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. All of this feels more at ease than Goon Squad, a novel Id never thought of as betraying any strain until I read The Candy House. 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. I realized, like, we have a problem here because the whole point of not pursuing a career was to have time to write, but trying to survive in New York on menial jobs ended up taking all day, every day. As in Goon Squad, Egan rifles through an assortment of fictional styles and motifs to tell these peoples stories. Did that experience help you with your own writing? It had more ideas in it. Im interested in people who are not like me. Im just a wannabe person. And its a tragedy in the Greek sense. Likewise with Twitter, I had the sense that a sort of Homeric Mediterranean as the site of a spy mission in the twenty-thirties could maybe live in short utterances, which I envisioned as a list of lessons learned, meaning that the protagonist is listing what she has learned from each step she takesrather than listing the actual step that she tookso its sort of indirect storytelling. Around then I got the novel draft out and looked at it and thought, Oh, my God, what was I thinking? I dont really have to keep that much straight because I dont have much of a plan. The subject feels inexhaustible because the technology keeps changing. Storyteller, Producer, Adventurer, Fan of People But perhaps its the members of your writing group who are your fiercest critics? I will always credit that institution with helping me figure out what kind of person I was and what kind of life I would live. The Collective Consciousness is the product of a company named Mandala, founded by Bix Bouton, the protagonist of the first chaptera charismatic entrepreneur whose genius lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form. Hes a bit Mark Zuckerberg, a bit Steve Jobs, except Bix is Black, first drawn into the world of the internet by the belief that, when disembodied, Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world. Bixs first big idealifted from an obscure anthropology monograph containing algorithms that calculated how trust and influence formed in a Brazilian tribewas a social media platform that made him rich and famous. It was like eating exactly the protein that my body wanted. Im thinking about one of the chapters in The Candy House, Lulu the Spy, 2032; it started as the story Black Box, which ran on the New Yorker Fiction Twitter feed as a series of tweets. I got an N.E.A. There was a period where I think I would have said, Well, I love lyrical writing. 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 was always so driven by a desire to get outside of my own world, and I felt like it did that for me. That place wasnt communal the way a lot of youth hostels were. So I really was extremely focussed. Were there notes and ideas that you didnt find a way to use? I drew a character map while reading Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, just for the pleasure of charting the swooping, kaleidoscopic intersections of parents and children (and cousins and tennis partners and drug dealers) of a central set of people first introduced in her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. So I had no words to understand what was happening to me. Thats not really the question youre asking, but it is something that I reassure myself with, because medical progress inarguably has made all our lives better. For more information on this site, please read our Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service. I wanted to travelthat was a deep wish, which I think, to some degree, came from living in California, where I felt very cut off from Europe. Stories so bleakly wrought that they make me eerily happy. Egans latest book, The Candy House, from 2022, now out in paperback, is just what that reader described: a series of sometimes bleak, interlocking narratives of unloved childhood, struggling adolescence, confused youth, and wary or regretful adulthood which are nevertheless shot through with a soul-warming sense of compassion. 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. But for some reason it was a revelatory experience to be cut off from those paths of least resistance. She wrote a book called The Leavenworth Case, in the eighteen-seventies. I mean, invisibility is a joy if you can reinhabit yourself eventually. I know. April 16, 2022, 11:07 AM. The protagonist is new. Cross-Channel Advertising Buyer Intent Insights Website Chat Web Form Enrichment. And so that gap year became about trying to earn money so that I could travel, and I ended up going to Japan as a model for March and April. And that was it. Which is not unusual, or definitely wasnt then. Ill just think, Oh, my God, its Armageddon. Goon Squad revolves, at least tangentially, around the music industry. Things felt very fragmented to me. But one sentence in the new novels penultimate chapter does strike me as unnecessary. But now it just feels like a superpower. So there comes a point when he shares just his memories of this man to the collective. Its so unreal in its coloration and so shiny and appealing. And also I was reading Another Country in the late seventies. Its packed with ideas, it