Jeffrey Eugenides

Reading List: Campus Novels

The Narratologist

Science fiction author Joe Haldeman once said:

Bad books on writing tell you to “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW”, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

And yes, ageing white professors cheating on their wives is definitely a recurring theme on this list – but there is also some sexual experimentation, a murder or two, slapstick comedy, and plenty of cheap wine.

In Omnia Paratus!

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Reading List: Depression

The Narratologist
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Picture credit: Volkan Olmez.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Infinite Jest (1996), David Foster Wallace.

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Reading List: Intersex and Transgender Literature

The Narratologist
Photograph from the "Anima Animus" series by Claudia Moroni.

Photograph from the “Anima Animus” series by Claudia Moroni.

One issue many writers grapple with is the question of identity. Who are we? How do we know? What shapes us and why? Something that many people take for granted in this discussion is the gender binary: we may not be sure who we are, but one thing we feel we do know is whether we go in the male or in the female box. But what if you’ve been put in the wrong box? What if you don’t belong in any of the boxes? Why do we feel the need for boxes anyway? Do boxes even exist?

So here are some books about boxes (or lack thereof).

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