Jeffrey Eugenides's narrator, Cal, informs the reader on page one that he is intersex- born as a girl, but transitioned to living as a boy at age 14. Then he winds back the tale of his family, immigrants who fled the war between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s to settle in Detroit. Cal's grandfather worked in the auto plants, smuggled bootleg liqueur and ran an underground bar during Prohibition. His grandmother struggled in the new land, living half in the present world and half in an increasingly fictional Greece in her mind. Cal weaves the tale of his parent's births, their courtship, and of his own birth and childhood. This book leans heavily on consensual sibling incest as a plot point: Eugenides suggests that Cal has only been born intersex because his grandparents were brother and sister, and his parents first cousins. Intersex readers of this novel have given it very mixed reviews, from luke-warm to BURN IT, and for anyone wanting a specific intersex perspective on the book I'd recommend this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmyKRGpZclc

I have a complicated relationship with this book because I read it very early on when I was coming out as nonbinary, and I liked the story when I read it with the lens that Cal was in fact nonbinary and masculine of center as well intersex. However, I'm pretty sure most of the richness that I found on my first reading of this book was me projecting my own feelings onto the character. In learning more about Eugenides' process of writing it (he not only lifted heavily from the actual memoir of an intersex woman whom he didn't fully credit, he also didn't interview any intersex people for accuracy or sensitivity reading) I've lost my respect for this book and would no longer recommend it.