Middlesex: A Novel [Paperback]

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal.

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling,Middlesexis an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Middlesexis the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Discussion Questions

1. Describing his own conception, Cal writes: The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection. (p. 11) Is Cal's condition a result of chance or fate? Which of these forces governs the world as Cal sees it?

2.Middlesexbegins just before Cal's birth in 1960, then moves backward in time to 1922. Cal is born at the beginning of Book Three, about halfway through the novel. Why did the author choose to structure the story this way? How does this movement backward and forward in time reflect the larger themes of the work?

3. When Tessie and Milton decide to try to influence the sex of their baby, Desdemona disapproves. God decides what baby is, she says. Not you. (p.13) What happens when characters in the novl“W