More than a year after reading Middlesex for Episode 12, this week we return to Jeffrey Eugenides' oeuvre to check out 2011's The Marriage Plot.

It's a more focused, less-sprawling book than Middlesex, but as in his previous book Eugenides spends a lot of time here talking about growing up with a difficult condition. Intentional or not, there's also some subtle sexism here that we try to walk ourselves through—it's complicated by both authorial intent and the time the book is set (the early 1980s), but it's still a talk worth having in light of recent events.

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