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I Approach Writing Female Characters The Same Why I Approach Writing Male Characters. I Never Think I'm Writing About Women, I Think I'm Writing About One Woman, One Person. And I Try To Imagine What She Is Like, And Endow Her With A Lot Of My Own Thoughts And History.

-Jeffrey Eugenides

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I Approach Writing Female

Jeffrey Eugenides

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I Approach Writing Female Characters The Same Why I Approach Writing Male Characters. I Never Think I'm Writing About Women, I Think I'm Writing About One Woman, One Person. And I Try To Imagine What She Is Like, And Endow Her With A Lot Of My Own Thoughts And History.

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Virgin Suicides

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Narrative Voice

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I Approach Writing Female Characters The Same Why I Approach Writing Male Characters. I Never Think I'm Writing About Women, I Think I'm Writing About One Woman, One Person. And I Try To Imagine What She Is Like, And Endow Her With A Lot Of My Own Thoughts And History.

If I Write A Character, Instead Of Looking From The Outside, Like Maybe A Journalist Would, Trying To Describe Them Physically And Figuring Out What Kind Of Things They Might Be Interested In Or Have In Their House, I Don't Really Do It That Way. I Try To Feel What It Would Be Like To Be Inside This Person, To Be Them.

In Madeleine's Face Was A Stupidity Mitchell Had Never Seen Before. It Was The Stupidity Of All Normal People. It Was The Stupidity Of The Fortunate And The Beautiful, Of Everybody Who Got What They Wanted In Life And So Remained Unremarkable.

But What Humans Forget, Cells Remember. The Body, That Elephant

We Knew, Finally, That The Girls Were Really Women In Disguise, That They Understood Love And Even Death, And That Our Job Was Merely To Create The Noise That Seemed To Fascinate Them.

You Never Get Over It, But You Get To Where It Doesn't Bother You So Much.

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I Have A Good Memory For Early Life. My Visual Memory Is Good About Childhood And Adolescence, And Less Good In The Last 10 Years. I Could Probably Tell You Less What Happened In The Last 10 Years. I Remember What Houses Looked Like, Sometimes They Just Pop Into My Head.

When I'm Creating A Character, It's A Little Bit Like What My Theater Teachers Used To Tell Me About Stanislavsky, Like If You're Using Sense Memory To Do A Scene - If You Have To Cry In A Scene, You Try To Remember Something In Your Life That Made You Cry And You Use That In Order To Get The Tears.

She Thought A Writer Should Work Harder Writing A Book Than She Did Reading It.

Detroit's A Great Music Town. If Your Interaction With It Was Mainly Musical, I'm Sure You Have A Good Opinion Of The Place.

I Wanted To Be An Actor. My Parents Were Not Too Keen On That.

In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

Every Letter Was A Love Letter.

And She Had Succeeded, On The Second Try, In Hurling Herself Out Of The World

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Dr. Armonson Stitched Up Her Wrist Wounds. Withen 5 Minutes Of The Transfusion He Declared Her Out Of Danger. Chucking Her Under The Chin, He Said, "what Are You Doing Here, Honey? Your Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." And It Was Then Cecelia Gave Orally What Was To Be Her Only Form Of Suicide Note, And A Useless One At That, Because She Was Going To Live: "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A 13 Year Old Girl.

Basically You Come Up With The Fictional Idea And You Start Writing That Story, But Then In Order To Write It And To Make It Seem Real, You Sometimes Put Your Own Memories In. Even If It's A Character That's Very Different From You.

That Since Cecilia’s Suicide, The Lisbon’s Could Hardly Wait For The Night To Forget Themselves In Sleep

They Had Killed Themselves Over Our Dying Forests, Over Manatees Maimed By Propellers As They Surfaced To Drink From Garden Hoses; They Had Killed Themselves At The Sight Of Used Tires Stacked Higher Than The Pyramids; They Had Killed Themselves Over The Failure To Find A Love None Of Us Could Ever Be. In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

Remember That Day You Said You Loved Me? Remember That? See, You Could Do That Because You're Basically A Sane Person, Who Grew Up In A Loving, Sane Family. You Could Take A Risk Like That. But In My Family We Didn't Go Around Saying We Loved Each Other. We Went Around Screaming At Each Other. So What Do I Do, When You Say You Love Me? I Go And Undermine It.

You Begin Always Knowing Nothing. You Remain Forever An Amateur, A First Timer.

