Jeffrey Eugenides' 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides is considered a modern classic.
The American writer has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2002 novel Middlesex, and is now a professor of creative writing at Princeton University,
But despite his professional success and a privileged upbringing, the financial precariousness of life in America haunts Eugenides and runs right through his new short story collection Fresh Complaint.
US Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex, has a new book of short stories out called "Fresh Complaint". Photo: Gaspar Tringale
Eugenides had a privileged upbringing in Detroit, he says, but the city's prosperity then rapid decline was the backdrop of his childhood.
"I had a fairly affluent, pampered upbringing, but was right next to the city and spent a lot of time there.
"It was strange to grow up in a city where many of the buildings were being abandoned and burned and city landmarks were disappearing.
"The experience of being born into a city that was thriving, and then ceases to thrive and goes through a period of depopulation destabilisation, violence... When I finally realised it was okay to write about my hometown I found a lot of material there."
Eugenides went to a "good school with influential teachers" and was bookish from an early age.
"I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and you were reading Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover. You didn't know what they were reacting against.
"What you were seeing was a kind deconstruction of the literary tradition and maybe not actually the tradition itself and so when I read Tolstoy or [George Eliot's novel] Middlemarch, I was astounded by their power.
"It's almost like seeing Picasso before you see Velazquez; you see the cubism before you see the figuration."
He draws from both traditions in his writing.
"I've tried to go back and avail myself of story, narrative and character in the 19th-century novel while not forgetting the playfulness and innovation of the post-modernists."
Financial insecurity is a theme that runs through many of the stories in Fresh Complaint - in 'Early Music', a man brings his family to financial ruin after buying an antiquated clavichord he can't afford.
After watching his father and grandfather lose their money later in life, Eugenides says that financial precariousness haunts him.
"I look at my Greek grandfather who came over, he was an educated man a teacher, he came to America and had to run a grocery and then he ran a bar and he did okay, he made a decent living and then late in life became interested in gambling and lost a lot of his money."
Eugenides' father made his losses in real estate.
"He could have retired as a mortgage banker and been fine and lived out his golden years in relative tranquillity but he wanted more, he wanted to hit it big. He went into real estate and made a lot of money and then lost it.
"I've seen in my life the American Dream attained and lost."
Despite his huge success as a novelist, Eugenides still has to work, he says.
"I didn't make that much money from The Virgin Suicides. I sold the book for a little bit of money. I certainly did well with Middlesex, but I'm also now a divorced man, so I've found my own ways to squander a fortune as my grandfather and father did before me!
"I certainly could not claim to be in the position of my grandfather or father at the end of their lives, but I live in fear of that, of how quickly things can change."
