At that point, the Goon Squad world really faded from my mind, except when I was thinking about abstract ideas that were interesting to me. Lou Kline is running his record company with the help of his two daughters, and, in 1999, Napster comes along, and everyone realizes that it is going to be a disaster for the music industry. Its true that most young people tend to be self-involved. I still dont really know. I have to find the story that can only be told that way. Witnessing all these differently motivated agendas gradually coalesce into a creative force is an exhilarating delight. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on whos telling the story. I worked as a temp in the word-processing pool for Willkie Farr & Gallagher for a few months. And I feel it is essential that I do precisely the opposite. Not only thatI had saved every map and drawn circles around each site that I visited. A member of the 7 Action News morning team since 2015, LaFlamme posted the news of her departure Monday afternoon on social media Michigan's new But, honestly, there were also people I wanted to write about but wasnt able to successfully. I love taking a point of view that is opposed to the one that I traditionally occupy. The power of the image and image culture, its relationship to our inner lives, terrorism as an epiphenomenon of image culture, just as modelling isI kind of brought those two ideas together in my novel Look at Me.. And I justmy environment became suddenly strange to me, and I felt really alienated. What are they doing? At some point, we become aware that his daughter is telling the story. As in so many books written in the fifties and sixties, the way women are written about feels jarring to a contemporary sensibility, but its still great. I just told the story in a much more straightforward way, and it was an absolute relief to do that. And there were these little signs of approval that would come along, like a handwritten nice note or sometimes even a signed name. All you need to know is that I was born in 1962. My curiosity tended to be applied to the characters who are the most opaque in Goon Squad, characters who seem almost dispensable, because theyre so minor; that automatically made me curious, because, of course, there are no minor characters in real life. And there was no way I could have reached anyone to talk about it. I couldnt seem to make anything much happen. The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. It was carefully written to run that way, but I didnt realize it when you first sent it to me, in 2012. Its so spectacular. April 16, 2022, 11:07 AM. WebJennifer Egan. It was so useful later to have all that documentation. And then, if they wish, they can share all or part of their memories to a collective, the Collective Consciousness, and that ends up being an important development that plays out through the course of the book. So, with Manhattan Beach, I thought, Well, Im not going to just write a novel set in the past. So thats what I was doing. But I also look forward to the point when we can somehow acknowledge the offense, recognize that the work would be better without it, which is always true, and yet also acknowledge that the work is utterly worth reading. So Charlie, his daughter, solves the mystery, but along the way she also learns that her father loved her brother more than he loved her, and he reflected on that repeatedly. I feel so grateful to the ones who stick with me. If A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time and music, The Candy House is about experience and art, although the novels four sections (Build, Break, Drop, Build) refer back to the musical structures of Goon Squad. How did you get from there to the first book? So, yes, that stuff is all there in The Invisible Circus. And I think the feeling of not being real is also very present in that book. My moms. Own Your Unconscious, his second breakthrough, was also lifted from an academics research and allows people to deposit a copy of their memory to a sexy bit of tech shaped like a luminous cube. The chapter is an illustration of how human connection works, facilitated by technology, yet not so different from the Brazilian tribe studied by anthropologist Miranda Kline, who is dismayed to see her monograph monetized by Bix into a surveillance platform disguised as a community. Jennifer and her husband, Jason, are expecting their second child. I knew that dataa relationship between data and storytellingwould be really important in The Candy House. So I found myself thinking about that a lot and taking notes on it. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing., Photographs by Thea Traff for The New Yorker, private secretary to the Countess of Romanones. So that was where my mind went. So, for example, when I started working on Manhattan Beach, I was trying to establish the voice, which is one of those elusive concepts and yet a totally necessary element of successful fiction, and I had this idea that I think was left over from Goon Squad, in which I took a kind of winking approach to time: the reader often knows what happens before the characters do, because the story moves backward. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. We are all the protagonists of our own lives. So many! Instagram, Twitter and TikTok can monopolize all of your time, driven by what the novelist Jennifer Egan calls humankinds ongoing hunger for authenticity.. That is a kind of catalytic discovery for him that gets him out of his house and into action. Recalling a character whos struggling to complete a novel, an authorial voice-over drops in to explain that only fiction lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective. Paeans from a novelist to the unique powers of fiction do register as a bit self-serving, but the reason Egan doesnt need to tell us this is because shes spent the previous 13 chapters gloriously proving it. Weve talked about your recent books but not about the beginning of your career. All rights reserved. I feel alienated from characters like me. Storyteller, Producer, Adventurer, Fan of People During the actual process of writing something, you dont always realize that its inert. He gave me an introduction to George Plimpton, whom I dont think I had any real contact with, but someone in his office said, Were having a party, come. The Paris Review had what I guess are now these storied parties. 