Knowing Nothing

I Saw The Movie, He Said. I Know What It's About. Listen To This. When Girls Get To Be About Twelve Or So - He Leaned Toward Us - Their Tits Bleed.

This Can't Be True But I Remember It.

I Was Unemployable When I Got Out Of College.

I Went Into The Desert To Forget About You. But The Sand Was The Color Of Your Hair. The Desert Sku Was The Color Of Your Eyes. There Was Nowhere I Could Go That Wouldn't Be You.

Three Times A Day Petrovich Showed Up At The Nurse's Office For His Injections, Always Using The Hypodermic Needle Himself Like The Most Craven Of Junkies, Though After Shooting Up He Would Play The Concert Piano In The Auditorium With Astounding Artistry, As Though Insulin Were The Elixir Of Genius.

They're Just Memories Now. Time To Write Them Off.

Yes, You Need A Passport To Prove To The World That You Exist. The People At Passport Control, They Cannot Look At You And See You Are A Person. No! They Have To Look At A Little Photograph Of You. Then They Believe You Exist.

We Knew The Pain Of Winter Rushing Up Your Skirt, And The Ache Of Keeping Your Knees Together In Class, And How Drab And Infuriating It Was To Jump Rope While The Boys Played Baseball. We Could Never Understand Why The Girls Cared So Much About Being Mature, Or Why They Felt Compelled To Compliment Each Other.

It Was Morning By The Clock But Deepest Nighttime In His Body.

Planning Is For The World's Great Cities, For Paris, London, And Rome, For Cities Dedicated, At Some Level, To Culture. Detroit, On The Other Hand, Was An American City And Therefore Dedicated To Money, And So Design Had Given Way To Expediency.

Basically What We Have Here Is A Dreamer. Somebody Out Of Touch With Reality. When She Jumped, She Probably Thought She'd Fly

To Be Inclusive You Must Accommodate Different Levels Of Sophistication.

Emotions, In My Experience, Aren't Covered By Single Words. I Don't Believe In "sadness", "joy", Or "regret". Maybe The Best Proof That The Language Is Patriarchal Is That Is Oversimplifies Feeling. I'd Like To Have At My Disposal Complicated Hybrid Emotions.

I Think There's A Real Connection Between Acting And Writing Novels Because The Way I Write Characters Has A Little Bit To Do With The Method Acting That I Was Taught In High School And College.

We Listened To Them, But It Was Clear They'd Received Too Much Therapy To Know The Truth.

Bubble Gum Angels Swooped From Top Margins Or Scraped Their Wings Between Teeming Paragraphs, Maidens With Golden Hair Dripped Sea Blue Tears Into The Books Spine, Grape-colored Whales Spouted Blood Around A Newspaper Item (pasted In) Listing Arrivals To The Endangered Spieces List. Six Hatchlings Cried From Shattered Shells Near An Entry Made On Easter. Cecilia Had Filled The Pages With A Profusion Of Colors And Curlicues, Candyland Ladders And Striped Shamrocks.

There Are Some Books That Reached Through The Noise Of Life To Grab You By The Collar And Speak Only Of The Truest Things.

The Girls Took Into Their Own Hands Decisions Better Left To God. They Became Too Powerful To Live Among Us, Too Self-concerned, Too Visionary, Too Blind.

Depending On The Year Or The Therapist He Was Seeing, He'd Learned To Ascribe Just About Every Facet Of His Character As A Psychological Reaction To His Parents' Fighting: His Laziness, His Overachieving, His Tendency To Isolate, His Tendency To Seduce, His Hypochondria, His Sense Of Invulnerability, His Self-loathing, His Narcissism.

I'd Like To Show How 'intimations Of Mortality Brought On By Aging Family Members' Connects With 'the Hatred Of Mirrors That Begins In Middle Age.

Whenever We Got A Glimpse, Their Faces Looked Indecently Revealed, As Though We Were Used To Seeing Women In Veils.

In The End, It Wasn't Death That Surprised Her But The Stubbornness Of Life.

It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

My Family Suffered. My Hair Turned Up In Every Corner, Every Drawer, Every Meal. Even In The Rice Puddings Tessie Made, Covering Each Little Bowl With Wax Paper Before Putting It Away In The Fridge--even Into These Prophylactically Secure Desserts My Hair Found Its Way! Jet Black Hairs Wound Themselves Around Bars Of Soap. They Lay Pressed Like Flower Stems Between The Pages Of Books. They Turned Up In Eyeglass Cases, Birthday Cards, Once--i Swear--inside An Egg Tessie Had Just Cracked. The Next-door Neighbor's Cat Coughed Up A Hairball One Day And The Hair Was Not The Cat's.

