Middlesex

Middlesex is a novel by the American writer Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sold more than four million copies.

The book is a family chronicle told by its narrator, Cal, who traces his own genetics through three generations of a Greek family. It begins with his grandparents, a brother and sister who left their village as the Greek population of Asia Minor was being driven out, arrived in the United States, and married each other on the passage over. From there the novel follows the family to Detroit, through the Ford factories, the race riots and the suburbs, and into the life of the narrator's parents and of Cal himself, who grows up in the 1960s and 1970s as a girl called Calliope and discovers, in adolescence, that this is not what he is.

Eugenides said he wrote the book after reading a nineteenth-century memoir of an intersex person and being dissatisfied with how the subject had been described. The novel deals with nature and nurture, with the pursuit of the American Dream, and with the moment a person decides who gets to say what they are, and it is told in a voice that keeps circling back through family history to explain a single decision.