American - Novelist | April 13, 1960 -
You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Moving ForwardMovingForwardYouGo
I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
LifeGoodChildhoodMemoryRemember
Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
MarriageNew YorkPeopleThinkFate
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
LifeAlonePathFindingYouTalk
The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.
BookStorytellingFairDifferent
He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.
PeopleLongGoDeadGrandparentsUp
At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
FamilyTimePastWritingStoryMore
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
MyselfVoiceRulesNarrativeSeen
It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants.
BookGoReactionFirstSecondGuess
I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
WorkMeStartLiteratureYouWay
Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
CharacterMemoriesWritingStartYou
That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.
MyselfChoosePersonWillWayWrite
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