Jeffrey Eugenides grew up in a city that was dying.

By the time he was old enough to walk its streets, Detroit was smoke-stained, empty-windowed, and whispered about in the past tense.

And yet, that bleakness did not repel him.

It raised him.

For Eugenides, Detroit was not just home.

It was a myth.

It was a legend.

Some of the most celebrated literary fiction of the 21st century would go on to be written by him, and Detroit would haunt its pages like a perfume that cannot be placed, like a lover that cannot be forgotten:

Not at the forefront yet always pulsing just below the story.

Born in Detroit to a Greek American family, Eugenides grew up in the shadow of its worst decline, with white flight, race riots, and economic collapse the soundtrack of his adolescence.

His education at the University of Liggett School in Grosse Pointe, where inherited privilege clashed against urban decay just a few miles away, was a learning experience he would never forget.

Eugenides described himself in interviews as the “middle child of history,” watching the city go from lively to sterile.

This tension between old-world structure and postmodern drift would find its way into all of his novels.

In short, Detroit taught him contradiction:

That grace can appear in the midst of ruin.

And that desire can exist even in the face of repression.

Eugenides wrote his debut novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1993 – an eerie little tale told by a band of neighborhood boys watching the five Lisbon sisters die one by one that would be elevated to cult status through Sophia Coppola’s 1999 film adaptation.

Set in suburban Grosse Pointe, the novel is moody in character if not in geography – full of decay, obsession, and a longing for a time that never really existed.

It was not just a book about suicidal ideation.

It’s about how society fetishizes girlhood, what lies buried under perfect lawns and curfews, and what happens to desire when we try to sterilize it.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ magnum opus was published in 2002: Middlesex.

It was a Greek American family epic, one-part intersex coming-of-age story, one-part love letter to a dying Detroit – and it earned Eugenides the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003.

The story spans three generations, highlighting the 1920s Greektown diaspora, the 1967 Detroit race riots, what life was like in the suburban sprawl of Bloomfield Hills, and above all else, the complex gender identity of Cal Stephanides, born with a 5-alpha-reductase deficiency.

Middlesex is about fluid identity as much as it is about a city trying to reinvent itself.

Factories, fires, and family form the core of the novel.

In it, Eugenides does not describe Detroit as a cliché.

He writes it as if it’s a living organism – breaking, rebuilding, and remembering.

Eugenides’ third book, The Marriage Plot (2011), follows three Brown University students in the 1980s as they deal with love, depression, and philosophy.

Although it is not set in Detroit, it bears all his usual hallmarks of longing, intelligence, and a sense that all narratives are fragile.

Eugenides doesn’t write mere urban thrillers.

He writes emotional cartographies – maps of the heart that feature decaying buildings, racial tension, and old-world rituals trying to survive within modern asphalt.

His Detroit is symbolic rather than bankrupt:

Of gender.

Of heritage.

Of loss.

Of possibility.

Perhaps more than any other living author, Eugenides mythologized Detroit without making it lovable.

It wasn’t sanitized by him.

Instead, he understood that the mess had to matter for something.

Jeffrey Eugenides does not need to write about Detroit directly to write about Detroit deeply.

He writes like the city itself:

Beautiful.

Brutal.

And above all else:

Hauntingly Human.

Victoria Jackson (Editor In Chief)

Victoria Jackson is a lifelong student and sharp-eyed documentarian of all things Detroit, from its rich musical roots and cultural icons to its shifting neighborhoods, storied architecture, and underground legends. With her finger firmly on the pulse of both the city’s vibrant past and its rapidly unfolding future, she brings a deeply personal, historically grounded lens to every piece she writes.

Published on: August 18, 2025