Jennifer Egan Writes to Experience a Life Outside Her Own

Jennifer Egan: I was a private secretary for years for a very difficult woman who was also a writer, who was a nonfiction writer and a former spy for the O.S.S. and a very extreme character. I did a lot of impersonating when I worked for her. That was part of my job really. I sort of took on her voice and was able to carry on correspondence in her voice. I’ve signed books in her voice. Our actual voices didn’t sound the same at all, but that feeling of the job of representing someone virtually, even though this was basically pre-internet, I knew that feeling really well. And being a fiction writer is part of what made me good at doing it.

Joe Skinner: For Jennifer Egan, writing fiction is a way of life, and life is a way to write fiction.

Jennifer Egan: Fiction, I think, can give us an experience of transport out of our inner lives beyond what many other things can do. I’m Jennifer Egan, and I am a fiction writer and a journalist. And I feel very strongly that the novel was invented to be inventive.

Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. Today, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan takes us on a journey through her writing process, and how “Lulu the Spy, 2032,” a chapter from her latest novel “The Candy House,” came to be.

“The Candy House” is a sort-of sequel to and takes place twenty-ish years after “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won Jennifer the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011. Each chapter of these books looks at the point of view of a different, periphery character introduced in previous chapters. It’s a wild style. She’s called it “kaleidoscopic.”

Jennifer Egan: I guess what I would call my first kaleidoscopic book is probably “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” I had definitely done work that you could call experimental before that, but that was the first one in which every chapter actually is from a different point of view and there is no single person whose story the book is. And I actually came about it by accident, which is how a lot of things I end up doing seem to come along.

I was writing what I thought were just individual short stories and because I didn’t think they would ever be part of one single story, I was doing what I normally do with stories, which is taking a different technical approach for each. That’s the fun of stories. You know, they’re each their own world, but there were characters in common among these stories, and I started to feel like, oh, wouldn’t it be fun to actually have them be a book? But not just your traditional linked short stories, which tend to have a common voice and sort of technical approach, but actually to have a work in which every chapter feels like it’s part of a different book and yet, they combine into one story.

Joe Skinner: As a reader, it’s a lot of fun to gradually uncover the interconnections between all these characters as the book progresses, like a low-stakes game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. But while writing, Egan didn’t put any pressure or hard and fast rules on herself to keep track of everyone’s connections. Her priority was to have each individual story stand on its own, to keep the book less about tracking the connections, and more about developing the characters. She likened the structure of these books to a concept album, like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or “The Wall,” in which the individual tracks of one album all come together as a whole to tell a singular story.

Jennifer Egan: It’s about contrast. That’s the fun of a record album. No one wants to listen to an album in which the same rhythms and notes occur every single time. So once I knew that, in a way, the major elements of that book were already in place. I had already published four short stories, some of them even a decade earlier, that were just… felt a little orphaned. And I started thinking, wait a minute, what if there’s a way that these four can link into this other story that I’m telling? It felt like a real long shot. I mean, they had nothing in common and they were radically different in form. But little by little, I could feel these like little tentacles reaching out from one to the other. And ultimately, they became essential parts of “A Visit from the Goon Squad” and therefore, “The Candy House.”

Joe Skinner: “The Candy House” takes place a decade or so into the future, with a device called “Own Your Unconscious” at the center of it. “Own Your Unconscious” is a machine that allows people to externalize the whole of their memories into a private, DNA-accessed cube.

Jennifer Egan: It gives that individual the opportunity to review the entirety of their life from a present day perspective. If they choose to, an ancillary element of this technology allows them to share all or part of that consciousness, all of those memories to a collective, in exchange for access to the collective themselves. So it works like Napster, let’s say, or any other sort of online sharing.

We see people using the machine to solve various mysteries in their own lives.There’s a case where a woman is able to view a pivotal day in her father’s life through his eyes and solve a mystery, which is, why did he leave the family?

There’s a guy who’s very curious about a drug dealer he used to buy from, whose full name he doesn’t know. By sharing specific memories of him, he’s able through facial recognition to view anonymous memories of other people who had encountered the same guy and learn about various points in his life. And then there are chapters in which we are deeply inside people’s minds, but they aren’t actually using the technology at all, it starts to feel like in fact, we might be using this device to see inside all of these people’s minds.

So for me as the writer, the machine was a very convenient externalization of what I’m always doing as a fiction writer, which is getting inside points of view that are unlike my own. And it was sort of fun to kind of solidify that process into a so-called machine that lets people do this, you know, all over the place.

