Middlesex (novel)
The book is a bestseller, with over a million copies sold as of March 2011. Despite the fact that the novel is not an autobiography in the strict sense of the word, many small details of the narrative outline were taken from the life of the author himself, which he learned about in the process of studying the Greek part of his ancestry. The idea to create such a work came to Eugenides in 1980 while reading the memoirs of Herculine Barbin (eng. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite), after which he decided to give his own interpretation of the description of the anatomical structure and emotions of intersexes.