The Virgin Suicides was lyrical and claustrophobic. Middlesex was sprawling, exuberant, and epic. The Marriage Plot was intellectual, ironic, and intimate. Across three decades and three novels, Jeffrey Eugenides has written with the precision of a stylist and the ambition of a historian. His books are rooted in adolescence, gender, family, and form — told through narrators that are anything but typical.
Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, an affluent suburb of Detroit. His first two novels, though wildly different in tone and scope, both return to that geography: The Virgin Suicides is a suburban gothic narrated in the first-person plural by a group of haunted men; Middlesex is a generational saga that follows a Greek-American family from the burning of Smyrna in 1922 to the Detroit riots of 1967, narrated by an intersex protagonist reflecting on the genetic and social legacy that shaped him.
With Middlesex, Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize, gained a massive new audience when Oprah picked the novel for her book club, and spent nearly a decade on the road. “The book was my jailer and we became friendly,” he told Jonathan Safran Foer in BOMB. “I was like Patty Hearst with her Stockholm Syndrome. Little by little the book expanded to fill every inch of my consciousness.”
He writes slowly, publishes infrequently, and obsesses over structure. “The Virgin Suicides was written in a slow, methodical fashion, sentence by sentence,” he told The Paris Review. “I rewrite a lot. That’s why I don’t publish books very often.”
When he does, they tend to stick. The Marriage Plot, released in 2011, revisited his college years at Brown, folding Roland Barthes, mental illness, and romantic longing into a tightly controlled love triangle. It felt closer in size and setting to his first novel, but the emotional complexity was deeper. “This book has the deepest characterization that I’ve attempted so far,” Eugenides told Goodreads. “I spent a lot of time going into the characters’ minds and thoughts and tried to make them as real and vivid as possible.”
Jeffrey Eugenides’ daily writing routine
Eugenides treats writing like a job, not a mood. He starts around ten in the morning and works through the afternoon, often until dinnertime, sometimes beyond. As he told The Paris Review:
I try to write every day. Sometimes it’s not productive, and there’s a lot of downtime. Sometimes I fall asleep in my chair, but I feel that if I’m in the room all day, something’s going to get done. I treat it like a desk job.
In the final year of writing The Marriage Plot, he started pulling double shifts: writing all day, breaking for dinner, then returning to his desk at night. “I didn’t want to put myself through that,” he said. “But I had so much to do and a lot of things were coming together, so I had to work long hours.”
Despite owning a beautiful glass-walled studio in Princeton, he prefers small, unadorned spaces. “Actual composition I don’t want to do in a pleasant space,” he said. “I’m even thinking of moving up into the attic because it’s the most austere and removed place in the house.”
For most of his life, he wrote in bedrooms — small apartments in college, spare rooms in Berlin, and now a plain office upstairs. “Leonardo said that small rooms concentrate the mind,” he told The Paris Review. “I find that I like working in small, cramped rooms with not much in them.”
He composes on a computer, but prints out pages regularly to edit by hand — sometimes jotting new paragraphs on the backs of printed sheets. As the years go on, he prints less frequently, but the habit of annotating and rewriting remains. “There are always handwritten corrections at some point,” he said.
Unlike some authors who crave routine and ritual, Eugenides keeps it simple: a desk, a chair, some coffee or tea. Toward the end of a book, when fatigue sets in, he occasionally allows himself a cigar in the yard — a holdover from his time in Berlin. “Cigars are the perfect literary drug,” he said. “I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind.”
But ultimately, his routine is less about inspiration than discipline. “Sitzfleisch,” he told Goodreads. “The Germans think this is very important for scholarship and for work in general. I agree that this is what you need for writing novels. It’s a long and slow haul, and there’s nothing about the process that is particularly interesting.”
Even when the writing slows or a novel begins to falter, he doesn’t stop. If a project isn’t working, he shelves it for a while and starts something new. Then returns. Then starts again. “Maybe that will stop now at middle age,” he said. “But that’s how it’s been so far.”
Eugenides is always writing, always revising, always tinkering — even if it takes him nine years between books. “I don’t take breaks,” he said. “Except when I’m on book tours.”
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