Middlesex. Jeffrey Eugenides

Esquire

      ‘Ever so rarely, I read a novel that deserves the accolade of ’tour de force’. Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book Middlesex is such a novel, managing to be both immense in its human scope and moving and funny in its human detail. Life-changing is a rather alarming way to describe a book, but I suspect this one is just that’

      Joanna Trollope’s Book of the Year, Daily Mail

      ‘Unprecedented, astounding … The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak’

       San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

      ‘Handled with storytelling genius … a good, old-fashioned family saga, owing its epic qualities to a fine cast of memorable individuals’

       Image

      ‘Not for nothing has Eugenides been acclaimed as some new Homer: he offers similar scope, heroics and Greeks enduring watery misadventures … the prose is always generous, frequently amusing and never dull’

       Financial Times

      ‘A vast great sprawling story, flickering through three generations, brilliantly engaging, stunningly written’

      Anna Pavord’s Book of the Year, Evening Standard

      ‘Dazzling …a big, fat, funny American book without which no chattering-class home is complete’

       GQ

       Dedication

      FOR MM, WHO COMES FROM A

      DIFFERENT GENE POOL ENTIRELY

       CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Praise for Middlesex

      Dedication

Book One

The Silver Spoon

Matchmaking

An Immodest Proposal

The Silk Road

Book Two

Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot

Minotaurs

       Marriage on Ice

       Tricknology

       Clarinet Serenade

       News of the World

       Ex Ovo Omnia

       Book Three

       Home Movies

       Opa!

       Middlesex

       The Mediterranean Diet

       The Wolverette

       Waxing Lyrical

       The Obscure Object

       Tiresias in Love

       Flesh and Blood

       The Gun on the Wall

       Book Four

       The Oracular Vulva

       Looking Myself Up in Webster’s

       Go West, Young Man

       Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco

       Hermaphroditus

       Air-Ride

       The Last Stop

       A Note on the Author

       Also by Jeffrey Eugenides

       About the Publisher

       Book One

       The Silver Spoon

      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. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.

      My