I run across coincidences in my reading life all the time, usually involving an author referencing something I just saw in another form or was just talking about with someone else.

A few weeks ago, my friend Brooke wrote about her latest read on her blog, and in the process randomly mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides.  That was only a few days after I began reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Middlesex.”

This is one of those stories that was so engrossing, I barely paused to highlight anything.  The narrator, Cal, describes his family’s multi-generational journey from a small town in Greece, to struggling immigrants in America, to thriving in the heydays of Detroit before bad luck and bad decisions changed everything.  Amid all of that, Cal grew up as Callie, the product of a gene mutation and an incompetent doctor who never noticed what made her different from other girls.  Callie didn’t find out until she was 16, and shifted into a new life as Cal.

Growing up is hard enough when you’re “normal,” and slowly learning the detailed history of Cal’s differences that were never his fault is heartbreaking.  It’s a drawn-out “woooooooow, that’s tough.”  Yet no matter what you look like, how popular you were in school or what your family life was like growing up, there’s so much in his story that relates.  That process of learning about yourself, absorbing disappointments and finding your way happens to everyone, and that’s the hook that I think makes it so easy to put yourself in Cal’s shoes.

One of the few pages I did flag had this great section about one of Callie’s high school friends, who seemed completely disinterested in the classroom, but came alive as an actress.

“Talent is a kind of intelligence,” he writes.  “Far away from her cigarettes and her snobbishness, her cliquish friends, her atrocious spelling.  This was what she was good at: appearing before people.  Stepping out and standing there and speaking.  She was just beginning to realize it then.  What I was witnessing was a self discovering the self it could be.”

I think Eugenides captures so well that feeling of looking on as someone you care about finds their “thing.”  You see them take steps toward something that could be great, and as they begin to succeed, the whole process feeds on itself, growing exponentially as ambition feeds back on confidence.

A friend recommended this book to me and described it as amazing, but heartbreaking.  I would agree with that assessment, but would add in the incredible power of seeing someone overcome those circumstances.  Not every story is happy, but neither is it sad.  There’s a spectrum to life, and Cal’s story encompasses many of its parts.