Overview of Better in Person with Jennifer Egan
Stephen Dubner sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan for a wide-ranging conversation about how she writes, what she’s trying to do in fiction, and why she trusts feedback more than her own instincts. The episode moves from her creative process and books like A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach, and The Candy House to her family history, her brother’s death, her skepticism toward AI, and the postwar-era detective novel she’s working on now.
What the Conversation Covers
Egan’s writing philosophy
- Egan describes her process as intensely imaginative but also highly disciplined.
- She often works against what she just did in the previous book, avoiding repetition and forcing herself into new territory.
- She’s less interested in “judging” characters than in making their choices feel necessary, lived-in, and emotionally true.
- Her goal in fiction is to confront mystery and create the experience of being inside another consciousness.
Craft, structure, and revision
- She uses a writer’s group regularly and says she trusts almost anyone more than herself when it comes to early feedback.
- The group reads work aloud, which helps her focus on rhythm, voice, and the big structural issues.
- She values criticism that identifies what is not working by first understanding what is working.
- Egan shared that she’s trying to be kinder to herself in drafts, using notes like “needs rethinking” instead of harsher self-criticism.
- Her manuscripts are heavily outlined and color-coded, with many unresolved sections early on.
Aesthetic choices in her novels
- A Visit from the Goon Squad came out of a practical need to move characters through time, but it ended up letting her explore fragmented, lateral storytelling.
- She thought parts of Goon Squad were satirical, especially its technology, but some of it now reads like straight realism because reality caught up.
- Manhattan Beach initially began as a noir-inspired wartime story, but she abandoned more experimental tricks because the material demanded a straighter narrative.
- She enjoys finding ideas that are both ridiculous and plausible, such as a character in The Candy House who screams in public to provoke authentic reactions.
Personal Background and Influences
Risk, fear, and curiosity
- Egan says she was adventurous but also fearful—someone who sought extreme situations without necessarily taking extreme personal risks.
- She traveled in difficult places, including solo backpacking in China and taking prop planes in Central Asia, despite a fear of flying.
- Her personal rule became: don’t avoid something solely because it’s scary.
Family history
- She talks movingly about her brother, who died by suicide nine years ago and lived with schizophrenia and alcoholism.
- She wants to keep his memory alive by talking about him, especially since he often felt invisible.
- She also reflects on how much less understood mental health was in the 1990s.
- Her grandfather was a Chicago cop who served as one of Harry Truman’s bodyguards, and that family history helped shape her understanding of Irish-American, law-and-order culture.
- Her father, who had once wanted to be a priest, helped inspire her interest in emotionally reserved men and the worlds that formed them.
What She’s Working On Now
A new detective novel
- Egan is working on a murder mystery set in San Francisco in 1952.
- She resists calling it a sequel or prequel to Manhattan Beach, though it follows chronologically.
- Her focus is the immediate postwar period: America’s growing power, wartime changes in women’s lives, and the mythology of domesticity that followed.
- She says the book is challenging because genre fiction has strict rules, and a mystery must “work” in a way that feels almost mathematical.
Historical imagination
- Her interest in Manhattan Beach was shaped by:
- 9/11 and the feeling of New York as a sudden war zone
- wartime New York and the noir atmosphere
- the waterfront and the Irish-American control of the docks
- She sees this new book as part of a larger arc of writing toward the America she knows and the historical forces that shaped it.
Big Takeaways
- Egan’s fiction is driven by empathy, structure, and problem-solving, not just inspiration.
- She believes the best literary characters should feel deeply understandable, even when they behave badly.
- She is skeptical of AI, calling it a form of processed groupthink and rejecting it as a creative tool.
- She treats awards as partly luck-based, saying prizes reflect who happens to please a small set of judges.
- The episode presents Egan as a novelist who is both highly experimental and deeply methodical—someone who wants each book to discover a new shape while still telling a good story.
Notable Insights
- “I trust almost anyone more than myself because I’m completely compromised.”
- “What is working is the roadmap for how to fix what isn’t working.”
- “I just want to tell a good story.”
- “The measure of my ability to do that is the degree to which that person’s choices... feel essential.”