Joe Skinner: Egan is a fiction writer who uses fiction to get inside the minds of others. In her previous career, she actually found some interesting parallels to this ethos back when she worked as a private secretary to a former spy.

Jennifer Egan: The O.S.S. person, whose name was the Countess of Romanones, it’s a question mark how much spying she was really doing after World War II. And there were people who disputed her account that she continued to work for the CIA. And I actually don’t know. So she had her secrets even from me. But I’m very interested in spying and I think you could say that in a way every fiction writer must be, because we’re always looking around at the world around us with another agenda, which is, “how can we use this?” That question is always in my mind.

Joe Skinner: Jennifer Egan took this inspiration and channeled it into a chapter from “The Candy House.” Here’s how it starts:

Jennifer Egan: Lulu the Spy, 2032.

One.

People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting. Necessary ingredients of a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness. The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible. When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.

Two.

Some powerful men actually call their beauties “Beauty.” Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties. If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you’ve gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind. Kindness feels good, even when it’s founded on a false notion of your identity and purpose.

Joe Skinner: “Lulu the Spy, 2032” is a chapter that really jumps out at you because of its unusual formatting. It’s written in the second-person and reads almost like a list of To-Do items.

Jennifer Egan: The way I came to it was unexpectedly, I think, very domestic, which is that I keep many lists. It’s kind of how I organize my life. And one of my lists that I kept for some time and then forgot about it, so it kind of fell down the list of lists on my phone, was called “lessons learned.” I was trying to keep track of things I wanted to do differently in my life. And so on this list, which I rediscovered a couple years later, were things like, “Put ‘Don’t pick flowers’ sign up as soon as bulbs come up.” And another one, my favorite was, “Put train ticket in bag night before, ALWAYS” in all caps. And what I loved about these “lessons learned” was that I couldn’t remember the initial incidents in either case, but I didn’t have to, to know what had happened. So just having a lesson showed me what the action was that it was responding to. And as soon as I saw that and it made me laugh, I thought, ah, “How can I use that?” Which is a question I ask all the time about everything. I thought, I’ve gotta find a way to tell a story in the form of lessons learned. We’re not told this happened or that happened. We’re just told what the character learned from each thing. And that was really the beginning.

Joe Skinner: Lulu is a child in “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” and she serves as a secondary character to the chapter’s main character, her single mother Dolly. In “Goon Squad,” Lulu is a precocious, wiser-than-her-years nine-year-old. In “The Candy House,” we get to delve deeper into Lulu’s story and see her as an adult, carrying out an espionage mission.

Jennifer Egan: I thought so who does she grow to be? She’s kind of awesome. Like she’s a strong person clearly, has a lot of grit. And I thought I just started imagining her in this kind of Mediterranean environment, narrating lessons learned during a spy mission. And I started writing it. All I knew was my basic situation: Lulu, undercover as a so-called “beauty,” which you might also call a high, of high level prostitute, working for the U.S. government, but in a civilian capacity to bring down a network of plotters against America. I mean, when you describe it, when I describe it, I feel how generic and sort of cliched that situation is. But writing it in this weird way, in the form of lessons, which inevitably are in the second person, Lulu, saying, “don’t do this,” or “you shouldn’t do this,” instead of, “I did this,” or “I shouldn’t have done that,” it offsets the cliched and kind of generic quality of this and, and lets me do something that feels a little more interesting and fun.

So that’s the key with using these unusual structures. They let me do something I couldn’t have done any other way. And so finding a way to enter into a genre in a fresh way is so fun. Who doesn’t wanna read a spy story? Like, I always wanna read a spy story!

Joe Skinner: Here’s more from “The Candy House.”

Jennifer Egan: Three.

Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France. Sunlight on bare skin can be as nourishing as food. Even a powerful man will be briefly self-conscious when he first disrobes to his bathing suit. It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks. If you love someone with dark skin, white skin looks drained of something vital.

Four.

When you know that a person is violent and ruthless, you will see violent ruthlessness in such basic things as his swim stroke. “What are you doing?” from your Designated Mate amid choppy waves after he has followed you into the sea may, or may not, betray suspicion. Your reply- “Swimming!” -may or may not be perceived as sarcasm. “Shall we swim together toward those rocks?” may or may not be a question. “All that way?” will hopefully sound ingenuous. “We’ll have privacy there” may sound unexpectedly ominous.

