“Stories like Jennifer Egan’s make me want to continue my subscription to The New Yorker and discontinue my prescription to anti-depressants,” a reader once wrote in. “Stories so bleakly wrought that they make me eerily happy.” Egan’s latest book, “The Candy House,” from 2022, now out in paperback, is just what that reader described: a series of sometimes bleak, interlocking narratives of unloved childhood, struggling adolescence, confused youth, and wary or regretful adulthood which are nevertheless shot through with a soul-warming sense of compassion.
Although the book is a kind of sequel to Egan’s Pulitzer-winning novel, “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” from 2010, it takes place in a changed world, one dominated by technologies that in the earlier book had not even been conceived of. Egan’s output—she has published seven books of fiction—is notable not for its uniformity of style and approach but for its ever-shifting ambitions and obsessions. “I feel such a hunger to do things that I don’t feel I’ve done before,” she told me. “And one thing I know from experience is that, in order to do new things, I have to do them in new ways.” Egan repeatedly breaks down the walls of form and genre to play with conventions and the reader’s expectations—one chapter of “The Candy House,” for instance, is written in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or less, and was first published as a Twitter thread.
This interview is drawn from two conversations. One took place as a New Yorker Live event, on Zoom, in June, 2022. The second took place on a dark and rainy afternoon in January in Egan’s high-ceilinged but homey living room in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after I had displaced one of her three cats—“That’s Cuddles, our dim beauty”—from her spot on the couch. Our conversations have been edited and condensed.
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. What is the appeal of that structure for you?
Well, like all structures, it lets me do a certain set of things that I can’t do any other way. And I guess the challenge always with structure is to find the story that requires that particular structure. “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 program—since that’s where many people get their serialization now. What’s fun about it for me is that it lets me try a lot of different smaller structures without forcing them to pass the test of sustaining a whole novel. And, if I create these very diverse, smaller units that still fuse into a larger story, it can give the book a kind of power that a straight-through novel doesn’t have in the same way.
When you’re writing something like this, do you end up with outtakes, chapters that just don’t fit into the puzzle?
So many! I think my failure ratio is higher with this kind of book than with any other. I would say for “Goon Squad” and “The Candy House” that about fifty per cent of the first drafts I wrote were unusable. In some cases, I didn’t even type the chapters up; I could just feel that they were sort of inert. In other cases, I did keep working on them, but realized in the end that I couldn’t make that particular version work. Sometimes I’d then take a crack from another angle, and I was able to make it work. During the actual process of writing something, you don’t always realize that it’s inert. Usually my test is whether I really have no interest in continuing—if it feels better to walk away than to continue. Then I will walk away, but often I try quite a few things before I get to that point, because I’m still, you know, waiting to see if some other approach might come to my aid. I’m thinking about one of the chapters in “The Candy House,” “Lulu the Spy, 2032”; it started as the story “Black Box,” which ran on the New Yorker Fiction Twitter feed as a series of tweets.
It was carefully written to run that way, but I didn’t realize it when you first sent it to me, in 2012. You said, “Read it. See what you think. There’s something different about this story.” I thought, Well, all these paragraphs are very short, but I wasn’t yet Twitter-aware enough to realize why. That story picked up on a character from “Goon Squad,” much later in her life, and I’m wondering if that was the gateway story for “The Candy House”?
Yeah, it was. It was the first sign that in no way was I finished with the “Goon Squad” world. And that’s no surprise, because when each chapter is written from a different point of view that gives a book a kind of open-endedness. It invites continuation.
“Goon Squad” revolves, at least tangentially, around the music industry. And “The Candy House,” which is set in the not-so-distant future, revolves around a new form of technology. Can we talk more about that?
