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 is coming from an origin in me

that I 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 had seen him

she had not even known him then and what she had 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 place after watching XXX

and started fooling around

when Madeleine found that instead of being turn off by physical struff the way she often was with boys

instead of trying to 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 to play scales

you have to be able to make the rights 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

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 on the smallest level possible, just the sentence

so, if you have enough sentences together, maybe this will be a story

and once you have written some stories, you think, maybe I can write a novel

I actually find that it is easier to write a novel than to write short stories

and I have had (and still have) a difficult time writing short stories

my mind is naturally suited for a long form