Which came first, the chicken or the egg — the novel about the hermaphrodite or the Greek family saga?
Both. The book is a hybrid, as you’re describing it, and the first part came with the hermaphrodite. I read a memoir of a real hermaphrodite from the 19th century, thinking this would be a wonderful story. It had a lot of things in it that appealed to me: a medical mystery, an amazing personal transformation and a doomed passion at its center. The hermaphrodite who wrote it was a schoolgirl in a French convent, and she fell in love with her best friend. In doing that, she discovered that she was a hermaphrodite. Unfortunately, it was written in 19th century convent-school prose — very melodramatic, evasive about the anatomical details and really unable to render the emotional situation in any regard. I was frustrated by this and thought, I’d like to write the story I’m not getting from this book. I started to do a lot of research on hermaphroditic conditions, and the one I landed on was 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. (I always feel like a doctor when I say that.) The salient f
