In 1982, when he was 21,living in India and volunteering at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote letters home to Grosse Pointe, Mich., filled with parent-pleasing tidings like the fact that leprosy wasn't all that easy to catch. "You feel pretty invulnerable when you're that age," he recalled recently in Princeton, where he lives with his wife and daughter in an airy, book-lined Tudor house. At the time, he was caught up in an altruistic quest "to see if you could actually live your life doing things for others in a saintly way." To his parents, the virtue of this goal was not necessarily apparent. "I sent a lot of letters that really alarmed my mother in those days, and now I understand-as a parent myself-how awful it must have been for her."
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