7 Bulfinch Place I came with a suitcase on a plane alone. And I think when those panic attacks came there may have been a sort of weird existential aspect to them. My first stepfather had a good friend who was this kind of wild man named Loy Weston. They are insanely sexist. Things felt very fragmented to me. But back then I was awed and amazed by everything around me, and I actually felt that I was not a real person for a lot of my early life. In general, imposing any sort of structure on an existing story has never worked for me. Goon Squad revolves, at least tangentially, around the music industry. Anyway, Uncle Loy, as I called him, introduced Kentucky Fried Chicken to Japan. I dont think I was thinking I would be a writer at that point. The judgments I have are generic. I was really afraid that I was mentally ill, although I also had some great times, and I met some wonderful people on that trip. And then I tried to write a novel, which was absolutely terrible, but I think my problem was more that I had not figured out what my method was yet. That was how I was able to do it. So I will write a first draft and then look at it more critically and ask myself whether the form will continue to serve what Im doing. And this is the foundation of the next novel? Thats right. Its a historical novel set in Brooklyn during the Second World War, and it required a huge amount of research. I think maybe I was the inverse of that. I did not think it while looking at Twitter! In terms of style, I dont know. And this work routine of writing for four hours every morningthat was enough time to get a lot done. I think I was a strange young person. Its so easy to say. As a single, stand-alone book, Im not sure anything can top it, actually. He had these thoughts, and they are painful for Charlie to witness. And, often, theres not a huge overlap between those two. The feeling of being unreal compared with other people is, if anything, worse now. The protagonist is new. Your most recent book, The Candy House, which came out last spring, picks up the stories of several of the characters in your 2010 book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The structure is similar, too, in that each chapter tells a story about a different character, but the chapters interlock and revolve around a kind of central core. And also I was reading Another Country in the late seventies. But the only thing that really had my attention atmospherically was Manhattan Beach. Then when I finished writing that, I finally started typing up The Candy House material, and a lot of it was really not good. Egans outputshe has published seven books of fictionis notable not for its uniformity of style and approach but for its ever-shifting ambitions and obsessions. grant. Im kind of excited, because it definitely was frustrating, with Manhattan Beach, to feel that I couldnt find any more interesting way to approach the convention of historical fiction except to hit it head on. The story definitely got attention; it was by a completely unknown writer. I felt that other people were always doing things better than I was. I cant even utter those words because its such a downer. As in Goon Squad, Egan rifles through an assortment of fictional styles and motifs to tell these peoples stories. Theres no, you know, not quite having time and sort of fudging it slightly, or fixating on little things instead of big things. Are you willing to talk about why youre so interested in the eighteen-seventies? We update links when possible, And that was it. Youre giving the Internet access to your own music and your own computer. They come away, often, with uncomfortable knowledge. Pour en savoir plus sur la faon dont nous utilisons vos donnes personnelles, veuillez consulter notre politique relative la vie prive et notre politique en matire de cookies. There was no pressing reason for the PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad to be written in PowerPoint besides proving that Egan could do it, but the email/text chapter, titled See Below, could only be written in this form. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. But I was assiduously sending out my stories. Its deeply problematic from the standpoint of sexual mores and violence against women. I think theres probably a little bit too much of my research in that book. Cupcake gender reveal for NewsCenter 5's Jennifer Eagan Updated: 11:25 AM EDT Apr 16, 2022 Sorry, this video is not available, please check back later. One example of that is a character named Sasha, in Goon Squad, who likes to steal. I think some of that was that I felt that Id been over-rewarded for Goon Squad, and I feared a kind of comeuppancethat, coupled with the fact that I was doing the thing that I felt least qualified to do, because one thing Ive realized over time is that, although I dont write about myself or people I know, the physical environments I rely on are ones that I remember. In order to write about my characters, I have to identify with them completely, and by that I mean that their choices need to feel not only viable and logical but, from their point of view, actually essential. I think my failure ratio is higher with this kind of book than with any other. What is the appeal of that structure for you? I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before, she told me. but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. I had sent things to The New Yorker, and they would always come back with a form letter. It was tissue-thin paper with tiny print, and it was so dense, and I remember the person on the elliptical next to me glancing over, and I could tell they were thinking, like, Wow, I cannot believe that is what she is using to entertain herself while she works out. I guess that, in a way, it reproduces that feeling of not being real and thinking that other people were more real, which really was painful but has also left me with something that I value, which is a willingness to kind of forget who I am while hearing about the experiences of other people. I dont know. Do you think that there is something inherent to your voice, no matter which book it is? So there comes a point when he shares just his memories of this man to the collective. It fuelled this constant desire for information. It was so thrilling. I dont really regret that, because it informed the development of my thinking, but by this point I needed to just read a bunch of books. But sometimes the limitations actually feel bizarrely freeing, and I have this sense of possibility and opening and a voice that can continue. WebDiscover the book. The Internet seems dangerous