Jeffrey Eugenides

I have a love/hate relationship with blogging. I suppose when I started blogging I imagined I'd be writing for some assortment of strangers, but instead I'm writing for friends I never hear from. I suppose it makes me uncomfortable to know that people are reading about my life without replying or without me hearing about their lives. Facebook has made voyeuristic friendships the norm, but frankly it creeps me out. Strangers hearing about my day? Sure, bring it on. However, friends that know every anecdote I've had in two years without a phone call, e-mail exchange or other reciprocal form of contact? That's just plain weird.

In the meantime, here's what's new. I have managed to get mono not once but twice this year, at my ripe old age. Miracles do happen.

I did my first reading. It was nerve-wracking and I thought I was going to pass out/throw up, but apparently no one in the audience noticed. Yay.

My first novel is currently being read by three agents now. One is a super power-house literary fiction agent. He has clients who publish fiction in the New Yorker and he also has some nifty glasses too. .

I started my second novel. I'm about 15-20 pages in at the moment. Hoping it works out. It's an entirely different voice from my first novel. More restrained, male. My attempt at being a Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen, writing the quintessential white male upper middle class Americana book, basically.

I saw Jeffrey Eugenides read from "The Marriage Plot" last Thursday and he said several amazing things. One is that he writes every day but throws away most of what he writes. That's why there are ten years between each book. He also said each new book arises from the previous book, out of a lingering sense of failure. Apparently after winning the Pulitzer Prize for "Middlesex" nearly ten years ago he still found shortcomings in his writing. He said that his third novel is his attempt to get to the heart of his characters - whereas Middlesex relied more on complicated plotting. I noticed that the passages he read on Thursday were more pared down in language, and I appreciated that. It was interesting to hear him connect the dots between pared down language and depth of character, but I suppose that makes sense.

My first novel has simple language, short sentences and a lot of character depth. And my sense of lingering failure is the opposite of his. I started my second book hoping to be more opaque and more controlled, but I can see exactly how one book flows into the next.