“What my life has come to: sitting alone on a Friday night, listening to Soundcheck on NPR.”

In case you didn’t hear, the entire universe has been in New York this past week. Wednesday night was graced with the presence of Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot. Bwog daily Tatini Mal-Sarkar saw him speak and proceeded to fangirl for hours/days/probably years.

I rush to Schapiro at 6:45, having skipped a solid three quarters of my Lit Hum class, but alas, to no avail: the room is already packed entirely to capacity. The crowd is full of MFA students (all smelling of smoke, naturally), some of whom are, for lack of space, sitting cross-legged on stage, quite literally at (what will soon be) Jeffrey Eugenides’ feet. The doors are impeded by would-be lecture-goers willing to stand in the doorway if that means hearing him speak, but somehow I’m one of the last six people to get a seat and, by pure luck/force of elbows, manage to secure a seat in the second row. I can’t help but think that the universe is on my side, and I’m hyper-aware of both my unreasonable expectations and the extraordinarily high chance that they’ll be wildly disappointed.

The program coordinator speaks very briefly—“I’ve been dreaming of this for years” (same)—and a student, dressed in (what else?) a sport coat and Keds, gives the real introduction. He talks about the metaphoricity of Eugenides’ work, and how it speaks simultaneously to the tendency of self-loathing, the inability of knowing oneself, and the capacity for love. After perfectly synthesizing Eugenides’ great gift for taking common things and making them uncommon, he exits the stage, and on comes the man of the hour.

Eugenides starts off with an endearingly self-deprecating quip: “After seeing this crowd, I should have prepared more.” But it becomes very clear very quickly that he has prepared, and to fruitful effect. The self-deprecation continues: “The lion’s share of what any writer must know is diligence, practice, osmosis… and the ongoing humiliation of everyday life.” (pause for appreciative laughter, which basically continues through the rest of the night—solemn and self-important, Eugenides is not)

His main spiel, though, is the question of voice and what that means and how to get one (or many). It’s a topic that’s peculiarly applicable to Eugenides in particular, considering the diversity, and sometimes frank weirdness, of the perspectives he’s undertaken, and, in the way that things you struggle with often wind up characterizing you, it’s not something that came naturally to him at all. In fact, he spends the first couple minutes delineating the quantitative difficulty of telling a story at all. A 6000-word short story has “infinity infinity” permutations of the words themselves. How, he asked, do we decide what words to put where?

To figure out a methodology, he posits, we have to first understand what the purpose of writing is: to use a set of already extant words to create something entirely new. In other words, your only real contribution to truth is through voice, a distinguishable method for putting words in place that people can read and instantly identify as your own. But is it necessary for this voice to be constant and unchanging and recognizable in a heartbeat?

In a word: no. Eugenides’ end argument is essentially that, despite the prominence and visibility of such writers (à la Virginia Woolf), it’s not necessary to have a single, easily identifiable voice. He cites Saul Bellow’s story of waiting around until one day at a pier front, his voice appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Eugenides, like many a young writer, thought a similar thing would happen to him and was bewildered by the fact that this über voice hadn’t come and claimed him as promised.

But that’s not inherently a bad thing. In defense of a constantly changing tone, he questions the accuracy of a consistent self, describing today’s self as existent only within this moment. Depressing though it may seem, the subjectivity of voice doesn’t exist outside of being “reflected through the prism of consciousness” (don’t deny how beautiful this is. I gasp audibly and am embarrassed). He continues, “As soon as I stop writing this, this voice will stop. It won’t cling to me.”

In contrast to the über voice, the unten voice comes from below or under, as in the case of Alice Munro. She’s not a stylist, but that doesn’t mean her work doesn’t have style. Eugenides, a marked critic of transparency, suggests that, despite her work’s seeming transparency, her dry wit and “wicked humor” float beneath the surface, noticeable through quiet moments and unexpected combinations.

The rest of the talk centers primarily on the inherently repetitive nature of things, and how this also isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the cult of individualism and the American fixation on specialness, we glorify difference, to the point of desperation. In a wonderfully ironic moment, he quotes King Lear (“Nothing comes from nothing”) to discuss the “exhaustion of language.” The long and short of it is that language is a flawed method of representation, and he finishes up the talk portion with a quick anecdote about good old left-handed Jimi Hendrix, who learned to play a right-handed guitar for the hell of it. And this guitar, we’re told, is the English language.

In the Q&A session that follows, Eugenides responds to loads of the standard Q&A questions: what are you reading, how much do your personal experiences affect your writing, how was the process of making a film of your book, etc, etc. (Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk; a lot, otherwise it’s not credible; good with Sofia Coppola, less so with others) But the answers are good and produce such gems as, “My first book is the only I like. It doesn’t make me as queasy [as the others].” Also of note: there is a Marriage Plot screenplay. This is not a drill.

I walk out basically in love with him and furious with myself for having left my copies of Middlesex and the Marriage Plot at home. In a fit of entirely unreasonable expectations, I had wanted Eugenides to somehow encapsulate every aspect of existence and also to just in general affirm my soul, and was deeply fearful that he would make one wrong move and I’d feel alienated forever. That didn’t happen. Eugenides is this mix of humble and self-effacing but also definitively brilliant, and he combines the brute force of his intelligence with his searing humor. Overall, 10/10, v satisfied, would skip Lit Hum for again.