We Value Love Not Because It's Stronger Than Death But Because It's Weaker. Say What You Want About Love: Death Will Finish It. You Will Not Go On Loving In The Grave, Not In Any Physical Way That Will At All Resemble Love As We Know It On Earth. The Perishable Nature Of Love Is What Gives Love Its Importance In Our Lives. If It Were Endless, If It Were On Tap, Love Wouldn't Hit Us The Way It Does.

They Thought Depression Was Like Bieng 'depressed'. They Thought It Was Like Being In A Bad Mood, Only Worse. Therefore, They Tried To Get Him To Snap Out Of It.

People Don't Save Other People. People Save Themselves.

The Worst Thing About Religion Was Religious People.

There Was Nowhere I Could Go That Wouldn't Be You.

Paris Was A Museum Displaying Exactly Itself.

She Wanted Out Of The Decorating Scheme.

But That Was In The Days When They Expected Perils To Come From Without, And Nothing Made Less Sense By That Time Than A Survival Room Buried In A House Itself Becoming One Big Coffin.

What Are You Doing Here, Honey? You're Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." (...) "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A Thirteen-year-old Girl.

Winter Is The Season Of Alcoholism And Despair.

You Went Out With A Girl At First Because The Sheer Sight Of Her Made You Weak In The Knees. You Fell In Love And Were Desperate Not To Let Her Get Away. And Yet The More You Thought About Her, The Less You Knew Who She Was. The Hope Was That Love Transcended All Differences. That Was The Hope.

The Only Way We Know It's True Is That We Both Dreamed It. That's What Reality Is. It's A Dream Everyone Has Together.

I'm The Final Clause In A Periodic Sentence, And That Sentence Begins A Long Time Ago, In Another Language, And You To Read It From The Beginning To Get To The End, Which Is My Arrival.

That Was When Leonard Realized Something Crucial About Depression. The Smarter You Were, The Worse It Was. The Sharper Your Brain, The More It Cut You Up.

When You Stood Between Somebody You Loved And Death, It Was Hard To Be Awake And It Was Hard To Sleep.

If You Talk To Geneticists They Are Constantly Finding That Your Genes Are Being Switched On And Off Because Of The Environment. Genes Alone Do Not Determine An Exact Path In Your Life.

It Was Something Every Child Knew How To Do, Maintain A Direct And Full Connection With The World. Somehow You Forgot About It As You Grew Up, And Had To Learn It Again.

I'm Not Really An Autobiographical Writer, Though I Use Lots Of Stuff From My Life To Make My Stories Seem Real. But When I Actually Write About Myself, I Get Very Confused.

On The Morning The Last Lisbon Daughter Took Her Turn At Suicide- It Was Mary This Time, And Sleeping Pills, Like Therese- The Two Paramedics Arrived At The House Knowing Exactly Where The Knife Drawer Was, And The Gas Oven, And The Beam In The Basement From Which It Was Possible To Tie A Rope.

But, Like Anyone In Love, Madeleine Believed That Her Own Relationship Was Different From Every Other Relationship, Immune From Typical Problems.

She Could Become A Spinster, Like Emily Dickinson, Writing Poems Full Of Dashes And Brilliance, And Never Gaining Weight.

You Used To Be Able To Tell A Person's Nationality By The Face. Immigration Ended That. Next You Discerned Nationality Via The Footwear. Globalization Ended That.

I Live My Own Life And Nurse My Own Wounds. It's Not The Best Way To Live. But It's The Way I Am.

There Comes A Moment, When You Get Lost In The Woods, When The Woods Begin To Feel Like Home.

Maybe The Best Proof That The Language Is Patriarchal Is That It Oversimplifies Feeling.

The Window Was Still Open.” Mr Lisbon Said. “i Don’t Think We’d Ever Remembered To Shut It. It Was All Clear To Me. I Knew I Had To Close It Or Else She’d Go On Jumping Out Of It Forever

All Sixteen Mentioned Her Jutting Ribs, The Insubstantiality Of Her Thighs, And One, Who Went Up To The Roof With Lux During A Warm Winter Rain, Told Us How The Basins Of Her Collarbones Collected Water.

I Studied English Literature In The Honors Program, Which Means That You Had To Take Courses In Various Centuries. You Had To Start With Old English, Middle English, And Work Your Way Toward The Modern. I Figured If I Did That It Would Force Me To Read Some Of The Things I Might Not Read On My Own.

