175 Years of The Times

Jeffrey Eugenides: My First Day Seems So Much Older Than Me

Mr. Eugenides is the author of the novels “The Virgin Suicides,” “Middlesex” and “The Marriage Plot.”

To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. This is part of a series. Look up your own birthday page here.

In the 1980s, when I lived in San Francisco, I bought a desk from a used furniture store. It was my first serious writing desk, made of oak and as big as an aircraft carrier. Other than my futon, it was the only piece of furniture I owned. Once I got it home, I discovered that the two lower drawers were lined with newspapers. Old, yellowed newspapers, torn at the edges and some of them stained. The reason they were there was that........

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