He said, Yes, its good, but you can do better. And I thought, Dude, everyone loves it, its emotional. I had sent things to The New Yorker, and they would always come back with a form letter. Usually my test is whether I really have no interest in continuingif it feels better to walk away than to continue. All of that felt so alive to me. By the way, I had met him at Squaw Valley, originally. 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. It was the first sign that in no way was I finished with the Goon Squad world. 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. It is really sort of amazing to think of how different that trip would be now. Jennifer and her husband, Jason, are expecting their second child. And its also one of the first highbrow books that I read for pleasure. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House comes together in pieces. With the nineteenth-century book, I assumed it would be Here we are in the past, and what I found was that that approach felt very flat. The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. The . 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 Theyd lost interest, so it was time to stop. And the device I eventually came up with allowed me to do a lot of things. I got an N.E.A. 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. 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. So that was where my mind went. The way that he managed to accommodate this potentially large amount of work that might come on any particular night was that he would stop people when he felt the room had heard enough. Oh, yes. And, believe me, I was hitting that point very quicklylike, I was barely getting past a couple of pages. In some cases, I didnt even type the chapters up; I could just feel that they were sort of inert. 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. That seems so artificial. Its just such a privilege and a joy to be thrust out of ones own life and into other peoples lives. Eagan, who graduated from Boston College, will join WCVB after more than five years at WHDH 7News as a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor. Send me updates about Slate special offers. Another book I pulled from her shelves was James Baldwins Another Country. I absolutely loved that novel, which I reread recently. We actually began as a writing class. but that wasnt true. If you buy something through our links, But that was all I did. Maybe David Copperfield, but I think not even. The big lesson that I learned is: dont ever assign a book without having read it recently, because our standards are changing, and thats all for the good. Ive noticed with my kids and their friends that you dont find young people questioning adults about their lives very much. Its intentionalnot so much out of a directive as to what I think I should be doing but because I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before. I just couldnt find the right vibe or structure or physical environment to write something that was worthy of inclusion. It just insisted on moving more slowly. I was thinking about this list of utterances that I was generating in the voice of this person on her spy mission. And where did that idea come from? Then, at a certain point, I felt that I was starting to really spin my wheels with The Candy House project, and, except for Black Box, I didnt even type any of it up; it was just a handwritten draft that I put away so that I could focus just on Manhattan Beach.. And I will sometimes feel that a particular physical environment might live well in a structure that I have on my list. I wanted to be a famous model, and thank God I did so badly at it, because would I have walked away from more success in that realm? 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. What makes real success happen is actually continuing to do better and better work. Stories like Jennifer Egans make me want to continue my subscription to The New Yorker and discontinue my prescription to anti-depressants, a reader once wrote in. Its pure genius. 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. J. Smith-Cameron knows what everyone thinks about Gerri. Dostoyevsky was someone I really loved at an earlier age. 2023 Cond Nast. But I found that, actually, it felt impossible to get there without contending with the fifties. Egenolf came to the station in late 2016 to serve as an update anchor. The public may view the reports by going to WHDH.com and clicking on "FCC Public File", or by visiting the FCC's website at FCC.org. The title of the book is clearly a warning, but I also think of it as more neutral. I had read a lot of books about books that I hadnt read. I mean, invisibility is a joy if you can reinhabit yourself eventually. 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 the Brits, I mean, MiddlemarchI think it is one of the best novels written in English, no question about it. He felt bad about it and hoped it was normal. And Im so happy, actually, that I was like that, because I ended up having so many encounters and conversations that I wouldnt have had otherwise. He went on this adventure in the California woods, where he smoked marijuana and got a sense of a cultural change that was imminent, and he returned home having basically decided to walk away from the conventional life hed made for himself and his family. The second took place on a dark and rainy afternoon in January in Egans high-ceilinged but homey living room in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after I had displaced one of her three catsThats Cuddles, our dim beautyfrom her spot on the couch. 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. But at least Id have got some work done. I love to think about the sound and the music of language. But it was a lot of fun in The Keep, for example, to give all of that up and write in the voice of someone who is not versed in any of the conventions of writingso that any sort of lyric beauty that comes along happens by accident. Not only is the notion of finding out exactly what other people think of you pretty terrifying, but the raw memories pose a threat to the stories we make of them afterward, stories that construct our lives. It was more interesting. I sent this book to Romulus Linney. Each chapter is told from a different perspective selected from a group of interconnected characters, many of whom also appear in Goon Squad (although you dont need to remember them well to follow this one). 