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 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 [Hammercord?]

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 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

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 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 is easier to write a novel than short stories.

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 training wheels on a bicycle for me.

You have to learn, with short stories, to suggest

the greater whole without describing it particularly.

That takes a certain amount of wisdom and strength

that only comes after many years of writing.

So I keep going back to short stories to see

if I'm able to do it.

It means leaving out a lot of things

that I actually enjoy putting in.

Sometimes, in a novel, putting those things in

actually does bear fruit.

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."

The [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 it Asia Minor

and lots of other things. From one little idea,

many, many other ideas came or attached itself

to the original concept.

That's how my mind worked. 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 very large story to tell.