The person who invents the technology becomes a kind of throughline for “The Candy House”—a guy named Bix Bouton, who’s a minor character in “Goon Squad.” A lot of people don’t even remember him. 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. friends, Drew and Rob, he walks with them to the East River to watch the sunrise. After Bix leaves, the other two end up going swimming, and Rob drowns. In “Goon Squad,” Bix was a grad student in electrical engineering. When we meet him in “The Candy House,” he has invented social media. It’s 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. 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. And then, if they wish, they can share all or part of their memories to a collective, the Collective Consciousness, and that ends up being an important development that plays out through the course of the book.
And where did that idea come from? Was it a desire to be able to review your own memories?
Interestingly, it didn’t really come about that way. 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. 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. So there’s already this possibility of mental content being shared technologically. Little by little, I began to get a sense that in the twenty-thirties, which I was writing into, there’s the possibility of thought sharing. And that was how I began to have a sense of what this machine was. And the device I eventually came up with allowed me to do a lot of things. It allowed me to write both from the perspective of looking back at the past and from the perspective of the future. It allowed time travel within the book. It allowed me to do certain narrative things that I knew I wanted to do. One of those, for example, was to write a story in which people can find other people whom they’ve glimpsed only once, whose names they don’t know. 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.
In one chapter, there’s 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. He is preoccupied with what became of the guy who used to sell him drugs, and he knows only the guy’s first name, Damon, if it even was his first name. So there comes a point when he shares just his memories of this man to the collective. He remembers Damon, and then, through facial recognition in the Collective, he is able to view other people’s memories that involve Damon. And, in that fragmentary way, he’s able to string together the story of Damon’s life up to that point, which unfortunately ends at that moment with Damon in a penitentiary. That is a kind of catalytic discovery for him that gets him out of his house and into action. So the machine was an empowering tool for me as a fiction writer.
People have said that this kind of technology is imminent, but I don’t think it is. I mean, if we can’t figure out how to cure mental illness, we clearly don’t understand the brain well enough to externalize and view it. And what does it even mean to view consciousness? Our consciousness is not like a camera. So if you look too closely at the “machine,” it starts to dissolve a little, but I think the reason that it feels connected to this moment is that it’s analogous to what we already have. You know, there is a gigantic collective of information out there. You can learn an unbelievable amount about people without even going to a whole lot of trouble. 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. I use it in the book as a sort of comic exaggeration of a familiar reality.
The Collective Consciousness offers something very appealing, but it also has a dark side, and I’m wondering if you surprised yourself with the manifestations of the technology in the book.
Well, it was interesting, when imagining people using the machine, to think about what that would really mean. 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. At some point, we become aware that his daughter is telling the story. She explains that the reason she knows what happened to him is that she’s using his externalized memory. And then we go back into his adventure, which we are watching alongside her, from his point of view, and she solves a mystery while reliving that day with us—she gets an answer to the question of what changed her father. He was a straitlaced businessman who was madly in love with his wife. He went on this adventure in the California woods, where he smoked marijuana and got a sense of a cultural change that was imminent, and he returned home having basically decided to walk away from the conventional life he’d made for himself and his family. So Charlie, his daughter, solves the mystery, but along the way she also learns that her father loved her brother more than he loved her, and he reflected on that repeatedly. He felt bad about it and hoped it was normal. Don’t all men prefer their sons? He had these thoughts, and they are painful for Charlie to witness. So that’s part of the dark side of the technology, even for people who use it for its intended purpose. They come away, often, with uncomfortable knowledge.
How did you decide which characters from “Goon Squad” to explore in “The Candy House”?
Well, I had curiosity. My curiosity tended to be applied to the characters who are the most opaque in “Goon Squad,” characters who seem almost dispensable, because they’re so minor; that automatically made me curious, because, of course, there are no minor characters in real life. We are all the protagonists of our own lives. So that was one thing. And, in some cases, I knew more about a character than the reader did by the end of “Goon Squad.” I knew, when I wrote about Bix in “Goon Squad,” that he would go on to invent social media, and it bothered me that the reader had no idea, so that generated a sense of wanting to revisit him. But, honestly, there were also people I wanted to write about but wasn’t able to successfully. I just couldn’t find the right vibe or structure or physical environment to write something that was worthy of inclusion. So it’s always trial and error.
