My mom had a friend, a guy named Blair Fuller, who had been involved with The Paris Review as a younger man. That sounds so weird. Contact & Company Search Sales Automation Conversation Intelligence Workflows. How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? she realizes. Youre kind of describing the process of reading fiction. How did you decide which characters from Goon Squad to explore in The Candy House? Im just a wannabe person. Japan and was very friendly with the world of models and modelling agents. 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. Its now 2010, and he finds himself back at the East River at midnight, in the same spot where he stood with his friends all those years ago, and he is kind of flabbergasted to realize that he cannot remember much at all about that morning in 1993. 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. Another book I pulled from her shelves was James Baldwins Another Country. I absolutely loved that novel, which I reread recently. Our consciousness is not like a camera. You once worked as a private secretary to the Countess of Romanones, who was a spy during the Second World War. Its important to me to hear about these very extreme experiences that I will never have but that enrich my understanding of the world and give me material that I can access later imaginatively. Im all for trigger warnings. It was partly just thoughts about objectification that had arisen from modelling, but had also been substantiated when I studied literary theory in college. But its funnythe people I met in my dorm hallway are my best friends to this day. And I continue to be very interested in genre, so Im reading a lot of crime fiction. The news about the 39-year-old performer was revealed by Deadline on Friday, and it was also reported that she would serve as the director of both projects. 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. How did you get from there to the first book? Are there noncrime writers who have been inspirations for you? I dont think so, no, because its going to take so much research. He felt bad about it and hoped it was normal. All rights reserved. I think probably the best whodunnit Ive ever readcertainly, contemporaryis Presumed Innocent. Theres psychological richness, its very hard to guess who the culprit is, and its heavy on atmosphere. The book is called The Candy House, which I assume is a reference to Hansel and Gretel, a story in which a candy house seduces children with sugar. Steve Eagar is a reporter and evening news anchor for Fox 4 News. I clearly dont pay close enough attention. So these writers conferencesI cant recommend them too highly to young writers. So putting the words down made you more real? 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. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Egan was born in Chicago, and her parents divorced when she was two. It was so thrilling. I had just turned eighteen. I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before, she told me. But there are lots of other great crime stories. When we meet him in The Candy House, he has invented social media. The Paris Review had many volunteer slush-pile readers, so I started doing that. And then I also have people who read whole drafts and an editor whos incredibly helpful as well. The feeling of being unreal compared with other people is, if anything, worse now. Goon Squad revolves, at least tangentially, around the music industry. Si vous ne souhaitez pas que nos partenaires et nousmmes utilisions des cookies et vos donnes personnelles pour ces motifs supplmentaires, cliquez sur Refuser tout. One bravura chapter, reminiscent of the famous PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, is told in directives conveyed to an undercover agent through an implant in her brain. But there were enough ideas there for me to feel that it could become a book. I think theres probably a little bit too much of my research in that book. You know, I dont know how it happened. A questionable service, but he was extremely successful. I would try to write five to seven pages of each project each day, and Im actually doing the same thing nowtrying to write five to seven pages a day of two very different projects. I think the first time it happened was in a youth hostel that was in a kind of high-rise building in Reims. Tell Hank: (855) 247-HANK. OpenAIs chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Interestingly, it didnt really come about that way. I put it in the mail, and two days later I had a message on my answering machine from Dan Menaker saying that he wanted to publish it. 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. And its a tragedy in the Greek sense. 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. Then the next crucial test is what happens when I start writing in this way. My mother and my stepfathers marriage started to break down while I was in Japan, so it was a pretty grim scene when I returned home. I was devastated. I feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way,Jennifer Egan says. Yes, I am. So when I got the job with the countess what it meant was that I could write from eight to noon every day, and I did. But our mental processes aremore mysterious than we realize. 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. While working on fiction, you have sometimes also taken on journalistic assignmentsfor the Times Magazine and other places. 2023 Cond Nast. Around then I got the novel draft out and looked at it and thought, Oh, my God, what was I thinking? Its almost unbelievable that people were allowed to publish these books, because the casual sexism is just impossible to metabolize for a contemporary sensibility. Does it slow you down, or is it liberating to feel that you have backup? I felt that other people were always doing things better than I was. At that point, I wasnt thinking about Twitter anymore. Thats whats so sad about it. One chapter mentions that thousands of abusers have been convicted based on the evidence of their victims externalized memories, viewed as film in courtrooms, leaving the wider impact on criminal justice, among other institutions, a tantalizing mystery. But Tom was kind of nonplussed. I think my whole generation has been so shaped by his work. I had never heard of her, but Ive read a number of her books now. 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. Talent Search Candidate I thought, It cant be real because there actually hasnt been enough time for the story to have even reached him. WebJoin Morning Show Producer Jill Egan at Centennial Park West Summer Concert Series 97.1fm The Drive WDRV Chicago NOW PLAYING SISTER CHRISTIAN NIGHT RANGER Drive Events This event has passed. 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. But the idea for the book felt unscathed by this effort, because the effort was so misguided, so wrongheaded. 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 doesnt come easily to me. But I will say that I worry about what happens when theres no more solitude, because, without it, Im not sure if I would ever have figured out any of the things that have made my life great, you know? I did not think it while looking at Twitter! I just knew that everyone kept mentioning it. They came to college with their parents and supplies. Its weird, you know? 