Or as Cal's puts in the book, "my mythical life in the actual world." In literature, hermaphrodites have always been creatures of fancy. Mine was going to be an real person. I wanted to get the medical facts right. It was fine if the novel was a fairy tale. But it also had to be true.
- In the Virgin Suicides the narrator was a whole group of men, in ?Middlesex" someone with both male and female sensibilities. Do you like to make things hard for yourself?
I seem to. I wish I could get over it. But the voice of the novel, Cal's voice, was the first great problem I had writing the book. It took me literally years to arrive at it. It wasn't only its androgynous qualities I had to worry about. The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate epic events in the third person as well as a deeply personal, psychosexual drama in the first person. Compared to Cal's voice, the collective narrator of "The Virgin Suicides" came easy, in one go, really. With Cal's voice I had to fuss around for a very long time before it came together.
- The adult Cal is a third generation American Greek immigrant living in Berlin, who bears a striking resemblance to yourself. Is there much of you in him and what deductions can the reader make from this?
Because I was writing such an incredible story, I had to ground it in reality in order to make it credible for myself and, hopefully, the reader as well. That's why I drew on a lot of surface details from my own, supposedly real, life. Berlin, where I've been living the past three years, came into the book only at the very end, when I rewrote the frame story. As for the physical resemblance, that's really not true. Cal is immune to the effects of dihydrotestosterone. He will never lose his hair.
Writers are forever warning readers not to confuse them with their characters. But readers go on doing so. I think it's a lost cause to plead this case. Cal's life is so far from my own experience, at least on a medical level, that I made him resemble me to bridge the gap.
- In the same vein, to what degree does the family history of Cal correspond to your own?
The same rule applies here: the family in the book resembles my own only on a superficial level. My grandparents did indeed immigrate to the United States from Asia Minor, but, at the risk of disappointing you, I must insist that they were not brother and sister. The locales in the book come from real life, the houses in Detroit and Grosse Pointe. I actually grew up on Middlesex Blvd. There it was all those years, emblazoned on our street sign: my title. My grandfather did run a bar & grill but my father never went into the restaurant business. He was a mortgage banker. My mother isn't even Greek.
- The Greek immigrant story in America is not one that is widely known. Did you feel that the story needed to be told?
As hermphroditism came into it, classicism came into it. As classicism came into it, Hellenism came into it. As Hellenism came into it, my family came into it. I used my Greek roots because they were handy, not out of any ethnic boosterism. That said, being Greek plays a big role in the novel. I learned a lot about my heritage by writing the book. On superstitious days, I did feel that I was communing with the dead in the only way I know how: imaginatively, in words. It was a means of finally knowing my grandparents, who died when I was still young. It was a way of returning to Europe and the Old World.
- What are the major literary influences on your writing?
I studied Latin for seven years in high school and college. The single greatest influence on me at a formative age was reading the Aeneid, line by line. That's where I learned to read. And that's where I first began to have some idea of the complexity and patterning of a literary work. Looking at my work thus far, I sometimes think to myself that it was that epic, the Aeneid, that influenced me more than any other book. It had a burning city in it, too, remember. There were supernatural elements and grand addresses to the reader. Closer to our own time, I've been influenced mainly by the great Russians (Tolstoy and Nabokov), and the great American Jews (Bellow and Roth.)