Joe Skinner: Before we even fully understand that we’re reading a spy story, the reader can sense that danger lurks beneath the surface. In one of the darker elements of the book, we discover that Lulu is actually taught a “dissociation technique” to help protect her through the more dangerous aspect of her job as an undercover call girl to powerful and violent men.

Jennifer Egan: The heaviness of it also came about a little bit as a surprise in the writing process. Although I should have seen it coming. How could it not be heavy? I mean, what this woman is really undergoing is severe and extreme. We don’t fully contend with it in that story, because in the end, it is really a spy story. And so the genre, I think to some degree protects the reader from the real horror of what’s going on. But I knew that if I were going to include that in a book, I would have to own that horror and that trauma, and show us how Lulu moves on from that.

And that was one of the hardest things to do in “The Candy House” because you know, in the same way that say in a murder mystery, genre protects us as a reader from the horror of murder and death. You know, murder mysteries are not about grieving. There may be an element of that, but we wanna find out who did it. They’re about using the crime for entertainment.

The same is somewhat true in “Lulu the Spy”, but the heaviness of it did come through really strongly. And those were amazing surprises in the writing process. Like for example, when she has to actually have sex with this person that she’s following. In the moment of writing, I thought, how can she go through this? Like, what, what is there to protect her? The answer came to me dramatically: oh yes, she’s been taught a dissociation technique so that she can exit from that trauma, which is what dissociation is. And so I just wrote it that way. But of course, it’s brutal. And that’s present too. I like it when lots of things are present at once because power and compression are essential to writing something that’s any good, in my opinion.

Joe Skinner: Despite the darker elements of the storytelling, Egan found that her novels also share a sense of humor, which she finds through a very improvisational process of writing.

Jennifer Egan: I feel like my books are much funnier than I am. And I’m curious about that. And I’ve come to think that the reason that they’re funny has to do with the way I write, which is so blind and basically improvisational at the beginning. And if you think about improv, especially dramatic improv, it tends towards the funny. The way that I write is by beginning with a kind of sensory environment. The first question is, who is perceiving it? And that is the beginning of a character. The next question is, who else is there? What do they say and do? These are just observations that naturally arise. Those are the things that I’m looking for as I write.

I’m just following my way through it in this very instinctive way because I’m following a line of action or possibility and often pushing it to its limit, often too far, so that I have to pull back later, it tends toward humor. Which I love. Humor always feels like a dimension that could be there in many situations, even the very darkest, and in fact, sometimes humor is the most satisfying in those dark situations. When that possibility exists, when I feel the humor kind of glimmering, it’s a sign that I’m coming at my situation from every angle and pushing it as far as it can go. And that’s what I want to do, because again, I want as much to be happening at once as possible. Not in a chaotic way, but in a way that mimics the complexity of real life and human perception.

Joe Skinner: Jennifer seeks inspiration for her writing everywhere. She’s a big fan of “The Sopranos” for example, so you can see elements of episodic TV writing in her books. She’s also turned writing reminders on post-it notes into an entire story. Egan pitched that as a way to write “Lulu the Spy,” which was actually first featured as a short story in a speculative fiction issue of the New Yorker in 2012, and it was originally called “Black Box.”

Jennifer Egan: Only after they, you know, sort of said, “yes we’re interested,” did I then say my requirement, which was that it had to be tweeted. But they were game! So they started the New Yorker Fiction Twitter handle then actually, and we sort of conspired together about how to do this. I knew very little about Twitter. All I had done to that point was get hacked by a vitamin sales person and tweet out a bunch of vitamin ads. So I was really not doing well on Twitter. Twitter at 140 characters had a kind of inadvertent poetry to it that I really enjoyed. And we, we came up with a plan which I think we immediately realized was flawed, which was that it would be tweeted over several nights. Which was a good idea, but we had one tweet per minute, which was way too slow. And in a way it just speaks to how long ago that was in kind of contemporary time that you would think anyone would follow one tweet a minute. Are you kidding? That’s like a thousand tweets in between. So in the middle of that tweeting process, they printed it in full.

Joe Skinner: Taking a look at it on the page, Egan realized that the visual representation of the story mattered too. The New Yorker typeface just didn’t work for the story. The lines didn’t look right.

