BOMB’s Summer Issue is on newsstands June 15! Check out a preview and order or subscribe now.

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BOMB’s Spring Issue is on newsstands now! Check out a preview and order or subscribe now to get get a copy in the mail.

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BOMB’s Winter Issue is on newsstands December 15. Check out a preview and order or subscribe now to get your copy of #122 in the mail.

BOMB’s Winter Issue, featuring Rude Mechanicals, David Lang, Cristian Mungiu, Fanny Howe, Mark Z. Danielewski, Oscar Murillo, Alix Pearlstein, Tony Feher and much more, will be on newsstands December 15. Get a preview of it here, or better yet, Subscribe now to get your copy of #122 in the mail.

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BOMB’s Fall Issue is on newsstands now! Check out a preview and order or subscribe now to get your copy of #121 in the mail.

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BOMB’s Summer Issue is on newsstands June 20! Check out a preview and subscribe now to get your copy of #120 in the mail.

BOMB’s Summer Issue, featuring John Newman, B. Wurtz, Ralph Lemon, Tom Murphy, Ariel Pink, Cass McCombs, Brian Evenson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Danny Lyon, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and much more, will be on newsstands June 20. Get a preview of it here, or better yet, Subscribe now to get your copy of #120 in the mail.

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BOMB’s Spring Issue is on newsstands March 20. Check out a preview and subscribe now to get your copy of #119 in the mail.

BOMB’s Spring Issue, featuring Charles Long, Dean Moss, Nicolás Pereda and Gerardo Naranjo, Mohsen Namjoo by Shirin Neshat, Liz Deschenes, Ingo Schulze, K8 Hardy, and Heidi Julavits and much more, will be on newsstands later this week. Get a preview of it here or, better yet, subscribe now to get your copy of #119 in the mail!

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BOMB’s Greatest Hits is a new archeological project that unearths the best of the BOMB archive from the past 30 years.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Safran Foer

 

Jeffrey Eugenides. Photo by Karen Yamauchi.

Some of the best interviews split down the middle of the Q and the A for something less tiered and more along the lines of the talk that happens when the yard work’s all done and the lawn chairs are out. Back in 2002 Jonathan Safran Foer sat down with Jeffrey Eugenides while he was working on Middlesex. Somewhere in the tug and pull between the young Foer, whose career has again leveled up with a screen adaptation of one of his books (this time Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), and his former professor Eugenides, who had similar luck after his first book The Virgin Suicides, they come around to the question old enough to make them both seem young: How do you balance a lit tendency with everything else?

Jonathan Safran Foer It’s been an awfully long time since we last spoke. Four years? And it’s been a long time since the reading world last got new material from you. About seven years? What’s been going on?

Jeffrey Eugenides I’ve been writing a book.

JSF Have you been happy?

JE I’ve been absorbed.

JSF One of my biggest problems as a writer is that I get tired of what I’m working on. Or rather, I feel that a project can’t keep up with how I think about writing and how I think about the world. How were you able to commit yourself to one story for such a long period? And how did the passage of time influence what you were writing?

JE Well, one of the hardest things about writing Middlesex was trying to stay true to the original impulse. I felt young when I began the book but something more like middle-aged by the time I finished it. All sorts of life-altering things happened to me while I was writing it, too. My father died in a plane crash. I became a father myself. William H. Gass says it’s difficult writing a long book because as you go along, you get better, and then you have to go back and try to bring the rest of the book up to the same level. I did a lot of that. I obsessively went back and reworked the early parts of the book. Even so, I made sure the later chapters had the same voice and spirit as the early chapters.

JSF And what about fatigue when writing? How’d you deal with that?

JE My fatigue was alleviated by the structure. Nearly every chapter of Middlesex takes on new historical or emotional terrain. Once I was finished dealing with the Greco-Turkish War, I had to summon up Detroit during Prohibition, and then later I launched into genetic and sexological concerns. Middlesex has lots of different storylines in it, so when I had done all I could with one I could refresh myself with another. The book allowed me to grow along with it. But there was pain, sure. There was lots of pain.

There must have been some kind of perverse comfort, too. I had this torture waiting for me every day, but at least it was my torture. The book was my jailer and we became friendly. I was like Patty Hearst with her Stockholm Syndrome. Little by little the book expanded to fill every inch of my consciousness. It lasted as long as the Trojan War. But I didn’t want to be Harold Brodkey. I knew before things got really ridiculous I had to set sail for home.

JSF Along these lines, Middlesex strikes me as a book that begins as a fairy tale (albeit a violent, racy, political fairy tale) and develops into a coming-of-age story. You have a daughter. Do you think the development of the style was influenced by her development?

JE My daughter was born midway through the composition of Middlesex. Her influence shows up in the plot, not the style. There’s a preoccupation with birth and fetal development in the book. There’s a lot about what women go through during pregnancy, and how beside the point men feel in the process. I see my daughter’s fingerprints in those details, but the book took shape long before she arrived on the scene.

Read the full interview here

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