Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulferblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Jeffrey Eugenides, whose second novel, Middle Sex, has just been published by

Farras Strauss and Cheru.

He's the author as well of the Virgin Suicides. Now, this book,

you know, self-consciously wants to be an epic novel, and so it's narrated by a person whose name

at birth is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

And it takes in several generations and kind of a tour of America as well as the burning,

the incineration of, is it Smyrna?

Smyrna.

Yes.

I wondered in it, because it takes us so long to actually meet its narrator, what was the impulse that led you to want to begin the novel several generations back?

Actually, the first impulse in writing the book or the first idea was to write a fictional memoir of a hermaphrodite.

I envisioned the book being 250, 300 pages, something like that.

But because hermaphrodites in literature had always been mythical creatures like Tyresius

or Orlando, I thought what I would like to do was write about a real hermaphrodite and be as accurate about the medical details as I could be.

So I started going to the medical library and reading a lot about sexology and genetics,

and I found this one hermaphroditic condition, 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome.

...