Q and A with Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the many pleasures of this job is getting to work with authors whose writing I have admired for years.

I have loved Middlesex since first reading it on Bondi beach, four years ago. Despite the insistent beauty of my surroundings and the offensively bronzed and healthy-looking Aussies frolicking in the surf around me, I found myself completely transported by Calliope’s story and barely put the book down in the day it took me to tear obsessively through it. I have been raving about it to friends and total strangers ever since.

I therefore leapt at the chance to work with Pulitzer-winner Jeffrey Eugenides on My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, a quixotically named collection of classic love stories edited by the great man himself, which features work from some of the greatest writers of the last century – from Chekhov to Faulkner, Eileen Chang to Alice Munro.

The quality of writing is stunning and the project has been a joy to work on: even the disappointment of not being able to clear permission to include Joyce’s elegiac ‘The Dead’ in the UK edition was offset by the thrill of conversations with his grandson, which meandered impressively from Schiller through to Franz Fanon and (rather implausibly) ice hockey.

The calibre of the contributors aside, however, in any anthology the selection is as significant to the shape of the finished book as the stories themselves. In conversation with book critic Andrea Hoag (which follows below) and in his introduction to the book (which we’ll be posting in time for Valentine’s Day), Jeffrey explains how he chose which stories to include, which he particularly loves, and which ones got away…

Andrea Hoag: What was the process of elimination like? Can you discuss which stories you decided to leave out?

Jeffrey Eugenides: The story I miss most is “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx. I picked it, but we weren’t able to the secure the rights to reprint it, even though the anthology supports a charitable cause. The UK edition lacks James Joyce’s “The Dead” for similar reasons. (Happily, “The Dead” is in public domain in the U.S.) The first thing you confront when you compile an anthology like this, however, is the painful obligation to exclude wonderful work. Lots and lots of it. The only way I could sleep at night was to remind myself it was all for a good cause. How did I choose? The way people choose their mates: for intelligence, beauty, humor, and a sense that they’ll be around for the long haul.

AH: You say in your introduction that “sober middle-age had made me less susceptible to [Nabokov’s] lush lyricism.” In a way, editing this collection brought you back into the proverbial fold where he was concerned. Why do you feel that he is “much better…than everybody else…”?

JG: In all honesty, I was never out of the fold. Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers. He’s able to juggle ten balls where most people can juggle three or four. “Spring in Fialta” works on so many levels: as an affecting tale of thwarted love; a reinactment of the literary process by which we fall victim to, and memorialize, our loves; and a philosophical rumination on time and fate. The sentences are perfect, the emotion deep, the intellectual scintillation nearly blinding. Pure bliss, in other words.

AH: I’ve been building up an imaginary shrine in my home dedicated to the cult of Lorrie Moore and I almost wept when I read the line from “How to Be An Other Woman” that goes… “he laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh….” I truly believe that. Don’t you think most people–smart, thinking people–would do just about anything for someone with a nice laugh?

JG: I’m glad you like the Lorrie Moore Story. Lorrie herself doesn’t. She wrote it when she was twenty-four, and neither my own appreciation of the story, nor my assurances that many people insisted I include it, were enough to dissuade her from detesting her own “immature” work. This is a sign of a great writer, by the way. But “How to be An Other Woman” remains a great story. In addition, since a lot of the stories in the anthology share a traditional narrative structure, the Moore story comes as a nice shift in tone and strategy. I was conscious of that, too, in putting the book together, the DJ aspect of the whole thing, moving from fast numbers to slow dances and back again.

AH: Can you talk a little bit about the charity the proceeds for this book will go to?

JG: 826CHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Their services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

826CHI provides after-school tutoring, class field trips to our location, writing workshops, and in-schools programs–all free of charge–for students, classes, and schools in Chicago. All of the programs are challenging and enjoyable, and ultimately strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice. Driving the mission home are more than 500 volunteers–the professional writers, teachers and artists, to name a few, who staff each and every program enables 826 CHI to serve 5,000 students annually with a small, efficient staff of four and an operating budget of about $282,550.