Jeffrey Eugenides

Biography

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 8, 1960. He is of Greek descent through his father and English and Irish descent through his mother. He has two older brothers. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School and then Brown University (where he became friends with contemporary Rick Moody). He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe, during which time he also volunteered with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Of his decision to study at Brown, he said, "I chose Brown largely in order to study with John Hawkes, whose work I admired. I entered the honors program in English, which forced me to study the entire English tradition, beginning with Beowulf. I felt that since I was going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know something about it." In 1986, he earned an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. Eugenides knew he wanted to be a writer from a relatively early age, stating,

"I decided very early; during my junior year of high school. We read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that year, and it had a big effect on me, for reasons that seem quite amusing to me now. I'm half Irish and half Greek—my mother's family were Kentuckians, Southern hillbillies, and my paternal grandparents immigrants from Asia Minor—and, for that reason, I identified with Stephen Dedalus. Like me, he was bookish, good at academics, and possessed an 'absurd name, an ancient Greek'. [...] I do remember thinking [...] that to be a writer was the best thing a person could be. It seemed to promise maximum alertness to life. It seemed holy to me, and almost religious."

Of his earliest literary influences, he cited "the great modernists. Joyce, Proust, Faulkner. From these I went on to discover Musil, Woolf, and others, and soon my friends and I were reading Pynchon and John Barth. My generation grew up backward. We were weaned on experimental writing before ever reading much of the nineteenth-century literature the modernists and postmodernists were reacting against."

Eugenides was raised in Detroit and cites the influence of the city and his high school experiences on his writings. He has said that he has "a perverse love" of his birthplace: "I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music, Motown, the MC5, house, techno." He also says he has been "haunted" by the decline of Detroit. In 1983, after graduating from Brown, he moved to San Francisco with the intention of becoming a writer and lived on Haight Street.

In 1986, he received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit." After living a few years in San Francisco, he moved to Brooklyn, New York and worked as secretary for the Academy of American Poets. While in New York he made friends with numerous similarly struggling writers, including Jonathan Franzen.

From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides lived in Berlin, where he moved after being awarded a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service to write in Berlin for a year. Since 2007, he has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, where he moved after he joined the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.

Of teaching creative writing, Eugenides remarked in an interview with The Paris Review, "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. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not 'audience.' Not 'readership.' Just the reader."

In 2018, Eugenides joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured full professor and the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters.

Eugenides met his former wife, photographer and sculptor Karen Yamauchi, at the MacDowell artist's program. They got married in 1995 and later had a daughter named Georgia Eugenides.

After being raised in a nominally Greek Orthodox household, in 2022 Eugenides was received into the Catholic Church.