Jeffrey Eugenides: The exitement of writing

Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, who finds it much harder to write short stories than long novels. Also he reflects upon the different expectations towards intellectuals in Europe and the United States.

Jeffrey Eugenides (born 1960) has become an internationally acclaimed writer through his novels The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. For Middlesex, he received the Pulitzer Price for fiction in 2003. In the interview Eugenides states, that even though he is attracted to writing short stories, he finds this literary form more challenging than writing long novels. In addition Eugenides admits, that even though the success of his books has made it much easier for him to live as a writer, he strives to keep himself in conditions, that remind him of his early years as an author. Thus in the late 1990s he moved to Berlin, where he could live and work incognito and concentrate on writing his novel Middelsex. Spending five years in the German capital, Eugenides recognized a huge difference concerning the role of the intellectual in Europe versus the US, where writers hardly are asked to comment on current affairs as for example the American led war in Iraq. The excerpts read by Jeffrey Eugenides are from his novel The Marriage Plot published in 2011.

Jeffrey Eugenides was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner.

Camera: Troels Kahl and Martin Kogi

Produced by: Martin Kogi and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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Supported by Nordea-fonden.

I just write the stories

but it's coming from an origin in me

that I either don't understand
or prefer to keep dark.

"It was debatable whether or not

Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard
the first moment she'd seen him.

She hadn't even known him then

and so what she'd felt
was only sexual attraction, not love.

Even after they had gone out for coffee,

she couldn't say that what she was feeling was

anything more than infatuation. But ever since the night

when they went back to Leonard's place

after watching Amarcord and started fooling around,

when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off

by physical stuff the way she often was with boys,

instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it,

she'd spent the entire night worrying

that she was turning Leonard off."

I think to be a writer you first have to know

how to write a sentence

the way a musician has to learn how to play scales.

You have to just be able to make the right sounds

before you can play an entire song.

Plenty of people have ideas for long books

but they don't know how to write them

because they don't actually know how to write a sentence

so I think you have to begin with the language.

Everyone starts with short stories.

You have to learn how to write so you have to learn

how to write on the smallest level possible, really,

just the sentence.

So, if you have enough sentences together,

maybe that will be a story.

And once you've written some stories,

you think, "Maybe I can write a novel."

I actually find that it's easier

to write a novel than short stories.

I have had a very difficult time,

I still have a difficult time writing short stories.

My mind is naturally suited for a long form

so even though I was learning to write

and learning the different things I needed

to write a novel with the stories,

They're kind of like training wheels on a bicycle for me.

You have to learn, with short stories, to suggest

the greater whole without describing it particularly.

And that takes a certain amount of wisdom and restraint

that I think only comes after many years of writing.

So I keep going back to short stories to see

if I'm able to do it.

And it means leaving out a lot of things

that I actually enjoy putting in.

And sometimes, in a novel, putting those things in

actually does bear fruit.

So I really consider myself a novelist

and not a short story writer.

"Worrying that her body wasn't good enough

or that her breath was bad

from the Caesar salad she'd unwisely

ordered at dinner. Worrying too about

having suggested they order martinis

because of the way Leonard had sarcastically

said, "Sure. Martinis. We can pretend

we're Salinger characters."

In a book like Middlesex, at first, I thought

it would be a fairly short book.

A fictional autobiography of an intersex person

so someone born female who turns male.

But as I started to research the material

and think about it more, I discovered that

certain genetic conditions caused this state

the narrator would be in. And then when I started

thinking about genetics, I started thinking about

a whole family and a gene that goes on through

different generations of a family. And that brought

history in and it finally brought in Asia Minor

and lots of other things. So from one little idea,

many, many other ideas came or attached itself

to the original concept.

And that's how my mind works. It always works

through metaphorical connections between

various things that at first seemed dissimilar

that I find an actual resemblance in.

And then suddenly, I have a very large narrative,

a large story to tell.

I became interested in the idea

of The Marriage Plot from reading novels

that have a real marriage plot.

My book does not. My book is not a Victorian novel.

It's a contemporary novel. But the great story,

the great plot of the... certainly, the English novel

but the novel in general is the marriage plot.

A novel about a young woman in search of a husband,

And she has a number of different suitors to choose from.

It begins with Jane Austen, and those books are simpler.

Really, they just deal with finding a husband, and

when a heroine finds a husband, the book is over.

But as the 19th century went along, novels began

to follow these women into their marriages.

You have much darker, more tragic novels like

Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary where you see

what happens in a marriage and adultery, of course,

rears its head and becomes central to the novel.

So all of those books are some of the greatest novels

that have ever been written. You can't help

but want to write one if you're a novelist.

The problem is now that they're impossible to write

because social conditions have changed so much

that those plots no longer function. So I started

thinking about all of this, and I thought, well, how can you write

a marriage plot that's true for today?

What I realized was that you couldn't but that

those books, those forebearers really still function

in our minds and influence our behavior.

We still have a lot of romantic dreams

about marriage. People still get married

and raise kids, and a lot of those novels are what

gives us these ideas of who to become

and that we can find our true love.

"After having had, as a consequence of all this

anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure,

despite the perfectly respectable session

they put together, and after Leonard,

like every guy, had immediately fallen asleep,

leaving her to lie awake stroking his head,

and vaguely hoping she didn't get a urinary tract infection,

Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she just

spent the whole night worrying wasn't, in fact,

a surefire sign that she was falling in love."

It was always hard, so I can't say it's become any harder.

The time has become easier. When I was writing

The Virgin Suicides, I had a full-time job,

so that was difficult. I had to write just at night

and on the weekends, so I have a lot more time now.

It feels about the same in difficulty.

No easier, no harder.

I'd like it to become easier, you know,

I think I'm old enough now.

I should get one book that's easy.

And I'm always hoping the next one will be that one,

you know, you hear writers and they say, "That, well,

I wrote that in six months, that just was incredible,

I don't know how that happened, I just wrote that one."

And I'm always waiting for that to happen to me.

But it hasn't happened so far.

I do like to return, or try to keep myself

in the original conditions I had when I began writing.

That is, not being a professional, not thinking that I'm

writing a novel anyone's going to read,

not realizing I'm being paid for it as part of any kind of

commercial industry. Just a young guy, alone in his room,

who wants to write something

because of the excitement of it.

Those are the conditions that I try to

pretend exist around me.

And moving to Berlin, from New York,

helped me to pretend that that was the case,

because I didn't know anyone in the city,

I was far away from everyone, and I felt once again

like a writer starting out, so that kind of anonymity and

innocence and young excitement, which I think you

still want to have, even if you're old and middle-aged,

you still want to try to feel that way.

"And certainly after they'd spent the next three days

at Leonard's place, having sex and eating pizza,

after she'd relaxed enough to be able to come

at least once in a while, and finally to stop

worrying so much about having an orgasm,

because her hunger for Leonard was in some way

satisfied by his satisfaction."

I don't think it's special to be an artist,

or to be a writer. I don't think there's a separate

cultural way to see the world.

Obviously, we're trying to be close observers

of what's going on in the world.

But any idea of any valorization of