to me. And I think that approach was exactly what I needed. She explains that the reason she knows what happened to him is that shes using his externalized memory. But the good part was that she paid me enough to live on, and I worked from 1 to 6 P.M. on weekdays. Oh, yes. Its also a painful process. Tara Edwards is now suing Scripps Media Inc., the company that owns Channel 7 News, seeking $100 million, according to attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who filed It takes place in Chicago, where Im originally from. I definitely wanted to be an archeologist. How did you decide which characters from Goon Squad to explore in The Candy House? If that book even worksand that is still a question mark. Thats true, absolutely. My moms a huge readershe taught me to read, and weve been exchanging books and book ideas ever since. I mean, I do think that theres an existential misery at the heart of social media. Its just such a privilege and a joy to be thrust out of ones own life and into other peoples lives. That was a really hard way to live. And when I brought in this chapter, with its bells and whistles, they at first gently informed me that it was not really to their liking, and then more stridently said that when my narrator got, you know, ironic and winky with the reader they became angry. I doubt it. This interview is drawn from two conversations. So the bottom line was: I didnt publish a book until I was thirty-two. Do you feel that you need to keep your style evolving? It was a crazy two months. But perhaps its the members of your writing group who are your fiercest critics? If you go to a graveyard and see how many women were dying in their twenties, probably in childbirth. A questionable service, but he was extremely successful. But its all about framing and giving people the ability to metabolize something so that they have the option of enjoying it. But for some reason it was a revelatory experience to be cut off from those paths of least resistance. I guess what Im saying is that I dont have judgments about technology, actually. Yes, thank God. It allowed me to do certain narrative things that I knew I wanted to do. Well see. One took place as a New Yorker Live event, on Zoom, in June, 2022. And, in some cases, I knew more about a character than the reader did by the end of Goon Squad. I knew, when I wrote about Bix in Goon Squad, that he would go on to invent social media, and it bothered me that the reader had no idea, so that generated a sense of wanting to revisit him. In the nineteenth century, Im an Anthony Trollope freak, but I didnt actually come to Trollope until the last few years, at my moms suggestion, so I cant claim that as literary DNA. Then I had a scholarship to go to England and study at Cambridge. Does that one have a contemporary setting? Thats kind of what it boils down to: I had this face that reminded people of other faces, but there wasnt something striking there, which I took as a personal failure. I feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way. Their emotional lives need to feel immediate and accessible. Manhattan Beach-level research, for sure. WebNews Team Connect Jennifer Eagan is an anchor and general assignment reporter at WCVB Channel 5, Boston's News Leader. And I guess all of it speaks to the main thing I feel, which is that incremental success is absolutely the way to go, because that way you dont get ahead of yourself. Certainly, about as different from a city as you could get. . I joined a workshop with Philip Schultzthe Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who now has a kind of institute called the Writers Studio. Anyway, there were good times, but then there was this refrain of fear. So that was Dan accepting the story. . So when I decided that I wanted to write it was never with a sense of the tremendous potential that I would unleash on the world. . And I thought, If this material can affect me this way, there has to be a book there. At the same time, I was looking for some kind of writing class, because I clearly needed help. And he said, I have a challenge for you. It had to have been a fluke of timing. So its a deeply uncomfortable process, always, but just essential for me, because at the beginning I dont always know what Im trying to do, and when I ultimately do know what Im trying to do I dont know if Im doing it, and I like to find out while I still have time to close the gap. So thats a challenge, but I think its a really important challenge. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend That idea content became a kind of trademark of yours. But one sentence in the new novels penultimate chapter does strike me as unnecessary. Yes. Has all of your work been read first by the writing group? It was kind of like that. I didnt tell anyone about them because I was so ashamed. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing. There were ideas about structures that I might want to try, and, you know, culture is always offering up new ones. Does it slow you down, or is it liberating to feel that you have backup? We all have passing encounters in our lives that leave a memory but not enough of one to flesh out with any sort of information, and I kept thinking about how I could do that. And at the Squaw Valley one I met Virginia Barber, who was my first agent. When I write a first draft, what Im holding onto is a sense of atmosphere and the physical environment where the piece is unfolding. Can we talk more about that? If you think about the eighteen-seventies, its basically the beginning of the Gilded Age, and yet none of that stuff existed yet. So, again, back to curiosityif I can access my curiosity, Im suddenly totally fascinated, because I think, What are they looking at? I have taught another book I absolutely loved as a teen-ager, Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown. Thats where the Collective Unconscious would come in handy. Never did I appreciate more how urgently important that was to my writing process than when I cut myself off from that possibility by writing outside of my lifetime. Theres something different about this story. I thought, Well, all these paragraphs are very short, but I wasnt yet Twitter-aware enough to realize why. I dont know if I can really explain it, but that was what I thought: other people were more real than I was. In Goon Squad, Bix was a grad student in electrical engineering. WebCopyright WHDH-TV / Sunbeam Television Corporation. 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