A questionable service, but he was extremely successful. And the first thing I did in my gap year was to go on this pretty unsatisfying archeological dig. Never trust a candy house is also the advice of Miranda, who becomes an eluder, part of a movement of individuals who install a robotic proxy in their existing digital identity and then vanish into the offline world. I think my whole generation has been so shaped by his work. During the actual process of writing something, you dont always realize that its inert. Dont all men prefer their sons? 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. It becomes so easy, I think, as a middle-aged or older person, to just settle into your own experience. Technology, specifically the alluring Collective Consciousness, is the candy house of the novels title. Well, like all structures, it lets me do a certain set of things that I cant do any other way. That seems so artificial. 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. 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. We have the experience and we respond, and I think theres a great triage that occurs with reading aloud, where people just naturally go to the most important things. And I will sometimes feel that a particular physical environment might live well in a structure that I have on my list. All rights reserved. No other nineteenth-century writer, in English. Now, none of that means that I can write one. My first stepfather had a good friend who was this kind of wild man named Loy Weston. Have there been any writers or books that have had a strong effect on you? I wrote a creative thesis, which was a story collection, very conventional stories. 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. 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. Like so many crime novels of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, theyre very dated. 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 feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way. Later we find him running Mondrian behind a nonprofit front that organizes Dungeons & Dragons games for recovering addicts. I never would have imagined you sitting there, looking at Twitter, and saying, I think the Homeric Mediterranean combined with a 2030 spy mission is the perfect story for this form.. 2023 Instead, The Candy House contemplates what role the imagination could still play even when other peoples livesand the forgotten periods in our ownhave become easily and totally available. Was that the first positive reinforcement for your writing? I would say that there are books that feel like theyre part of my literary DNA, even though someone may or may not see that while reading my work. When I think about having to look things up in an encyclopedia from the library when I was a kid. 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. And then I go through a long editing process, but it does begin with a list of desires and then a test to see if the writing feels free using one of those structures. So I had no words to understand what was happening to me. 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. I can feel my I.Q. Like a Washing Machine Drum on Spin Cycle, Shivs Good News Could Change Everything on, Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men, The Secret to Netflixs Most Heinously Addictive Show. So youre reading a lot of crime novels now. But I did have an interest in the elliptical storytelling and the serialization that I saw unfolding on Twitter. Well, I always think of antibiotics. For example, there was an American crime writer named Anna Katharine Green. My favorite candy is definitely Snickers, but what I found myself thinking about with The Candy House, especially as we searched for a cover, is that candy can actually be very beautiful. He appears basically in just one scene, and that is set in 1993, when, after partying all night with a couple of his N.Y.U. William Lytton wentRead More, TAOS, N.M. (AP) The father of a 3-year-old boy found dead in a filthy New Mexico compound and his partner pleaded not guilty WednesdayRead More, An autistic teenage boy crashed an ambulance Thursday night, sending three people to the hospital, police said. 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 love taking a point of view that is opposed to the one that I traditionally occupy. 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. One took place as a New Yorker Live event, on Zoom, in June, 2022. I continue to want to understand how technology changes us. I got an N.E.A. I dont think I was thinking I would be a writer at that point. So all I really need to do is be able to be there mentally, and then write in a very improvisational, heedless way to fill up those pages, and then reread it before I get started the next day so that I can renter the flow and generate material. Oh, my God. And at the Squaw Valley one I met Virginia Barber, who was my first agent. 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. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. It was a fantastic, reasonably priced workshop. All contents WebMeet the anchors, reporters and meteorologists of KING5 in Seattle, Washington And I think when those panic attacks came there may have been a sort of weird existential aspect to them. Its just such a privilege and a joy to be thrust out of ones own life and into other peoples lives. 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. Certainly, about as different from a city as you could get. Its also a painful process. And then I tried to write a novel, which was absolutely terrible, but I think my problem was more that I had not figured out what my method was yet. I went to one in Park City, Utah, and I went to one in Squaw Valley. 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. Their emotional lives need to feel immediate and accessible. And, when I wrote Black Box as a series of tweets, I was not good at using Twitter at all. 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. