“Asleep in the Lord” is taken from your forthcoming novel, “ The Marriage Plot,” which follows the entwined lives of its three main characters-Mitchell the woman he loves, Madeleine and the man she loves, Leonard-after they meet at university. Volunteering for Mother Teresa represents only one stage in his pilgrim’s progress. He may fail in this particular section, but he makes progress later on. He’s wondering if such a thing is possible for him. Mitchell, who is undergoing a religious conversion of sorts, is trying to figure out how to live a saintly life. These events are part of a larger narrative, of course. He faces his fear and conquers it, but then a new fear presents itself, and this proves too much for him. Well, I think Mitchell does conquer his fears when he bathes the sick old man. In the story, Mitchell, you write, “had become uncomfortably aware that he was performing only the simplest, least demanding tasks at the Home … While Mitchell gave head massages, he watched people who looked in no way extraordinary perform the extraordinary task of cleaning and wiping the sick and dying.” Did you ever consider changing the trajectory of Mitchell’s experience at the Home-of allowing him to conquer his fear of the diseases and wounds he might discover, for example? So, while “Asleep in the Lord” remains autobiographical in nature, it’s no longer burdened by too great a fidelity to the actual. Finally, after thirty years (!), I managed to get enough distance on the events to able to chuck out a lot of “what really happened” and write the story. In trying to be true to my experience, I ended up replicating the inartfulness of real life rather than creating a narrative with its own coherence and patterning.

The Talk of the Town piece, in 1997, represented another small attempt. I began trying to write about these events at the time I was experiencing them, way back in 1982. Almost everything I’ve ever written, and especially “Middlesex,” is made up. The difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, for me, at least, is that you feel compelled to be faithful to your memory, and so you end up putting in characters and scenes that you don’t need. Ashamed because I don’t especially prize autobiographical writing (why write fiction if you want to talk about yourself?) and also because it took me so long to figure out how to do it. I’m ashamed to say that “Asleep in the Lord” is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.

The marriage plot eugenides