Esquire
‘Ever so rarely, I read a novel that deserves the accolade of ’tour de force’. Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book Middlesex is such a novel, managing to be both immense in its human scope and moving and funny in its human detail. Life-changing is a rather alarming way to describe a book, but I suspect this one is just that’
Joanna Trollope’s Book of the Year, Daily Mail
‘Unprecedented, astounding … The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak’
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
‘Handled with storytelling genius … a good, old-fashioned family saga, owing its epic qualities to a fine cast of memorable individuals’
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‘Not for nothing has Eugenides been acclaimed as some new Homer: he offers similar scope, heroics and Greeks enduring watery misadventures … the prose is always generous, frequently amusing and never dull’
Financial Times
‘A vast great sprawling story, flickering through three generations, brilliantly engaging, stunningly written’
Anna Pavord’s Book of the Year, Evening Standard
‘Dazzling …a big, fat, funny American book without which no chattering-class home is complete’
GQ
FOR MM, WHO COMES FROM A
DIFFERENT GENE POOL ENTIRELY
CONTENTS
Copyright
Praise for Middlesex
Dedication
Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
Looking Myself Up in Webster’s
Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.
My