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. When I write a first draft, what Im holding onto is a sense of atmosphere and the physical environment where the piece is unfolding. I cant even utter those words because its such a downer. Storyteller, Producer, Adventurer, Fan of People People will say, Are you interested in writing a think piece about something? And Ill think, You dont understand. In The Candy House, D&D represents one of several alternatives to the candy house of technology and information. Her grandfather passed away. When the expression comes up again, its used in a different way, by an aging rocker who wants to remix the old hits of a defunct band as a kind of candy house to lure in a new generation of listeners, so it has a much more benign vibe. It was so useful later to have all that documentation. Anyway, the thing that I had really been trying to do was just go to Europe with a backpack, so I did that finally. And, therefore, when I didnt really have encouragement it never stopped me. 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. I just told the story in a much more straightforward way, and it was an absolute relief to do that. I realize that Ive settled on a story of how it all happened, but sometimes I find myself wondering if it really did happen that way. Nous, Yahoo, faisons partie de la famille de marques Yahoo. I joined a workshop with Philip Schultzthe Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who now has a kind of institute called the Writers Studio. 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 had basically turned my back on archeology. The nineteenth-century book feels embedded in a contemporary context. I kind of felt like I was just disappearing, or my brain was crumbling. And I think the reason that I dont write about myself or people I know, ironically, is that I cannot identify with us on the page. What I love so much about writing journalism is that it gives me license to go marching out into the world and ask people all kinds of things and be the nosy busybody that I really am. But the good part was that she paid me enough to live on, and I worked from 1 to 6 P.M. on weekdays. And, when I failed, it felt like another manifestation of my lack of reality. I had never been to New York, and I felt like he was showing me a part of the world that I only dimly knew of and was so excited to get to. Yes. Oh, my God. I still dont. I was going to say that you often sound like your own fiercest critic; I havent heard many writers be as hard on themselves as you are. And Im now feeling like maybe I can. Egans latest is a beautiful reminder that the literary world has not fallen prey to Hollywoods existing-IP creative drought. Vanity Fair After her fiercely spectacular A Boston, MA 02114 My first stepfather had a good friend who was this kind of wild man named Loy Weston. After Bix leaves, the other two end up going swimming, and Rob drowns. As a single, stand-alone book, Im not sure anything can top it, actually. I think it was just what we would call anxiety, you know? 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. Anyway, Im just catching up on the genre, and I love the feeling that Im allowed to because its research. I feel very uninterested in writing about contemporary life at the momentalthough thats not totally true. He was not a gorgeous guyvery short, sort of funny-looking, but all swagger. 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? I didnt tell anyone about them because I was so ashamed. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. That idea content became a kind of trademark of yours. So that was a major career leap, although, as with every career leap I have experienced, there was a kind of difficult aftermath. So that was where my mind went. Egan thinks otherwise, maintaining that knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, its all just information. Forming it into a narrative is living (even if, as with Didion, the story you tell about yourself is that youre a neurasthenic cynic above such consolations). But perhaps its the members of your writing group who are your fiercest critics? WebDiscover the book. Photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem / Vistalux. I have a writing group that I rely on very heavilyI actually dedicated The Candy House to themand one reason I love having this group is that, with all of my shifting and changing, I really need to check, early and often, whether what Im doing is working at all. I read a lot of Shakespeare in England, and his storytelling abilities, putting aside the poetry and all the rest of it, were just so extraordinary. No, I had started getting little bits of positive reinforcement. I still dont really know. Im not going to say its great. Anyway, I was pretty conventional and ordinary as a writer, but I had one thing going for me. repudiate is too strong a word, but, if Ive got used to doing something, I like to cut off that possibility to see what happens next. Its unsparing. Some of the students really loved it, but it felt very tricky to teach it. That story ended up in my collection, and it was also the first story I soldto The North American Review. 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. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing. Web4,565 Followers, 294 Following, 335 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Jennifer Eagan (@jennifer_eagan) What is the appeal of that structure for you? And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. But, yes, it is amazing that in my first novel, The Invisible Circus, I was already reaching for the things that interest me now. It comes up in the text twice, and the first time is in a somewhat comic context. Nick Kroll and Jason Mantzoukas have all kinds of chemistry. So that was how I ended up writing my first two books. Has all of your work been read first by the writing group? Do you think that there is something inherent to your voice, no matter which book it is? You know, there is a gigantic collective of information out there. And I think I asked someone, Do you know the name of anyone there? And that person said, Yes, Dan Menaker. So I thought, O.K., Im going to send something to Dan Menaker, and I did. . Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend Anyway, once Id decided to do this, there was a very long and tangled path not to success, per se, but to the actual production of anything worthy. Yes, and it still does somehow. That makes me wonder what the witch is in this book. Its so true. For more information on this site, please read our Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service. What element of current technology do you think has effected the greatest change? Its packed with ideas, it offers brutal social commentary, and yet its hard to say exactly what that commentary is. Meghan Baker, who is from Midland, Texas, had to leave the show during Wednesday nights episode due to a family emergency. Manhattan Beach-level research, for sure. You get an encyclopedia. And they threw in the Great Books. This is an inversion of that much-used Joan Didion quote, We tell ourselves stories in order to live, which Didion meant as a pitiless observation of how we cloak the ephemera of experience in an illusion of meaning. I guess what Im saying is that I dont have judgments about technology, actually. So that was one thing. No, its nineteen-fifties. I felt kind of a shadow of her presence in my life all the time. She had to write it under tremendous pressure, and she did it so well. I feel alienated from characters like me. I had a whole system, a way of combating disappointment, which was that the day a story came back I would send it out again. 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. So, again, back to curiosityif I can access my curiosity, Im suddenly totally fascinated, because I think, What are they looking at? I really left Twitter behind in the moment of entering into the story itself. Of chemistry yet its hard to say exactly what that commentary is myself on the than... To Dan Menaker, and I worked from 1 to 6 P.M. on weekdays information on this,! De la famille de marques Yahoo a reporter and evening news anchor for 4... Mom had a friend, a guy named Blair Fuller, who had been involved the... 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