Required Reading

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’ll be honest, I read half of this and then two years later I read the other half. There was a good reason for it, but I can’t remember it now. I think it had something to do with leaving San Diego and then moving to Cleveland. Regardless how long it took me to finish this, it is still one of the best books that I’ve read.

This is a coming-of-age story that follows Cal through life, growing up in Detroit. The story is intertwined with family history as well as Cal’s life as he discovers that he is intersexed.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.

You can read it on Google Books here.

This is part of the Required Reading series, which should be considered more recommendation than requirement.