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. Inside the house is a witch who wants to eat them. That makes me wonder what the witch is in this book.
Maybe it’s just that what you find out may not make you happy. The title of the book is clearly a warning, but I also think of it as more neutral. It comes up in the text twice, and the first time is in a somewhat comic context. Lou Kline is running his record company with the help of his two daughters, and, in 1999, Napster comes along, and everyone realizes that it is going to be a disaster for the music industry. Lou’s 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 it’s not. You’re giving the Internet access to your own music and your own computer. That’s the price.” But the idea that someone driving along the highway would see one of these billboards and think, Ah, I guess I shouldn’t use Napster, is pretty silly, and they end up not pursuing the billboard campaign. When the expression comes up again, it’s 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.
But, you know, speaking as a candy lover, the idea of a candy house—well, it’s inherently also very positive for me! Even if there is a witch, it’s still an amazing thing to discover in the forest.
What would your candy house be coated in?
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. I love the way candy looks. It’s so unreal in its coloration and so shiny and appealing. So I think my house would have to be covered with hard candy: shiny, delicious nonfood.
Moving back in time to the years between “Goon Squad” and “The Candy House”: in 2017, you published “Manhattan Beach,” which is a very different kind of novel. It’s a historical novel set in Brooklyn during the Second World War, and it required a huge amount of research. I think you started working on it before writing “Goon Squad.” How could you have these two—or three—narratives going in your mind at the same time?
I didn’t start writing “Manhattan Beach” before “Goon Squad,” but I was researching it—which is a good thing, because the Second World War era is now truly vanishing from living memory. And even then a lot of the people I was interviewing, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, were already in their eighties.
I was writing first drafts for “Manhattan Beach” and “The Candy House” at the same time for about two years. I would try to write five to seven pages of each project each day, and I’m actually doing the same thing now—trying to write five to seven pages a day of two very different projects. I don’t really have to keep that much straight because I don’t have much of a plan. When I write a first draft, what I’m holding onto is a sense of atmosphere and the physical environment where the piece is unfolding. 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 reënter the flow and generate material. I can write really fast at the beginning, and the faster the better in a way, because I’m looking not to think about it too much. The more I can stay out ahead of the critical side of me, the freer I feel. So that’s what I was doing. I didn’t usually write the two projects literally back to back—I didn’t put down one and pick up the other—but I had a system where I would do one, take a break, then do the other. And then, the next day, I would pick up first with the one that I’d left off with last so that I could keep a feeling of continuity. Then, at a certain point, I felt that I was starting to really spin my wheels with “The Candy House” project, and, except for “Black Box,” I didn’t even type any of it up; it was just a handwritten draft that I put away so that I could focus just on “Manhattan Beach.”
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. I knew that data—a relationship between data and storytelling—would be really important in “The Candy House.” So I found myself thinking about that a lot and taking notes on it. But the only thing that really had my attention atmospherically was “Manhattan Beach.” Then when I finished writing that, I finally started typing up “The Candy House” material, and a lot of it was really not good. But there were enough ideas there for me to feel that it could become a book.
Were there notes and ideas that you didn’t find a way to use?
There were ideas about structures that I might want to try, and, you know, culture is always offering up new ones. I mean, when I first got enamored of the idea of trying to write in PowerPoint—which I did for a chapter in “Goon Squad”—I truly did not know what PowerPoint was. I just knew that everyone kept mentioning it. And, when I wrote “Black Box” as a series of tweets, I was not good at using Twitter at all. In fact, I had been quickly hacked and had spewed vitamin ads to my beleaguered handful of followers, so Twitter was not working well for me as a creator, but it was fascinating to me as a consumer, because of the storytelling that I witnessed unfolding, especially when tweets were limited to a hundred and forty characters.
