jennifer egan interview
IV.
Look at Me doesn’t have a gothic feeling at all.
Do you ever find that your journalism assignments influence your fiction writing? “Until this novel, it had never crossed my mind to think about the collective memories of people alive at a certain time,” she says. II.
JH: Don’t you think, in a way, that writing fiction is a meditative process?
And I had no credentials whatsoever. THE BELIEVER: You’re not a twin, are you? I suppose that’s why I write all of my first drafts of fiction works by long-hand, to get out of my head and away from my inner critic. I’ve sort of moved away from all that now, but I had a great time with it—I was happy just to live in that world for a while. Also, I really feel like the novel is a love story between Ray and Holly [two characters that start out as minor figures]—she is very present in that way as sort of a destination for him. Did that make it more challenging to begin a new novel? I want to know how it felt to be here then. In Look at Me, I was exploring twinning or doubling in the context of image culture, asking how reflections of us affect our inner visions of ourselves.
It just felt inevitable.”, “I was really interested in New York during World War II, specifically what it felt like to sense the juggernaut of American global superpower beginning to form. Each time I opened this book, I felt as if I was opening a door into a world I wanted to be in, to spend time with real people I wanted to know more about. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. JH: Don’t you think, in a way, that writing fiction is a meditative process?
It was bad.
I would love to know who they are and what they’re doing. Someone ran a red light coming down a hill and just smashed into us. That’s something I struggle with as a mom. I don’t personally meditate, but it seems wonderful, this process of getting out of your body and all of the things that create pressure and worries. David was really busy, but we had one day of leisure and we drove to Belgium to a castle in Bouillon where, it turns out, the First Crusade began, led by Godfrey de Bouillon. It seemed like a good meeting point of past and present. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth, like Anna’s father does. I loved A Visit From the Goon Squad so much—as a reader and a writer—that I was afraid I couldn’t possibly love this novel.
At one point, I thought that the private detective component in that novel would be bigger, and I worked for a brilliant, crazy detective for a few months. I knew one character was a mobster. My father’s side of the family has generally gravitated toward law enforcement. When I first read the term I felt a sort of shiver that seemed to be, you know, a sign that I was going to use it.
And they were both working on detective novels.
I read books about it. I found new reasons to admire and enjoy this historical narrative set during World War II. I also wanted to write a story about the ocean, the power of looking out onto this vast body of water and all the possibilities it held. So seeing an alcoholic fall off the wagon has some personal resonance for me. My sons are older now, 15 and 17, so they’re pretty self-reliant. I want my two boys to always be safe and cared for—and letting go is hard. Without giving too much away, in this novel I was surprised and a little heartbroken by some of the outcomes. I had known someone in college who had that problem, and I’d written a short story touching on it, “Sacred Heart,” which is in my collection. The editors and I had no idea how to approach this online story.
One reason is that each book has taken a long time to write, so they’ve happened pretty far apart from each other in my life.
“Treating People Well” by Lea Berman and Jeremy Bernard “One Good Turn” by Kate Atkinson We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the …
Oddly, a number of my pieces after that involved the same discovery.
Is that by design? I spent a lot of time—years, actually—talking with people and reading about Manhattan Beach in the 1930s and 1940s before I could inhabit that world with my own characters. Bad descriptions, stiff dialogue.
It’s all about being cut off. I followed the water into the various worlds that come together in this book.”, “As I writer, I’m looking for transport. Egan had her international breakthrough in 2010 with the novel ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, which won a Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a National Book Award.
It took me about two years to get back up to speed. It was pretty depressing, realizing how rusty I was. I have no idea why that keeps happening. I wonder if my twin preoccupation will continue after this. How did you come up with the idea of the castle in your book having a keep? And then later he becomes the same thing for her. Of course I got nowhere with that strategy.
Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, Early Medieval and Romaneque Architecture, Eclecticism, Industrialisation, and Newness, 1400-1500: Renaissance in Italy and the North, 1500-1600: End of the Renaissance & the Reformation, 1848-1907 in Europe and the United States, Andrew Atwood, Anna Neimark (First Office), Enric Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT), Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (SANAA), Álvaro Enrigue Interview: Advice to the Young, Cao Fei, Yang Beichen, Sun Xiaoxi, Hans Ulrich Obrist & Joseph Constable, Fashion and futurism in a Japanese hotel of horrors, Fish — A Dance Film Exploring The Idea of Mortality, Wura Natasha Ogunj Interview: Beauty in the Streets of Lagos. Actually, I struggled with the question of what kind of enterprise would bring these characters together. Try These 31 Snack-Size Habits, 5 Signs That You Are a Highly "Mindful" Individual, 2 Ways to Motivate Your Struggling Adult Child, Psychology Today © 2020 Sussex Publishers, LLC, Hard Physical Work May Be Bad for Brain Health, These Personality Traits Predict COVID-19 Compliance, One Brain-Based Reason Motivation Fizzles With Age, How to Get Kids to Change Their Behavior for the Better, Scott James: Grief Builds When a Life Is “Stolen”. That one is a little controversial, because after it was published it emerged that Lerner had bent the facts surrounding the murder he committed, trying to make himself sound like the victim. That’s the price you pay for doing something different every time.”, “I was a witness — not a hanger-on, just kind of a looker-on.”, “It feels just the right amount of different, so there’s no overlap at all with anything I’ve done before.”, “Ideally you would like it to seem true but not actually be true – because then it’s not satire, it’s just realism.”, NPR: To the Best of Our Knowledge, 6/11/11, “I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves, that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship — that’s how hegemony works.”, The Big App Show, with Adam Curry 5/19/11, “I think the city was in a sleepy hangover, and the echo of the ’60s was everywhere.”, If I try to read a book I’m not hungry for, I won’t enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I’ll devour it.”, Manhattan Beach: Publisher’s Weekly Interview, Manhattan Beach: New York Times Interview, Manhattan Beach: The Globe and Mail Interview. And oddly enough, it also turns out to be my best guide toward what’s going to really interest me on those brainier levels. “It’s a little like following trapped doors, or the suggestion of trapped doors. BLVR: I was looking at it more in terms of a cautionary tale or a dreaded alternative. There was car noise, honking, tunnels—you couldn’t understand most of what they were saying.
But twins do come up again and again. Her first, The Invisible Circus, is set in the ’70s and follows a young woman’s quest to piece together her older sister’s travels across Europe and make sense of … We came to re-invent ourselves, but in so doing – and as a means of doing that – we slaughtered untold millions of people. Your books all have twins in them, or people whose lives are mirrored by other characters, or other selves. I thought,“Do I want to write a novel set in medieval times?” But the logistics of that were mind-boggling; I had a newborn baby, and even just trying to fathom the research was overwhelming.And then I realized that what I really liked was the nostalgic feeling of this decayed medieval past, which is a very gothic sensibility. JH: Why that time period and why Manhattan Beach? I was almost done with Look at Me—I had sold it and everything—and I was just starting to think about what would come next.
I became fascinated with the period during World War II when the U.S. became a dominant force in the world.
She was American-born and very beautiful, had been a model for Hattie Carnegie. “IN A WAY, ADDICTION IS THE INVERSION OF THE TWIN FANTASY: IT’S TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE INSIDE ONE PERSON.”. I became a private secretary for a woman named the Countess of Romanones—and she was actually a writer. I found myself thinking, “I’m not going to watch this show anymore. I did a cover story about online dating where I never even spoke on the phone with my two main subjects.
Interview with Janet Fitch: Why Historical Fiction?
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