It had the effect of making me seem much more rebellious and exciting than I really was.
And they used to rally against me to Karen, my future wife. They thought I was a horrible, misogynist monster. My first novel, The Virgin Suicides, had been published, and there were a number of radical feminists in our colony who hadn't read the book, but objected to it because of the title. When I was wooing her, I had something in my favour. It's wonderful and idyllic, and you become Shakespearean, falling in and out of love in the woods. Relationships aren't encouraged, so there's always a lot of sneaking around. A lot of romance and adultery goes on at art colonies, a lot of randy composers sleeping with young sculptors. I met my wife at an art colony in New Hampshire. I disabused myself of certain kinds of sentimental views of life. Which was bad for my romantic purity but good for my fiction.
So the fiction of true love waiting for each of us ended violently. We split up a year later, when she betrayed me, horribly. For many years we wrote letters, and I built up this huge love story in my mind, and years passed, and it finally came that we were together, and it all seemed as though this fated dream of love was finally going to happen. There was a girl in college that I decided was my fated love. I'm not sure whether it's from watching movies or reading her 19th-century novels, but I grew up believing in destiny. I owe the fact that I'm a writer to the books she brought into the house. She went to college, where she was a big reader. She was one of those children of poverty who react to it by studying, and trying to control what they can. When she was young, in the Depression, they packed their possessions into a truck and moved to Detroit, and she had to ride down by the foot pedals.
Someone told me it takes twice as long to get over someone as the time you were with them. Later I tried to get over one woman by going after lots more. Early on I'd spend weeks lying face down in my room and listening to The Best of Bread. I had many heartbreaks between the ages of 15 and 28. I tended to follow them around, and moon over them. I thought girls liked sensitive men, but I drove them away with the weepiness. I was the poetic suitor when I was coming of age in the 1970s. It was the Obscure Object, 25 years later. On the day I finished writing Middlesex, in Berlin, I went for dinner, and sitting across the table there was a woman who seemed familiar. That name was one my friend, the writer Rick Moody, and I gave to a woman at college who was alluring and mysterious. And it led to the love interest, the Obscure Object, in my second novel Middlesex. Red hair became a motif in my fantasy life.
When I was around five I loved a girl with red hair, which did something to me. Too many crushes, from too early an age, make it hard to pinpoint my first.
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