Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides fantasized about becoming a doctor — for three days.
The man behind "The Virgin Suicides," Pulitzer Prize-winning "Middlesex" and "The Marriage Plot" had known in his bones that he would become a writer when he was just 15 years old. But when he was at Stanford for graduate school, he met a doctor whose work intrigued the budding novelist. For one brief moment, he could envision a life in medicine.
"I was thinking about [Anton] Chekhov and all those great literary doctors," Eugenides said earlier this month to Weill Cornell Medical College students as the latest speaker in its Readers and Writers series. "For about three days I was absolutely sure that was the course my life would take. And then I went home and told my mother. And she started to laugh. I thought that was a bad sign. She was always supportive of me, except she knew I would make a very bad doctor. So I kept writing and here I am."
Eugenides may not have pursued medicine, but the science bug never left him. In otherwise disparate works of art, each of his novels uses the scientific enterprise, biology and the mind to ruminate on the human condition. Though his repeated meditations on psychology are, he said in an interview, unintentional, "I do know that it's not as interesting to write about people who are calm and happy as it is with people who are erratic and tempestuous."
On April 10, more than 50 Weill Cornell students, faculty and staff came to the Weill Auditorium to hear the famed novelist — who began his visit with a reading from his short story "Find the Bad Guy" — and quiz Eugenides on his writing process. They asked him if there are nuggets of autobiography in his novels (the bipolar scientist in "The Marriage Plot" grew out of stories his ex-girlfriend told him about a former flame, he said in an interview) and what it was like to watch one of his books be reimagined as a film.
Jeffrey Eugenides
"The writer is probably the last person who should judge a film of his or her book because when you watch a film of your book, you are estranged twice," Eugenides said, referring to "The Virgin Suicides," which chronicles the lives of five sisters who each commit suicide. The novel, his first, was translated to the big screen by director Sofia Coppola.
"First is that it doesn't seem exactly like your book, and it also doesn't seem like the memories the book is based on," he said. "You always have that kind of estrangement and it takes a while to see the movie as what it is: a separate art form inspired by the book but not equivalent to the book in any way. It's like if a book had a dream; that's what the film would be."
Eugenides didn't have to do much research for "The Virgin Suicides," which was inspired by his memories of growing up in Detroit — "a city that was dying, that was committing a kind of suicide," he said. But the opposite was true of "Middlesex," which follows an autosomal recessive gene across three generations of a Greek family until it winds up in the novel's protagonist, Cal, in its active form. Born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome, a genetic condition that affects male sexual development before birth and during puberty, Cal begins life looking female, but becomes virile at puberty.
"I didn't have the story until I knew that it was a family story and an intersex story," Eugenides said. "It felt richer and more expansive when I saw this person in the context of his family and many generations.
"I wasn't really interested in making it just a story about gender switching. I wanted the story to be about the creation of an identity and how all of our identities are not really essential or pure, especially in this country," he said.
The Readers and Writers series, established by Dr. Anna Fels, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell, seeks to broaden medical students' access to the humanities. Now in its third year, the series has brought critically acclaimed authors Jonathan Franzen, Jamaica Kincaid, E. L. Doctorow, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Woody Allen, Oliver Sacks, Andrew Solomon and now Eugenides to the medical college.
"We know that the time constraints of medical education limit the students' access to the arts and specifically to contemporary writing," Dr. Fels said. "We're hoping to make the humanities more available to the students by bringing the authors to them."