Jeffrey Eugenides, a well-known and award-winning novelist, graduated from Brown with an A.B. in English in 1983. He went on to write "The Virgin Suicides" in 1993, which was turned into a motion picture in 1999 by director Sofia Coppola. His next novel, "Middlesex," won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, as well as the National BooksCritics Circle Award. Eugenides, who currently resides in Berlin, spoke to The Herald by phone from Chicago.
The Herald: Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?
Jeffrey Eugenides: I certainly knew before I came to Brown. I decided when I was about 14 or 15 years old, and one of the reasons I came to Brown was that I wanted to study with John Hawkes, who was at Brown at the time and was my favorite writer, and I chose Brown in order to study with him. So pretty early on I knew.
Herald: Did your experience at Brown live up to what you wanted it to be?
Eugenides: It did! I came freshman year and went immediately to Professor Hawkes' office and tried to ingratiate myself by quoting first lines of his novels to him. ...
Herald: Did it work?
Eugenides: Well, I gave him a writing sample and I did make it into the introduction to fiction writing class or whatever the course was called. After that I took many, many courses with Jack, as we all called him, and he was a wonderful writer, wonderful teacher, wonderful man, and a lot of people in those classes have gone on to be writers. I was in a class with Rick Moody ('83, author of "The Ice Storm" and "Demonology") and Meg Wolitzer ('81, who wrote "Sleep-walking" and "This Is Your Life"). ... Donald Antrim ('81, "The Verificationist") was not in fiction writing class with me, but he was in English seminars with me, and things like that. I knew a lot of writers at Brown who studied with me and went on to actually not quit, but continue.
Herald: So then you would say that your experience as an English major and as a Brown student prepared you for the career that you later had?
Eugenides: It certainly did. I looked at being a writer as being a profession like any other, in that I needed to gain a certain body of knowledge the way that someone who wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor would. I didn't just go to Brown and take creative writing courses; I took other classes and tried to learn as much as I could about the tradition of English literature, and then on the side I did a lot of creative writing. I don't really think you can do one without the other. So along with my more academic courses at Brown and the opportunity to try out my own fiction, those two things certainly did a lot to get me started.
Herald: Now in your life after college, what would you say are some of the challenges of the life of a fiction writer?
Eugenides: Well, the challenges in some ways change, and in some ways they remain the same. The central challenge, always, is trying to write something that's worth someone else's time in reading it. Basically, the position I'm in every day when I'm trying to write is exactly the same one I was in when I was at Brown or after Brown - just trying to come up with something, come up with a story or find a way to tell the story in a way that's easy to write, and that doesn't feel any different. Professionally, at first when I was younger, the problem was just getting into print and finding out how you do that, what magazines might be interested. I'm no longer in that position - I think about the next book and I know that the next book will probably be published, unless something really goes wrong (laughs). But the basic problem is that you're always playing - in golf they say you have to play the course, and you're really playing the course as a writer, and you're trying to write something that's original and add to what's been done before. It's always kind of difficult: It doesn't matter if your previous work did well or poorly, you're always kind of in the same position with the new work.
Herald: Reviews have described your work as being simultaneously disturbing and intriguing. Is there any specific theme that you're trying to explore in the books that you write, or do you just write about what strikes you and what seems interesting to you at the time?
Eugenides: I never start with the idea of a theme - I don't think many writers do. You start with a story or something that seems like it has dramatic potential. So far in my life I'm fairly unaware of the source of what I find interesting. That reviewer might think that what I'm writing about is disturbing, but I might not find it disturbing. I never sit down to write something to disturb myself. I sit down because something engages my imagination and I think it would be interesting to write a story around an event or a character, so I don't think about themes. Themes take care of themselves pretty much. I stick to the character, I stick to the story, and little by little perhaps, after I keep writing books, there will be a kind of continuity about them or a harmony of purpose that is not apparent to me right now that I will then be able to see. But no, I don't think about those things.
Herald: "The Virgin Suicides" was made into a movie. Does that change the way you feel about the story you wrote at all?
Eugenides: Once you have written a book or spent, as I did, three years writing "The Virgin Suicides," the primacy of that experience supercedes the very transitory experience of watching a film. Film really occupies a very small part of my life and my experience whereas the book was a major experience in my life. And the events in the book - the book in some ways is based on my memories of my childhood, and there's nothing more lasting and important than your childhood, so all of that is far, far more permanent than the movie. The movie is just, for me, a blip on the screen compared to the book.
Herald: How did winning the Pulitzer Prize for "Middlesex" change the way you go about your life and the way you go about your work?
Eugenides: It doesn't change the way you go about your work at all. It does change your professional status. You get many more invitations to do readings or take trips or endorse lines of clothing, things like that. So there's a lot of things that happen around it. The best thing that it did was bring a lot more readers to "Middlesex" than had read the book before. That's the change that you want from a prize. And I was very happy to get it. But it doesn't change the way that you write at all. The writing process is always going to be the same, no matter what's going on outside.
Herald: Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for any current Brown students who want to become published writers?
Eugenides: Well, I always think that people should read as much as they can, and write as much as they can. I was a voracious reader at Brown, and took the most difficult courses in literature that I could, and I also wrote as much as I could. I took the practice of trying to be able to write every day, and those two things are really the bedrock of my being a writer. I don't think people should think too much about the career of the writer, or the idea of being successful. You really just have to worry about the work itself, and hopefully the rest will follow. ... I proceeded about being a writer in a very serious way but never in a careerist way at all. I never worried about when I was going to get published or what age I had to get published by or anything like that, but I knew I wanted to write books that hopefully would be like the books that I admired and made me want to be a writer. In a way, it was a kind of imitation of my idols, and I wanted to do what they had done. I didn't really think about the financial or professional side of writing that much.
