Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novels Middlesex, The Marriage Plot and The Virgin Suicides. He recently published his first collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint. He lives in Princeton, N.J.
Why did you write your new book?
That depends on the story. Complainers, the first story in the collection, was written over an expanse of two years, not only because I had a hard time figuring out the structure and point of view but because I was trying, by writing it, to keep my mother intact in my mind. In her last years, my mother suffered from dementia. As she declined, rather than write about her from the point of view of an adult child, I decided to write about an aspect of my mother's life that I knew little about, which was her 40-year friendship with a woman 20 years her junior. I wanted to stave off my mother's decline by giving her a life of reading and friendship that she engaged in outside our home. I finished the story, predictably, only a few months before my mother died. Other stories in the book are responses to family events and tragedies, particularly to my father's business turn-arounds late in life, and the loss of his self-made fortune. Some stories arose from observing the pleasures and travails of contemporary marriage. Great Experiment is a response to reading de Tocqueville and wondering what the great Frenchman would think of America today. It's also about a poet taking up a life of crime.
Where did you write this book?
Everywhere I've lived in the past 30 years: San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Chicago and Princeton.
What are you like to be around when you're writing?
Invisible.
What scares you as a writer?
Writing itself scares me. Every day you sit down at your desk and wonder if you have the right to keep doing this. Every day, you go, in the words of John Barth, "from overweening self-confidence to utter despair." Weirdly, if I abandon this masochistic habit for as long as half a day, I long to be back on the rack. I should have gone into tax law.
Which book got you through the darkest period of your life?
Your own books are what get you through. As it so happens, the past four years have been the darkest period of my life, so this book, aptly named Fresh Complaint, was where I brought my sorrows and fears in the hope of transfiguring them into something useful for a reader.
Which books have you reread most in your life?
There's no single book, but I am almost always rereading Tolstoy, Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow, Roth and Munro. And lately I've been reading and rereading Javier Marias.
What's your favourite bookstore in the world?
One terrible result of being a writer, at least for me, is that it has ruined bookstores for me. I can't roam them like I used to, full of wonder. They're part of my profession now, part of the business end of things and I try to keep the business end of things out of my mind as much as possible. I prefer libraries now, old ones. My favourite recently is the John Hay Library at my alma mater [Brown University], in Providence, R.I. It's been recently restored and is the kind of place you could sit and read for hours, if not for the rest of your life.
What's more important: The beginning of a book or the end?
You don't have to choose. You had better have a good beginning and a good ending, although endings may linger in a reader's mind longer. In my own case, I usually remember the quality of the writer's voice and the entire reading experience, not just the beginning or the end.
How do you know when you're truly finished?
When everything I do makes the book worse.
How does it feel to have this book out in the world?
Happy that it's out there but sad that it's the first book my mother will never read. It's partially dedicated in her memory.