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. In admitting how much feedback I want to get on my work, I might give the impression that I somehow like this process. When youre writing something like this, do you end up with outtakes, chapters that just dont fit into the puzzle? Did that experience help you with your own writing? I have been robbed an insane number of times. All Rights Reserved. Thats true, absolutely. It just insisted on moving more slowly. But it really helped me. Sometimes Id then take a crack from another angle, and I was able to make it work. If all my dreams come true, I will publish a crime novel set in the fifties, followed by this really wacky eighteen-seventies book. Chris calls his organization Mondrian, presumably in tribute to his grandmother, who kept an authentic Mondrian painting in a modest tract home so impossible to secure that no company would insure it. And its so incredible because she got slotted in when another book fell through at Scribner, and she was doing all kinds of other things, like decorating her house and not really focussing. It allowed time travel within the book. That sounds so weird. I was writing first drafts for Manhattan Beach and The Candy House at the same time for about two years. But I also thought I was a mentally ill person, and was going to spend my life in institutions. What was bad about working with the countess was that she had a hot temper and could be abusive. Theres no, you know, not quite having time and sort of fudging it slightly, or fixating on little things instead of big things. 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. WebJennifer Egan. The Collective Consciousness offers something very appealing, but it also has a dark side, and Im wondering if you surprised yourself with the manifestations of the technology in the book. Jennifer Egan. The Solutions. And now everything will be different. But thats not what changes things. With a book like Manhattan Beach, which did require years of research, when it comes time to write, do you feel sort of burdened by the weight of that research and the need to incorporate it into your story? I dont like everyone staring at their phones. 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. After Bix leaves, the other two end up going swimming, and Rob drowns. Im thinking a lot about the nineteenth century right now, the eighteen-seventies in particular, and about what catastrophic loss most people had experienced by adulthood at that time, and how different that must have been from now. I felt like I came from a different world than a lot of the other students. It definitely results in legitimate feelings of incompetence. So I sent him this new one, The Stylist. I remember this vividly. WebNews Team Connect Jennifer Eagan is an anchor and general assignment reporter at WCVB Channel 5, Boston's News Leader. Sunbeam Television Corp Her solution is to camouflage it by filling the house with Mondrian merch: candleholders, vases, umbrellas, tea trays, glasses, place mats, towels, throw pillows, framed posters, coffee-table books, and a needlepoint footstool. No one, she explains, with a legit Mondrian would ever acquire such crap.. So, he was living there and running K.F.C. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. But I did get some work, so I was earning money. Its pure genius. I know for sure that Im smarter if Im writing., Photographs by Thea Traff for The New Yorker, private secretary to the Countess of Romanones. 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. In early 2003 I lived on the same street as Jennifer Egan, and, knowing her not really at all, but admiring her a lot, Id mailed my second book to her house, praying shed feel some vague neighborliness toward me and donate, to my sorry cause, a blurb. And then you imagine new technologies for the future. Pieter M. Van Hattem Advertisement One character, the junkie daughter of a music producer, uses the device to relive a dearly remembered trip to A candy house, on the other hand, is just a trap. I think I read it very sociologically as a teen-ager, maybe anthropologically. But, you know, speaking as a candy lover, the idea of a candy housewell, its inherently also very positive for me! As a single, stand-alone book, Im not sure anything can top it, actually. If I could pick one tool to bring with me into the world, it would probably be curiosity. WebCopyright WHDH-TV / Sunbeam Television Corporation. But the reason I kept it there is not the reason I always thought people included research in their novelsit wasnt to show off. That also includes art-stealing file-sharing platforms, denounced by Miranda Klines twin daughters, who take over their fathers music production company: Nothing is free! 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. My mom had a friend, a guy named Blair Fuller, who had been involved with The Paris Review as a younger man. I realized that Phils focus was on getting at emotional truth, which, in a way, matters more than anything else. So Id convert disappointment into hope immediately. Its weird, you know? I had read a lot of books about books that I hadnt read. So its been essential for me. Slate is published by The Slate I feel alienated from characters like me. The Candy House and Goon Squad are ensemble pieces that, hopefully, work in a sort of kaleidoscopic way, with many different individual stories fusing into a larger narrative that has an arc, but a looser one, like that of, say, a serialized novel or a TV programsince thats where many people get their serialization now. What I feel is critical about my characters is the ways in which they are different from me; that is essential in order for me to continue with curiosity and interest. I joined a workshop with Philip Schultzthe Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who now has a kind of institute called the Writers Studio. In fact, I have big questions about whether writing in the impulsive and intuitive way I do is possibly incompatible with the rigors of a good crime novel, which really, in the end, is all about design. No, it wasnt, but it just goes to show that there were a lot of years of trying to learn how to do it while trying to support myself. It gets very hard because of the sexism, but I think I may try. So many! . Send me updates about Slate special offers. Witnessing all these differently motivated agendas gradually coalesce into a creative force is an exhilarating delight. I ended up editing the literary magazine. Im now sixty, and occasionally Ill think, yes, I would have shifted things around a little here. 