draft in the first-person narrative in Cal's voice. He could not, however, portray Cal's grandparents intimately, so he completely abandoned his preceding year's draft in favor of writing the book in the third-person. He gradually violated his narrative convention by restoring the first-person voice amid the third-person narration to depict the mindsets of both Cal and Cal's grandparents. During the writing process, Eugenides moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan and later returned to Brooklyn. Worried about the narrative's sounding forced, he added instances of "self-reflexivity" to Cal's voice. After several years of struggling with the narrative voice, Eugenides finally seated himself at his desk and wrote Middlesexs initial page, "500 words that contained the DNA for the protein synthesis of the entire book." Middlesex was published for the North American market in September 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Vintage Canada for Canada. A month later, it was released in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing. The novel has been translated into 34 languages; the Spanish-language edition was translated by Benito Gómez Ibáñez and released in 2003 after the publisher, Jorge Herralde, had acquired the rights in a "tough auction". Plot Cal Stephanides (his masculine identity), also known as Calliope (feminine), recounts how 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, a recessive condition, caused him to be born with female characteristics. The book continues with accounts of his family's history and the conception of Cal, his childhood and teenage years being raised as a girl, and the discovery of his intersex condition. Cal weaves his opinion of the events in hindsight from his life after his father's funeral. Middlesex is set in the 20th century and interjects historical elements, such as the Balkan Wars, the Nation of Islam, the 1967 Detroit riot, and the Watergate scandal in the story. In 1922, Cal's paternal grandfather, Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides, lives in Bithynios, a village in Asia Minor. In the small village, high on the slope of Mount Olympos above the city of Bursa, incestuous marriages between cousins are a quietly accepted practice. Lefty makes a living selling silkworm cocoons harvested by his sister, Desdemona. The siblings are orphans; their parents are victims of the ongoing Greco-Turkish War. Lefty and Desdemona develop a romantic relationship as the war progresses. They flee the chaos brought by the war on a ship the United States amid the Great Fire of Smyrna. Their histories unknown to the