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Complainers is one of the ten stories that make up Eugenides' most recent collection, Fresh Complaint, published in 2017. The story of two elderly women, who, crushed by the patriarchy and numerous glass ceilings defining their existence as wives and mothers, "elope" in a desperate attempt at self-definition and self-determination, Complainers is maybe Eugenides' most obviously feminist piece to date, except maybe The Virgin Suicides. The present paper sets out to trace feminist discourse in Eugenides' story by resorting to two core feminist texts, Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" and Audre Lorde's "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Through the lens of these two texts, we have attempted to prove that what Eugenides depicts in Complainers is essentially a non-sexual, but profoundly spiritual lesbian relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a six year publishing break in the aftermath of his novel The Marriage Plot that appeared in 2011, the story collection Fresh Complaint was published in 2017 and contains ten stories focusing on Jeffrey Eugenides' core topics of interest: the impossibility of coherent identity construction, personal and social loneliness and isolation, and the frailness and ephemerality of human connections. "Fresh Complaint", the story that gives the collection its title, offers a postcolonial image of twenty-first century America, India and England, while keeping with the theme dearest to Eugenides' heart: the gasping void that fills all human interaction and communication. The story masterfully thematizes one of postcolonialism's central concerns, the one of the generational and cultural gap between first and second generation immigrants. The present paper's attempt is to offer a postcolonial reading of Eugenides' text, while also placing it in relation to his previous writings and main thematic concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]