So I’ll keep a list of structures that I’m curious about, but my entry point is always the physical environment. And I will sometimes feel that a particular physical environment might live well in a structure that I have on my list. So, for example, I suddenly began to sense that the California desert was an environment that could live in PowerPoint, which I’d tried to use multiple times unsuccessfully. Likewise with Twitter, I had the sense that a sort of Homeric Mediterranean as the site of a spy mission in the twenty-thirties could maybe live in short utterances, which I envisioned as a list of lessons learned, meaning that the protagonist is listing what she has learned from each step she takes—rather than listing the actual step that she took—so it’s sort of indirect storytelling.
Then the next crucial test is what happens when I start writing in this way. Very often, depending on the constraints of the structure, especially if it’s a radical one, I immediately feel unable to go on. But sometimes the limitations actually feel bizarrely freeing, and I have this sense of possibility and opening and a voice that can continue. So I will write a first draft and then look at it more critically and ask myself whether the form will continue to serve what I’m doing. 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.
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.”
I did not think it while looking at Twitter! But I did have an interest in the elliptical storytelling and the serialization that I saw unfolding on Twitter. And then, actually, a critical element in that process was buying a notebook with eight rectangles on every page so that suddenly I was writing inside these small boxes, and that really helped me. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about Twitter anymore. I was thinking about this list of utterances that I was generating in the voice of this person on her spy mission. I really left Twitter behind in the moment of entering into the story itself. And I think that was essential, because, as you say, it’s hard to pull all that together.
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? Does it slow you down, or is it liberating to feel that you have backup?
It was definitely one of the most difficult first-draft writing experiences that I’ve had. I think some of that was that I felt that I’d been over-rewarded for “Goon Squad,” and I feared a kind of comeuppance—that, coupled with the fact that I was doing the thing that I felt least qualified to do, because one thing I’ve realized over time is that, although I don’t write about myself or people I know, the physical environments I rely on are ones that I remember. Never did I appreciate more how urgently important that was to my writing process than when I cut myself off from that possibility by writing outside of my lifetime. So I felt uniquely ill-qualified to do that work, and the way that that manifested itself was that the writing felt really dead. I couldn’t seem to make anything much happen. And repeatedly I thought, Maybe I just need to walk away from this. The fact that I’ve spent time on this doesn’t mean that I need to spend more time on it. But every time I gave myself permission to do that I found that I kept returning to the environment as I had researched and imagined it: Second World War New York, the technical details of deep-sea diving with the equipment of the nineteen-thirties and forties, shipbuilding, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, merchant sailing. All of that felt so alive to me. It was like eating exactly the protein that my body wanted. And I thought, If this material can affect me this way, there has to be a book there.
I think there’s probably a little bit too much of my research in that book. I have a feeling that, if I had put it aside all these years, and I was now going to take one more pass before publishing it, I would probably remove a thin layer of research. But the reason I kept it there is not the reason I always thought people included research in their novels—it wasn’t to show off. It was that I was so enamored of these details that I had a really hard time recognizing the difference between the level of my interest and the possible level of the reader’s interest.
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. It was tissue-thin paper with tiny print, and it was so dense, and I remember the person on the elliptical next to me glancing over, and I could tell they were thinking, like, Wow, I cannot believe that is what she is using to entertain herself while she works out. But, to me, it was just enthralling at that point.
You said that you don’t write about yourself or people you know in fiction. Is that a matter of principle or just how it works for you? Do you identify with any of your characters?