Lux Spent The Ride Dialing The Radio For Her Favorite Song. "it Makes Me Crazy," She Said. "you Know They're Playing It Somewhere, But You Have To Find It.

She May Have Looked Normal On The Outside, But Once You'd Seen Her Handwriting You Knew She Was Deliciously Complicated Inside.

She Had Given Birth To Me And Nursed Me And Brought Me Up. She Had Known Me Before I Knew Myself And Now She Had No Say In The Matter. Life Started Out One Thing And Then Suddenly Turned A Corner And Became Something Else.

If You Think Of Even Tolstoy Or A Book Like 'anna Karenina,' You Go From Character To Character, And Each Section Is From The Third Person Perspective Of A Different Character, So You Get To See The Whole World A Little More Kaleidoscopically That Way. That's Traditional Narrative Manner, And I Haven't Done A Book Like That Before, But I Enjoyed It.

And In Some Of The Houses, People Were Getting Old And Sick And Were Dying, Leaving Others To Grieve. It Was Happening All The Time, Unnoticed, And It Was The Thing That Really Mattered. What Really Mattered In Life, What Gave It Weight, Was Death.

The Ideas For My Books Come About In Two Ways. There Can Be An Intellectual Idea That Seems To Be The Reason For Writing The Book. [...] The Other Motive Is Unconscious. There Is Something Deeply Psychological And Emotional That Draws Me To The Material In The First Place.

I've Never Had The Right Words To Describe My Life, And Now That I've Entered My Story, I Need Them More Than Ever.

You Don't Understand Me. I'm A Teenager. I've Got Problems!

Virgin Suicides

What Lingered After Them Was Not Life, Which Always Overcomes Natural Death, But The Most Trivial List Of Mundane Facts: A Clock Ticking On A Wall, A Room Dim At Noon, And The Outrageousness Of A Human Being Thinking Only Of Herself.

My Change From Girl To Boy Was Far Less Dramatic Than The Distance Anybody Travels From Infancy To Adulthood.

Mitchell Had Answered That, As Far As He Understood Them, Mystical Experiences Were Significant Only To The Extent That They Changed A Person's Conception Of Reality, And If That Changed Conception Led To A Change In Behavior And Action, A Loss Of Ego.

Mystical Experiences

It Was One Of Those Humid Days When The Atmosphere Gets Confused. Sitting On The Porch, You Could Feel It: The Air Wishing It Was Water.

Added To Their Loveliness Was A New Mysterious Suffering, Perfectly Silent, Visible In The Blue Puffiness Beneath Their Eyes Or The Way They Would Sometimes Stop In Mid-stride, Look Down, And Shake Their Heads As Though Disagreeing With Life.

One Of The Reasons That Art Is Important To Me Is Sometimes It Actually Feels More Coherent Than Life. It Orders The Chaos.

Where Else Would She Feel More Comfortable Than In This Subterranean Realm Where People Wrote Down What They Couldn't Say, Where They Gave Voice To Their Most Shameful Longings And Knowledge?

We Realized That The Version Of The World They Rendered For Us Was Not The Version Of The World They Really Believed In.

Virgin Suicides

Words, Words, Word. Once, I Had The Gift. I Could Make Love Out Of Words As A Potter Makes Cups Of Clay. Love That Overthrows Empire. Love That Binds Two Hearts Together, Come Hellfire & Brimstone. For Sixpence A Line, I Could Cause A Riot In A Nunnery. But Now -- I Have Lost My Gift. It's As If My Quill Is Broken, As If The Organ Of My Imagination Has Dried Up, As If The Proud -illegible Word- Of My Genius Has Collapsed.

Well, Marriage Doesn't Function In The Way It Used To In Terms Of Deciding Our Fate, But It's In Our Heads, And It Determines A Lot Of Our Actions. Like, Right Now, If You Think About Gay Marriage - And They Just Started Having The First Gay Marriages In New York - It Shows What A Potent Idea Marriage Remains For People.

I'd Like To Have A Word For 'the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants' As Well As For 'the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar.

So Do Boys And Men Announce Their Intentions. They Cover You Like A Sarcophagus Lid. And Call It Love.

I Think It Is Important To Remind People Of The Extent Of Our Free Will.

The World, A Tired Performer, Offers Us Another Half-assed Season.

