Middlesex Study Guide

Jeffrey Eugenides was, like Cal in Middlesex, born into a Greek- American family and grew up in Gross Pointe, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan (although unlike Cal, he is only half Greek; his mother is Irish-American). Inheriting a love of literature from his mother, Eugenides studied English at Brown University, graduating in 1982. He then received a master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford. He has lived in San Francisco, New York City, Berlin, and Princeton, New Jersey, where he now teaches creative writing at Princeton University. In 1995, he met and later married the photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi, whom he met at MacDowell Colony, a New Hampshire artists’ retreat. The couple had one child, Georgia, and are now divorced. Eugenides has received a large number of prestigious prizes for his writing, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize (for Middlesex).  

Middlesex chronicles a large number of historical events, some of which take center stage while others are mentioned in a more passing or subtle manner. Some of the most important events that take place in the first part of the novel include World War I, the Greo-Turkish War, and the Turkish destruction of Smyrna. As a result of this conflict, Cal’s grandparents Lefty and Desdemona—like so many others during this era—leave Europe in order to seek refuge and prosperity in the U.S. Later on, the novel depicts the boom of the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan, alongside racial tensions between white residents and black residents, many of whom had originally immigrated to the city during the Great Migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North. In one of the most unexpected historical references in the novel, Cal’s grandmother Desdemona gets a job working for the Nation of Islam, and it is revealed that the (real) founder of the movement, Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, was actually Cal’s (fictional) maternal grandfather, Jimmy Zizmo. (This is, of course, not actually true, and is an example of the novel blending fiction with historical reality.) Subsequent historical events chronicled in the novel including the Detroit Race Riot of 1967 and the collapse of the auto industry in the city, leading to economic depression. In Cal’s later life, he lives in Berlin, and references the reunification of the city following the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened only a few years before he takes up residence in the city.     

Middlesex is part of a wave of 21st-century writing that explores the immigrant experience to the U.S. in a way that highlights the nuances of this experience, particularly in regard to ambivalent feelings many immigrants feel about their new home. Other books in this category include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, which also features an immigrant family moving to Detroit (from Zimbabwe, in this instance). Like Middlesex, Many books from the emergent trans literary canon fall into the Bildungsroman genre, including Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. In this novel, the main character—like Cal—escapes from a sleepy midwestern existence and discovers themselves in San Francisco. Also similar to Middlesex is Casey Plett’s Little Fish, which explores the trans experience alongside questions of ancestry, inheritance, and fate.