Jennifer Egan: There was no way we could use typeface. It really really looked wrong. So they actually used a different typeface for the story, which was a godsend. And it is funny how these choices, like when I was writing it, I originally was writing it on a legal pad, which is where I write all my fiction. But those long dangling lines didn’t work. Somehow these dangly lines, like the New Yorker typeface, felt too familiar from other contexts to be useful for this sort of imagined communication. I ended up having to get… I got a notebook at Muji that had eight rectangles on every page, and I wrote it in these compressed squares. And I found oddly that by filling these rectangles with utterances, when I did eventually type it up and measure it for Twitter, they were almost never too long.

So there was something in my spatial estimation that I think showed me that these rectangles would be the right environment in which to handwrite for Twitter, which is already kind of counterintuitive. But, for me, because of again, the blind nature of the story and the complicated, you know, sort of thriller aspect, I needed to have that open-endedness of not typing and to write it in by hand, but in boxes that separated it from more narrative writing.

Joe Skinner: “Black Box” is a little longer and different from “Lulu the Spy.” Egan rewrote it without the limitations of Twitter’s 140 characters and she worked to incorporate the backstory of Lulu’s character into “The Candy House,” but the fragmented shortform limitation that she set for herself is still very present in the piece.

At the end of the day, the journey of Lulu the spy is but one story in an expansive mosaic of characters in her writing. Egan’s talents lie in being able to discern the forest from the trees as she stacks these layers of worldviews for the reader to consume.

Jennifer Egan: One of the things that I was interested in, in “The Candy House,” is the way in which a person is perceived as peripheral in the worldview of another person. And then we, the readers, are thrust into their sensibility and reminded of the thing that we all really know theoretically, but it’s so hard to believe it, that each of us is our own universe. That no one is a central character except to themselves. And that somehow we incredibly complex creatures manage to coexist without creating an explosion.

So, showing that to the reader in a fun way, to go from, you know, basically seeing someone out of the corner of your eye into boom, we’re right in the middle of their brains, thinking their thoughts and following their actions from their point of view. That excitement and that surprise and fun is what helps me structure it.

And so in the case of “Lulu the Spy,” it follows a chapter in which Lulu appears as a peripheral character in a deep stream of consciousness of another person. In the order that I place the chapters, we see that first. We see Lulu as a young girl. We see Lulu as the outsider who becomes essential. We know that she at one point in her mental bulletins, she’s remembering cases in which she, who was fatherless as a girl, had a single mother, would encounter social situations with other kids who had more so-called normal families. And how she always felt like such an outsider at the beginning, but she always managed to make herself essential. Like she had that adaptive skill. And then we see her as an adult, and we’re deep inside her head as she undertakes this very dangerous mission. And in moments reflects back on the events that we’ve witnessed from another person’s point of view from many years earlier in the previous chapter. So it’s about those juxtapositions and the surprise and fun and satisfaction that they can create.

Joe Skinner: Do you feel like you have a mission as a writer?

Jennifer Egan: You know, we have a tendency to devalue writing generally in this country. That is a measure that we take democracy for granted, because no one in an autocracy questions whether writing matters. The jails are full of writers, so we know it matters. Autocrats know it matters. The reason it matters is that it provokes complex thought and analytical thinking. And thought control is one of the chief tools of someone who’s trying to keep a society under their thumb. So writing matters an enormous amount.

I want people to remember that even in the context in which we have the luxury of regarding it as entertainment. I guess if I have a mission, it’s more to do everything I can by writing good books, hopefully, to remind people of how unique and specific fiction is and the fact that it does something that nothing else can do. You know, we’re looking to social media, or just media generally, for entertainment and an experience of transport out of our lives, and it does provide that, for sure.

But if you’re looking at a picture of someone, if that’s what you’re starting with, you are by definition not inside their mind. You are on the outside. Fiction, I think, does the opposite. It actually places us inside because we are language-driven creatures, and by being in the language alone of peoples’ thoughts rather than looking at their expressions and trying to divine their thoughts from that and from what they say, by invoking with language, the interior lives of other people, fiction, I think, can give us an experience of transport out of our inner lives beyond what many other things can do. And so I just wanna remind people of that. And, really it just comes down to trying to do a good job, and to insist upon the cultural importance of fiction. Because it is a rigorous way of consuming entertainment and one that generates empathy and real understanding of what it feels like to be someone else, all of which I think are actually important tools to having a healthy and active citizenry.

Joe Skinner: Thank you to Jennifer Egan for meeting with us to talk about her book. You can now find the paperback version of “The Candy House” wherever you buy your books.

American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by Diana Chan. And by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Evan Joseph.

Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Charitable Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.