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 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. What element of current technology do you think has effected the greatest change? And Ive heard this actually from friends whose kids were abroad and said, Other people are having better years abroad than I am. And how do they know? Very often, depending on the constraints of the structure, especially if its a radical one, I immediately feel unable to go on. And then you imagine new technologies for the future. I started submitting things to literary magazines on campus. I clearly dont pay close enough attention. I dont think so, no, because its going to take so much research. friends, Drew and Rob, he walks with them to the East River to watch the sunrise. I wish I knew their full names and could find out who they are and where they are now. He wrote a nice note back, and it was very encouraging. During the actual process of writing something, you dont always realize that its inert. 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. Pieter M. Van Hattem Advertisement One character, the junkie daughter of a music producer, uses the device to relive a dearly remembered trip to In one form or another, yes, because I was working on my first novel, The Invisible Circus, when I joined the class that became the writing group. The way it worked was that he had quite a few people in the workshop, and anyone could bring in work. Because the story Ive settled into is that I didnt want to be a writer, and then it sort of came to me during this year off that I was taking. I would go to writers conferences in the summers, which I think is a great way to actually get some feedback and make connections. In order to access the Collective Unconscious in the book, you have to share your own consciousness, and that give-to-get model is also familiar to us. Theres no, you know, not quite having time and sort of fudging it slightly, or fixating on little things instead of big things. All rights reserved. And I think I felt that gave me some sort of control or ownership of whatever was going on, whether it was good or bad. So you get these bolts of approval that sometimes come a little bit too soon, in the sense that theres no way to really follow up. 2023 Lous daughters are trying to figure out a way to warn people not to use Napster, and they flirt with the notion of a billboard campaign: along American highways, there would be billboards reading NEVER TRUST A CANDY HOUSE. The message is basically, This music seems to be free, but its not. And I guess really, at bottom, what Im reflecting on is the great technological revolution that Ive witnessed in my lifetime, being technically a baby boomerits a long generation, and Im at the tail end of it. There were also some really good Agatha Christies I hadnt read, particularly The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is just a knockout. Oh, my God. She wrote a book called The Leavenworth Case, in the eighteen-seventies. It takes place in Chicago, where Im originally from. Japan and was very friendly with the world of models and modelling agents. Slate has relationships with various online retailers. And I think when those panic attacks came there may have been a sort of weird existential aspect to them. Have there been any writers or books that have had a strong effect on you? It was like vanishing. April 16, 2022, 11:07 AM. Its unsparing. But the reason I kept it there is not the reason I always thought people included research in their novelsit wasnt to show off. All Rights Reserved. One of those, for example, was to write a story in which people can find other people whom theyve glimpsed only once, whose names they dont know. Si vous souhaitez personnaliser vos choix, cliquez sur Grer les paramtres de confidentialit. It fuelled this constant desire for information. I thought, Is this a prank? I love taking a point of view that is opposed to the one that I traditionally occupy. It felt like, somehow, by moving a little bit away from this emotional hot area of adolescence, I could feel ideas coming into the story in ways that were exciting to me. So, he was living there and running K.F.C. He was a real playboy. I guess what Im saying is that I dont have judgments about technology, actually. Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on whos telling the story. 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. I had a kind of breakthrough in Tom Jenkss class. . So, for example, with modellingand it seems so laughable now because, obviously, that was not a career that made a lot of sense for mebut what it felt like was other people were real and they succeeded, and I was fake and, therefore, I failed. I joined a workshop with Philip Schultzthe Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who now has a kind of institute called the Writers Studio. Sunbeam Television Corp So people were interested, and they would say, Show me what else you have, but everything else I had was clearly not as good. One is that I find them so addictive that they actually interrupt my life. It gets very hard because of the sexism, but I think I may try. Jennifer Egan wants to save literary fiction from itself By Lynn Steger Strong April 3, 2022 5 AM PT To do something fully, you have to believe it will change Moving back in time to the years between Goon Squad and The Candy House: in 2017, you published Manhattan Beach, which is a very different kind of novel. Before that, Id spent so much time just trying to earn money. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing. You know, I dont know how it happened. One of them, much revised, ended up in my first collection. But then I think that all that is really boring. dvelopper et amliorer nos produits et services. Which do we prefer? Slate may earn an affiliate commission. All contents And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. So, with Manhattan Beach, I thought, Well, Im not going to just write a novel set in the past. Can I see? And thats no surprise, because when each chapter is written from a different point of view that gives a book a kind of open-endedness. She has a new opportunity in front of her, which she cannot yet reveal. The actors estrangedRead More, An elderly couple is capturing hearts everywhere after a passenger snapped a picture of the two lovebirds riding the subway in New York. 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. Maybe I would have. I was so alone. That place wasnt communal the way a lot of youth hostels were. 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