The boy and his friends watch the Lisbon sisters and try to figure out who they really are. By the end of the novel all 5 Lisbon sisters; Cecilia (thirteen), Lux (fourteen), Bonnie (fifteen), Mary ( sixteen), and Therese (seventeen); have commited suicide.
The focus of the book is to show the way we (as a person) feel, and the memories and images we come away with. Throughout the book the teenage boys, who are neighbors to the Lisbons', wonder what actually goes on in the Lisbon house and who the Lisbons really are. They start to collect pictures, articles, and even diaries of the girls.
Eugenides got the idea to write this book after his nephew's baby-sitter told him she and all her siblings had attempted suicide. The book was finally published in 1993, and after its publishing he received the Whiting Writer's Award, 1993; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1994. Later he also received the Henry D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Middlesex, Eugenides' second book, was published in 2002. In this book Calliope Helen Stephanides-now the forty-one-year-old male narrator, tells us how he came to switch sexual identities; how he kept his secret; and what happens once his true nature is exposed. Calliope finds out she has what is called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome a mutation caused by intermarrying within a single blood line. Calliope begins her narration by saying, "I was born twice: first as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." (Eugenides, Jeffrey pg.3).
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Eugenides came up with the idea to write a story about a hermaphrodite after he read a memoire of a hermaphrodite, and it did not tell him what he wanted to know. When asked how he made Middlesex a normal reading book, he said, "I see it as a family story. I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence.
Notable references can be seen in, "The Fire Sermon," Mr Eugenides is described as, "Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants," currants are dried up grapes; here implying, very subtly, the lack of water in all areas of The Waste Lander's lives. ...
