What a strong start to my reading year to start off with this ambitious, complicated, Pulitzer-winning novel. Middlesex is about so much - displacement, cultural assimilation, war, as well as gender, autonomy, and heritage. I’m not sure how anything is going to follow tbh …

Middlesex follows the Stephanides family line - from Desdemona and Lefty fleeing to America from their birthplace of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish war, to the birth of their entrepreneurial all American son Milton who fights in WW2, to the eventual birth of Calliope, the novel’s narrator and star. Calliope is born intersex and their gender is the pivot point of the novel as they navigate life in an eccentric family in 1970’s America as someone who is othered and misunderstood.

I’m OBSESSEDDD with how this novel makes full use of Greek literary devices it had me geeking out in a big way. Calliope says at one point “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too”. The book’s theme of fate and self-determination, the feeling of monstrosity and deification in one, the hubris and peripeteia, the tragedy and comedy of if all and the muddy spaces in between. There are clever reflections of Homer, Sappho and Ovid that would make a literature student squeal. Eugenides is flexing a big literary muscle with this book and it’s impressive.

I really connected with both Calliope and with Desdemona and I’m really going to miss being part of the Stephanides family. Eugenides builds such an immersive experience of family life as an immigrant family in America that it feels like a little death to leave them behind.

This book was written in 2002 so I’d be wary of that from a terminology standpoint when it comes to gender, but the exploration of this book is so empathetic and nuanced that I think it still stands well in this today.