![]() ![]() A building one block from us had a historical marker indicating that Albert Einstein had rented an apartment there, too. Vladimir Nabokov, it turned out, had lived in Wilmersdorf during the 1920s. My wife and I slept in one bedroom, I worked in the other, and we converted the surprisingly spacious broom closet into a nursery for our daughter. ![]() ![]() We had a nice two-bedroom apartment in the sleepy neighborhood of Wilmersdorf. Moving to Berlin solved all these problems. The shakes I had at my desk could not be entirely blamed on the massive amounts of caffeine I was imbibing. My book, which I'd been working on for a number of years already, was far from finished, and the more I tried to put on an appearance of painstaking, Flaubertian calm, the more my inner self began to betray me. We had nowhere else to go and little money in the bank. Our landlord, a mean old man who owned the brownstone we lived in (hi there, Doug, still living alone?) was kicking us out for the offense of having a kid. The fellowship had come at a fortunate time. Among the things I'd packed in my large suitcase was the unfinished manuscript of Middlesex. I'd been given an apartment to live in and a small stipend to survive on, compliments of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm, which has been bringing foreign artists to the city since 1961. In 1999, I moved with my wife and 8-month-old daughter from New York to Berlin. Author of the deeply intelligent and romantic novel The Marriage Plot and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Jeffrey Eugenides reveals how to find the inspiration that can overcome fear and anxiety-and let you thrive. ![]()
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