Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan said, “I’m not interested in myself, and I don’t mean that I don’t like being myself, but for me, writing is about going beyond myself.” a guest of Jerusalem Writers Festival at Mishkenot ShananimWhich will run till May 11.
“I’m not interested in myself, and I don’t mean that I don’t like being myself, but for me, writing is about going beyond myself.”
Jennifer Egan
author of a body of work that includes a trip from the hooligan squad, manhattan beach And The Candy Houseand a former president of PEN America, she sat down to discuss how she creates her unconventional, highly acclaimed fiction, right from speaking at an event called The Right to Write: A Foundation Conference of PEN Israel Earlier
“When I feel like I’m on familiar ground, it feels like I’m failing somehow…. I’m not letting that magic work,” she said.
The magic she was referring to was her brilliant, idiosyncratic prose and dazzling, unexpectedly imaginative storytelling.
The Writings of Award-Winning Novelist Jennifer Egan
Egan, a Chicago native who has lived in Brooklyn for many years, has found great success with two books that defy categorization, a visit from the good squad And The Candy House, a trip from the hooligan squad2011 book for which he won the Pulitzer, has been described as a novel in linked stories that look at characters in and around the music industry over a period of decades. His 2022 novel, The Candy HouseIt also uses this format to tell the connected stories of a number of characters, some of whom have appeared in previous work but who are now related to the high-tech industry in which many of them work, new social media Trying to build platforms and apps that can change the fabric of our lives.
as written by Dwight Garner the new York Times,[S]She knows where she’s going and the polyphonic effects she wants to achieve, and she gets them, as if she’s writing on a type of MacBook that won’t exist for another decade.
Based on these two books, you could pigeonhole Egan as a writer who gravitates toward certain industries and technologies and a multi-character, multi-story format, but in 2018 she published Manhattan Beach, a is a more conventionally plotted novel. It tells the story of a young woman working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard building warships during World War II. Eventually, she decides to become a diver and is drawn to a powerful gangster on the docks who may hold the key to her father’s disappearance.
Egan, who describes her method as “improvisational and completely inefficient”, said she used whatever style she felt worked best for the story she wanted to tell.
talking about how The Candy House What appears to be some foresight in part about the concerns raised by the development of AI today is that she approaches the subject from a literary perspective, not a technical one, and that she is not a technically oriented person. “I’m not attracted to technology. To me it’s always felt like it’s going to be a slog and I’m going to have to learn how to do it, and then I’m also very scared of the impact that I see around me. And look….the degree to which we are all succumbing to the forces that are trying to make this stuff addictive – it’s really scary.”
Scary, but fascinating, Egan admits, adding that she can see the positive sides of the technological revolution, and that she especially enjoys audio books and is now “reading books more than ever”.
Addiction – to technology and drugs – is another important factor. The Candy Houseand while working on a times article about pregnant women’s addiction to opioids, she found herself thinking about addiction. When asked if she herself has struggled with the problem, she said, “No, thank God, I haven’t, but I’m surrounded by it, absolutely. My father had a very serious drinking problem and was a Luckily got sober at a certain point, and my brother had a drinking problem….some friends from high school got really into addiction.
She said she relates in a more personal way to the struggle to break addiction to technology. “As a person, I’m pretty down on technology, but as a fiction writer I’m very curious about it, and I wouldn’t write about it if I thought about it.” [and] Everything I felt about it was negative; This wouldn’t be a good topic for me, because I’m not interested in moralizing people or teaching a lesson or warning – to me that’s boring. Conventional wisdom can lead to “groupthink”, she said, which she considers unhelpful and avoids studying.
Since, any story she is telling, she is not writing about herself or her acquaintances, she does extensive research for all of her work. he began to develop the plot for manhattan beach While there she was working on an oral history project of the Brooklyn Navy Yards and became interested in the women who worked there during World War II, and how gangsters were part of life in the Yards. “I don’t think there was a single oral history interview in which the word ‘gangster’ was not uttered; Everyone knew a gangster. Gangsters were a part of everyday life; It was a job description and not completely unacceptable.
For him, the challenge of writing a period novel was not how the characters dressed or what they ate, “but understanding what people were thinking, what they were missing, what they were nostalgic for, what they were collectively What were they afraid of, what had happened recently, what big events were on the mind of a 20-year-old, a 40-year-old, an 80-year-old, etc. That’s the stuff that’s really hard.
asked about television adaptations of manhattan beach And a trip from the hooligan squad Reportedly in the works, she said, “I don’t go near screenwriting; I’m not interested in …. Everything always turns into something.
When asked to talk about characters she felt particularly close to, she mentioned Bix, a black tech entrepreneur who made a brief appearance in it. goon squad tour and who has a more central role The Candy HouseWhich led him to consider the tendency of people to criticize authors who write about characters who are different from themselves.
“Bix has a character Goon Squad And she has a small role, and I remained curious about that, and so it felt very natural to move forward with her,” she said, noting that she had written a Candy House chapter about him in 2011 or 2012, “…so this came long before the recent racial outcry in America. I think I would probably be more hesitant to write about him now, but I already Had done…
“I hate this kind of self-censorship…. I think it’s really bad for fiction. I think… that a lot of people are afraid to write about anything that happened to them, because they feel they have no right to do so; and that, I think, is really bad for [literary fiction] Style. But this is also the world we live in, but I think we really have to step back. Toni Morrison has repeatedly talked about how the first thing she would say to her students was, ‘Forget your boring life and imagine you are someone else. I don’t want to hear what happened to you.’ I really agree with that, so I’m really hoping we can get out of this impasse, because the genre is already under threat, you know, from all the distraction….if we keep writing crappy books. because we feel like we’re not allowed to tell stories that are anything other than our lives, which isn’t good for the genre, and I want to keep the genre strong because I think it does things like What no one else can do.
As much as he is concerned about literature, Egan is also focused on what is going on in the world and is interested in the present. Anti-judicial reform protest in Israel,
She had previously spent time in Israel when her husband had a Jerusalem fellowship, and so felt comfortable participating in Saturday night’s protest in Tel Aviv.
“It was exciting,” she said. Compared to anti-Trump protests in the US, “it felt more joyous. I loved it. It felt very alive. There was obviously a lot of anger… but I thought it also had a celebratory quality to it, and it was a little different and really wonderful,” he said before going to speak at the Penn event.