I Was Aware That You Weren't Supposed To Write About Suburbia, That It Was Undignified In Some Way, The Subject Matter Not Momentous Enough. And So, For A Long Time, That Kept Me From Writing About It. But Once I Began, I Realized It Was Just As Interesting As Anywhere Else.

The Window Gave Onto A View Of Dove-gray Roofs And Balconies, Each One Containing The Same Cracked Flowerpot And Sleeping Feline. It Was As If The Entire City Of Paris Had Agreed To Abide By A Single Understated Taste. Each Neighbor Was Doing His Or Her Own To Keep Up Standards, Which Was Difficult Because The French Ideal Wasn't Clearly Delineated Like The Neatness And Greenness Of American Lawns, But More Of A Picturesque Disrepair. It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

But Maybe The Charm Bracelets Understood More About Life Than I Did. From An Early Age They Knew What Little Value The World Placed In Books, And So Didn't Waste Their Time With Them. Whereas I, Even Now, Persist In Believing That These Black Marks On White Paper Bear The Greatest Significance, That If I Keep Writing, I Might Be Able To Catch The Rainbow Of Consciousness In A Jar.

Their Desire Was Silent Yet Magnificent, Like A Thousand Daisies Attuning Their Faces Toward The Path Of The Sun.

For The Eternity That Lux Lisbon Looked At Him, Trip Fontaine Looked Back, And The Love He Felt At That Moment, Truer Than All Subsequent Loves Because It Never Had To Survive Real Life, Still Plagued Him, Even Now In The Desert, With His Looks And Health Wasted. 'you Never Know What'll Set The Memory Off,' He Told Us. 'a Baby's Face. A Bell On A Cat's Collar. Anything.' They Didn't Exchange A Single Word. But In The Weeks That Followed, Trip Spent His Days Wandering The Halls, Hoping For Lux To Appear, The Most Naked Person With Clothes On He Had Ever Seen.

Jerome Was Sliding And Climbing On Top Of Me And It Felt Like It Had The Night Before, Like A Crushing Weight. So Do Boys And Men Announce Their Intentions. They Cover You Like A Sarcophagus Lid. And Call It Love.

The Television Replaced The Sound Of Conversation That Was Missing From My Grandparents' Lives.

We're All Made Up Of Many Parts, Other Halves. Not Just Me.

That's The Way I Will Write Characters, Put A Fair Amount Of Myself In Them, And Then Everyone Else Who Was Like That Person, I Will Pick And Choose.

I Tell My Students That When You Write, You Should Pretend You’re Writing The Best Letter You Ever Wrote To The Smartest Friend You Have. That Way, You’ll Never Dumb Things Down. You Won’t Have To Explain Things That Don’t Need Explaining. You’ll Assume An Intimacy And A Natural Shorthand, Which Is Good Because Readers Are Smart And Don’t Wish To Be Condescended To.

Emotions, In My Experience Aren't Covered By Single Words. I Don't Believe In "sadness," "joy," Or "regret." I'd Like To Have At My Disposal Complicated Hybrid Emotions, Germanic Traincar Constructions Like, Say, "the Happiness That Attends Disaster." Or: "the Disappointment Of Sleeping With One's Fantasy." ... I'd Like To Have A Word For "the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants" As Well As For "the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar." I've Never Had The Right Words To Describe My Life.

I Want An Ending That’s Satisfying. I’m More Of A Classical Writer Than A Modernist One In That I Want The Ending To Be Coherent And Feel Like An Ending. I Don’t Like When It Just Seems To Putter Out. I Mean, Life Is Chaotic Enough.

I Was Beginning To Understand Something About Normality. Normality Wasn't Normal. It Couldn't Be. If Normality Were Normal, Everybody Could Leave It Alone. They Could Sit Back And Let Normality Manifest Itself. But People-and Especially Doctors- Had Doubts About Normality. They Weren't Sure Normality Was Up The Job. And So They Felt Inclined To Give It A Boost.

The Lover`s Discourse Was Of An Extreme Solitude. The Solitude Was Extreme Because It Wasn`t Physical. It Was Extreme Because You Felt It While In The Company Of The Person You Loved. It Was Extreme Because It Was In Your Head, The Most Solitary Of Places.

There's A Kind Of Acting That Goes On In My Head When I'm Writing A Character Where I Put Myself In Their Place.

But I Care About The Reader, And I'm Trying To Keep The Reader's Attention For As Long As I Can.

If Mitchell Was Ever Going To Become A Good Christian, He Would Have To Stop Disliking People So Intensely.

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