I’m the opposite of an autofiction writer, that’s for sure. In fact, unless someone named Deborah Treisman occasionally asks me to write a personal essay, I really don’t even attempt it. It doesn’t come easily to me. 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 love taking a point of view that is opposed to the one that I traditionally occupy. One example of that is a character named Sasha, in “Goon Squad,” who likes to steal. I have been robbed an insane number of times. I clearly don’t pay close enough attention. I know the point of view of the person who’s been the victim of a robbery, but it was really fun to imagine the point of view of the person committing the theft. In order to write about my characters, I have to identify with them completely, and by that I mean that their choices need to feel not only viable and logical but, from their point of view, actually essential. Their emotional lives need to feel immediate and accessible. If I can’t do that, then the characterization won’t work. And I think the reason that I don’t write about myself or people I know, ironically, is that I cannot identify with us on the page. I feel alienated from characters like me. I’m interested in people who are not like me.
I feel as though if you were to read a page from a Hemingway novel or a page from a George Saunders story, you would know immediately who the author was. With you, if I read a page of “Manhattan Beach” and I read a page of “The Candy House” side by side, I would not know that they were by the same writer. Is that intentional? Do you feel that you need to keep your style evolving?
It’s intentional—not so much out of a directive as to what I think I should be doing but because I feel such a hunger to do things that I don’t feel I’ve done before. And one thing I know from experience is that, in order to do new things, I have to do them in new ways. In general, imposing any sort of structure on an existing story has never worked for me. I have to find the story that can only be told that way. If I keep chasing that novelty, it almost guarantees that I won’t be one of those writers who gives readers the satisfaction of feeling like they’re settling into a familiar voice and approach—which is, honestly, kind of a self-indulgence on my part, and I think it has asked a lot of my readers. I feel so grateful to the ones who stick with me.
Do you think that there is something inherent to your voice, no matter which book it is?
In terms of style, I don’t know. There was a period where I think I would have said, “Well, I love lyrical writing. 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 writing—so that any sort of lyric beauty that comes along happens by accident. I guess what I’m saying is that I like to work against what I’ve done before. It’s not as simple as even just wanting novelty. I want to... “repudiate” is too strong a word, but, if I’ve got used to doing something, I like to cut off that possibility to see what happens next. It’s a little like pruning: you prune to encourage growth in new ways, and I try to prune my own habits to keep growing and getting better.
It’s also a painful process. It definitely results in legitimate feelings of incompetence. Because, if I’ve figured out how to do something, my first goal is to not let myself do it. Often there is a kind of stylistic hangover from the previous project. So, for example, when I started working on “Manhattan Beach,” I was trying to establish the voice, which is one of those elusive concepts and yet a totally necessary element of successful fiction, and I had this idea that I think was left over from “Goon Squad,” in which I took a kind of winking approach to time: the reader often knows what happens before the characters do, because the story moves backward. So, with “Manhattan Beach,” I thought, Well, I’m not going to just write a novel set in the past. That seems so artificial. I want my narrator to call attention to the artificiality of this convention. So I was writing the first chapter in that way, with a narrator who kept reminding the reader that, of course, it was actually the twenty-first century.
I have a writing group that I rely on very heavily—I actually dedicated “The Candy House” to them—and 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 I’m doing is working at all. And when I brought in this chapter, with its bells and whistles, they at first gently informed me that it was not really to their liking, and then more stridently said that when my narrator got, you know, ironic and winky with the reader they became angry. So I let all of that go. I just told the story in a much more straightforward way, and it was an absolute relief to do that. Which was a sign that finally I had found an approach that made sense for the material that I wanted to write about.
I was going to say that you often sound like your own fiercest critic; I haven’t heard many writers be as hard on themselves as you are. But perhaps it’s the members of your writing group who are your fiercest critics?
The challenge is finding people who genuinely want the work to succeed and yet will be honest, and some of us in the group have been working together since the nineties. We actually began as a writing class. One of the most critical things about a workshop is to give as much attention to what is working as to what is not, because what is working is the blueprint for how to fix what isn’t. In admitting how much feedback I want to get on my work, I might give the impression that I somehow like this process. I hate it. I never want to find out what anyone thinks, unless it’s, like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read.” And when do you ever hear that? So it’s a deeply uncomfortable process, always, but just essential for me, because at the beginning I don’t always know what I’m trying to do, and when I ultimately do know what I’m trying to do I don’t know if I’m doing it, and I like to find out while I still have time to close the gap.