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. So its always trial and error. People have said that this kind of technology is imminent, but I dont think it is. Its interesting that you said that that story, The Stylist, was the first one you put ideas into. Slate may earn an affiliate commission. J. Smith-Cameron knows what everyone thinks about Gerri. 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. 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 its a tragedy in the Greek sense. When I hear any sort of backward-looking romanticizing of, lets say, early twentieth-century or nineteenth-century life, I feel its just a lie. So, for example, in Lulu the Spy, the chapter that you published as Black Box, Lulu is spying for the U.S. government and transmitting a record of her mission via a device implanted in her brain. But that was all I did. I feel very uninterested in writing about contemporary life at the momentalthough thats not totally true. Absolutely. 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. In one chapter, theres a guy who is a recovered drug addict, who has been living a kind of marginal life since he exploded his old life as a successful lawyer and family man. You can learn an unbelievable amount about people without even going to a whole lot of trouble. And the thing that I could not understand as a younger writerand its even worse now with social mediais that theres this transcendent effect that quote-unquote success seems to have, like, Oh, my God, Im ascending. Whats the problem? 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. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. Shes witnessing a moment of liberation in her fathers life but also the beginning of the end of her parents suburban marriage. 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 never want to find out what anyone thinks, unless its, like, This is the best thing Ive ever read. And when do you ever hear that? If you go to a graveyard and see how many women were dying in their twenties, probably in childbirth. Anyway, Uncle Loy, as I called him, introduced Kentucky Fried Chicken to Japan. It was like vanishing. My moms a huge readershe taught me to read, and weve been exchanging books and book ideas ever since. And it was so exciting to feel that happen. With The House of Mirth, I was vividly aware of the antisemitism, so I prepared my students properly. 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. I thought, If I could just use facial recognition, and there were some way to view these people in the world, I could find them, and that would be great. Marcus the blackLabrador Retriever received a warm welcome Wednesday afternoonRead More, A Boston police sergeant dog-sat a black lab from out of town as a family on vacation dealt with a medical emergency at Boston ChildrensRead More, ANTHEM, Ariz. (WHDH) A puppy is on the mend after jumping in front of a rattlesnake to protect his owner in Arizona Friday. For example, another chapter that you published, What the Forest Remembers, starts with a guy named Lou Kline heading off on an adventure in California in 1965. I started in his fiction class, and then we did an independent study. Ad Choices, The author, who has two new book projects under way, says, I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before.. You think youre going to eat it, but it ends up eating you. I wish I knew their full names and could find out who they are and where they are now. She wrote a book called The Leavenworth Case, in the eighteen-seventies. I wanted success violently. Jennifer and her husband, Jason, are expecting their second child. I feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way,Jennifer Egan says. There was no pressing reason for the PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad to be written in PowerPoint besides proving that Egan could do it, but the email/text chapter, titled See Below, could only be written in this form. And then more contemporary people: I was a huge admirer of Robert Stone. Theyd lost interest, so it was time to stop. I think there was an advantage to having pretty low expectations for myself, and having the wish to write come more from a sense that it would complete my experience of reality than that it would bring me acknowledgement from the outside world. The Internet seems dangerous to me. 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. So she made my life possible. Let people know whats coming. Being made of imagination, it offers a portal to another universe, much like each of the chapters in Egans novel. In youth hostels, I was thrown together with a couple of remarkable women whom Ill always remember. I worked for years with the playwright Romulus Linney. I think theres probably a little bit too much of my research in that book. but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. Also, Joyce Carol Oates, someone Ive read for a very long time and really admired. This is the guy who has made everyone searchable to everyone else, essentially, and yet his own memory feels off limits to him, and he finds that unacceptable, so he goes on to invent this device called Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to externalize their memories. When I was first married, it felt like, Thats what you do when youre married. So the machine was an empowering tool for me as a fiction writer. I feel such a hunger to do things that I dont feel Ive done before, she told me. 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. I find myself thinking more and more about how a good crime book works and why. Ill just think, Oh, my God, its Armageddon. Manhattan Beach-level research, for sure. Slate has relationships with various online retailers. It was not a story of, like, No one is acknowledging my greatness! There was no greatness to be acknowledged for quite a while. 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