#jeffrey eugenides

[texaschainsawmascara]

Carrie (1976) / The Virgin Suicides (1999)

[flowerytale]

Jeffrey Eugenides, from Middlesex

[thoughtkick]

You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[resqectable]

You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Prompt: The First Lines

Choose one of the first lines of these literary works and either create a new poem/story, or continue rewriting the story...

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they [electrocuted the Rosenbergs], and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless [Detroit day of January 1960]; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near [Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.] —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, [Colonel Aureliano Buendía] was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude (1967)

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" —E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (1952)

If this writing prompt inspires you in any way, please tag me, or send me a link. I would love to read your work!

More: The Last Lines (pt. 1) ⚜ (pt. 2) More: Writing Prompts

[rahabq]

[perfectquote]

You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[perfectfeelings]

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

[stay-close]

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

[derangedrhythms]

Ecstasy. From the Greek Ekstasis. Meaning not what you think. Meaning not euphoria or sexual climax or even happiness. Meaning, literally: a state of displacement, of being driven out of one’s senses.

Jeffrey Eugenides, from 'Middlesex'

[quotefeeling]

You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[flowerytale]

Jeffrey Eugenides, from The Marriage Plot

[vskitty]

[thoughtkick]

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Hua Cheng- Heaven Official's Blessing / Tian Guan Ci Fu by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu 

Cal Stephanides- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Simon Torquill- October Daye Series by Seanan McGuire

Alex Fierro-Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series by Rick Riordan

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

goodreads

Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Mod opinion: I've read this book for a college course on trans stories and I didn't really like it (the other book we read in its entirety for the course was stone butch blues though, so it had tough competition, but I really did not enjoy middlesex because it treats the intersex character horribly). Also note that this book is heavily criticised by intersex activist for its interphobia and fetishization of intersex bodies.