Middlesex

Hey, our first non-"dump" post in three weeks. The blog lives! Or at least it clings to life.

I really enjoyed this one. It's been on my radar since high school, and with transgender rights and issues making headlines of late, I figured there was no better time to read the story of an intersex man raised as a girl.

I wrote a little review for Goodreads (yeah, guess who's ten years late to the Goodreads party?) and rather than linking I'll just post it below:

Fantastic. Explores in equal measure both gender identity and the American Dream in the 20th century, all narrated by an intersex man raised as a girl. This was noticeably inward- and backward-looking, containing very few passages about what it is to be a modern man without a penis but very many about what it's like to be an adolescent girl in the 1970s waiting to "blossom" and struggling with sexual attraction. That's all in the second half, too. The first half focuses on the narrator's Greek immigrant grandparents and first-generation parents as they carve out a living in Detroit through bootlegging, war, race riots, and ch-ch-changes in general. Oh and there's also incest. Not an authentic memoir of any sort - author Eugenides is a cisgender straight man, so take the protagonist's internal struggles with a heap of salt - but eye-opening and poignant all the same.

And that's me quoting me!

Lastly, for what it's worth, the year of #BigReads is back on track thanks to this 529-pager right here.