in 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides started on his next project Middlesex. He was inspired by having read Herculine Barbin, the diary of a 19th-century French convent schoolgirl who was intersex. Eugenides had first read the memoir a decade earlier and believed it evaded discussion about the anatomy and emotions of intersex people. He intended Middlesex to be "the story [he] wasn't getting from the memoir". Eugenides worked on Middlesex for nine years. He started writing during his short-term residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, United States, and finished the novel in Berlin, Germany; he had accepted a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service in 1999. Eugenides spent the first few years trying to establish the narrative voice for his novel. He wanted to "[tell] epic events in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person". According to Eugenides, the voice "had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite". Although Eugenides sought expert advice about intersex, sexology, and the formation of gender identity, he refrained from meeting with intersex people, saying, "[I] decided not to work in that reportorial mode. Instead of trying to create a separate person, I tried to pretend that I had this [physical feature] and that I had lived through this as much as I could". Eugenides read books, sifted through many sheets of microfiche, and combed through videotapes and newsletters that dealt with the subject. He visited the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to search for the sole copy of a book about an "elusive historical figure". He discovered details of what he considered a vivid intersex condition while browsing Columbia University's medical library. After discovering in his library research 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, an autosomal recessive condition manifested primarily in inbred, isolated population groups, his perception of the novel significantly changed. Rather than a "slim fictional autobiography" of an intersex individual, the novel would be epic in scope, tracing the lives of three generations of Greek Americans. Eugenides lived in Brooklyn when he began his first draft of the novel. He went through a lengthy brainstorming process. He would write 50 pages in one voice, restart in a different voice with 75 pages, and then pursue a different narrative angle. He wanted the novel to be an "intimate" portrayal of protagonist Cal's transformation, so he wrote a