Middlesex is the story of Calliope Helen Stephanides, born with a mutation on her fifth chromosome which makes her appear at birth to be a girl, although she is, in fact, biologically and hormonally a boy. The idea was to write a fictional book about a hermaphrodite, and I wanted it to be medically accurate - to be a story of a real hermaphrodite, rather than a fanciful creature like Tiresias or Orlando who could shift in a paragraph to avail myself of the mythological connections without making the character a myth.' I didn't set out to write about the Greek-American experience or originally to write a family saga at all.

It's autobiographical at the level of family detail or almost insignificant fact. 'The story I am telling is very far from my own experience, so the only way I felt I could make it credible for me was to borrow from a certain amount of history and personal fact. So it seems appropriate to begin by asking how much of the novel is autobiographical. (He was awarded a grant to write in Berlin for a year and they haven't yet got round to leaving.) The café makes a fleeting appearance in Middlesex, whose hero, like Eugenides, is a Greek-American raised in Detroit and now living in Berlin. I met Jeffrey Eugenides in Café Einstein in Berlin, the city in which he has lived for the past three years with his wife, an artist, and their four-year-old daughter.

Middlesex book