offers brutal social commentary, and yet its hard to say exactly what that commentary is. Sometimes the best place to conceal the real is amid the fake, which could be the motto of fiction: the lie that tells a truth. Its a little like pruning: you prune to encourage growth in new ways, and I try to prune my own habits to keep growing and getting better. Ideally, youre doing all of itthe emotional part and the idea part. And I had this idea that my year would be devoted to archeology. I wish I knew their full names and could find out who they are and where they are now. But theyre good stories, and Im enjoying them. But I found myself, in September, with no plan at all. It allowed time travel within the book. The person who narrates the 1965 chapter, which describes how four young bankers leapt into the counterculture at a pot farm in the redwoods, is the daughter of one of the men. Apparently, they were standing on a shore or a ship. I finally wrote a story that Phil let me finish reading, and I was so astonished when he said, Keep going, that I cried in the workshop. Contact & Company Search Sales Automation Conversation Intelligence Workflows. So, he was living there and running K.F.C. It allowed me to write both from the perspective of looking back at the past and from the perspective of the future. Anyway, there were good times, but then there was this refrain of fear. I ended up editing the literary magazine. So it was very disappointing to find not only that people didnt like it but that ultimately, when I could sort of gather my courage to read it, I found it pretty unreadable, too. Everything about what I just said, all those emotions, all those sentiments are dull. 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And I feel it is essential that I do precisely the opposite. Talent Search Candidate I havent read him in quite a while. How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? How did you decide which characters from Goon Squad to explore in The Candy House? But my ability just wouldnt back me up. Chris starts out working for company seeking to turn what it calls stockblocks, narrative components from movies (Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense Into Protagonist; Crowd Rises to Its Feet in Unexpected Tribute), into mathematical formulae, although to what end he cant tell. And, ultimately, I ended up having to go home. That story picked up on a character from Goon Squad, much later in her life, and Im wondering if that was the gateway story for The Candy House? Id think, Well, if you just let me read a little more. It wasnt like dying. See what you think. And, when I wrote Black Box as a series of tweets, I was not good at using Twitter at all. This interview is drawn from two conversations. Are you willing to talk about why youre so interested in the eighteen-seventies? At some point, we become aware that his daughter is telling the story. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on whos telling the story. It was so useful later to have all that documentation. The person who invents the technology becomes a kind of throughline for The Candy Housea guy named Bix Bouton, whos a minor character in Goon Squad. A lot of people dont even remember him. But our mental processes aremore mysterious than we realize. Jennifer Eagan is an anchor and general assignment reporter at WCVB Channel 5, Boston's News Leader. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend EyeOpener (Saturday & Sunday 5:00AM, 6:00AM, 8:00AM, and Sunday 10:00AM) along with Rhondella Richardson. She is a Wrentham native and has been a reporter in New England for more than a decade. In terms of style, I dont know. I want you to write a story that has no kids in it and nothing about the past. I remember thinking, You really have some nerve. Which means uninteresting. So that all felt really close to me, and I used my itinerary from my doomed European trip, which I had documented so extensively in my journal. 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. I gleaned this device and its various properties more from first-draft material that I started writing in those early years, from 2010 to 2013. It becomes so easy, I think, as a middle-aged or older person, to just settle into your own experience. . 7 Bulfinch Place Little by little, I began to get a sense that in the twenty-thirties, which I was writing into, theres the possibility of thought sharing. And the big transition that she makes in that book is that she inhabits herself and her life as a real thing. That idea content became a kind of trademark of yours. One is that I find them so addictive that they actually interrupt my life. I feel its literary roots going so far back, which I love. I remember there was a moment when I was on the elliptical machine at the gym, reading the Merchant Marine Officers Handbook, from the nineteen-forties. But, at that timethis would have been the summer of 81it was exactly the opposite. 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 running K.F.C to the collective havent read him in quite a.... All those sentiments are dull not good at using Twitter at all ill just think, a. Think I would have been the summer of 81it was exactly the that... 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