Has all of your work been read first by the writing group?
In one form or another, yes, because I was working on my first novel, “The Invisible Circus,” when I joined the class that became the writing group. Another thing about the way we work is that we only read aloud, so there’s no homework. There’s no, you know, not quite having time and sort of fudging it slightly, or fixating on little things instead of big things. We have the experience and we respond, and I think there’s a great triage that occurs with reading aloud, where people just naturally go to the most important things. So it’s been essential for me. And then I also have people who read whole drafts and an editor who’s incredibly helpful as well. But this process of finding out very early what is alive and what is not—very basic questions—is, for me, really, really critical.
We’ve talked about your recent books but not about the beginning of your career. When did it first occur to you that writing might be what you’d do with your life?
I realize that I’ve settled on a story of how it all happened, but sometimes I find myself wondering if it really did happen that way. Because the story I’ve settled into is that I didn’t want to be a writer, and then it sort of came to me during this year off that I was taking. And I think that’s somewhat true. I definitely wanted to be an archeologist. And the first thing I did in my gap year was to go on this pretty unsatisfying archeological dig.
You were eighteen, nineteen?
I had just turned eighteen. And I had this idea that my year would be devoted to archeology. But I found myself, in September, with no plan at all. I wanted to travel—that was a deep wish, which I think, to some degree, came from living in California, where I felt very cut off from Europe. I’d been to Mexico, but that was really the only foreign country I had visited. And so that gap year became about trying to earn money so that I could travel, and I ended up going to Japan as a model for March and April. This was a strange interlude in my life. My first stepfather had a good friend who was this kind of wild man named Loy Weston. He was a real playboy. At one point, he stole a bride away from her own wedding.
Like in “The Graduate”?
Apparently, they were standing on a shore or a ship. He was standing with the bride, who hadn’t got married yet, and he took off his watch and threw it into the water, and said, “Baby, when I’m with you, time just stops.” And then he stole her away. He was not a gorgeous guy—very short, sort of funny-looking, but all swagger. Anyway, Uncle Loy, as I called him, introduced Kentucky Fried Chicken to Japan. A questionable service, but he was extremely successful. So, he was living there and running K.F.C. Japan and was very friendly with the world of models and modelling agents. And my then stepfather, I think, got Loy to persuade one of these modelling agents to bring me over. So I went and lived with Loy, and that was an absolute madhouse. It was a crazy two months. But I did get some work, so I was earning money. I don’t think I was thinking I would be a writer at that point. I wanted to be a famous model, and thank God I did so badly at it, because would I have walked away from more success in that realm? I doubt it.
Why do you think you did badly?
Oh, my look was wrong.
For the time or for the clients?
What everyone always said was that I looked very commercial. Which means uninteresting. That’s kind of what it boils down to: I had this face that reminded people of other faces, but there wasn’t something striking there, which I took as a personal failure. In retrospect, thank God. But I’m very glad that I had the little experience with it that I did because it was extremely useful in thinking about image culture and what it is to be an object.
It fuelled a lot of your writing.
Yes, so much. My mother and my stepfather’s marriage started to break down while I was in Japan, so it was a pretty grim scene when I returned home. 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 it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. I had basically turned my back on archeology. The modelling thing was not going anywhere. And, on that trip to Europe, I started having panic attacks, which I had never heard of. Nowadays, everything is so diagnosed and pathologized and categorized. But, at that time—this would have been the summer of ’81—it was exactly the opposite. So I had no words to understand what was happening to me. The only frame I had was drug use and the fear of having destroyed my brain. So that was where my mind went. I was really afraid that I was mentally ill, although I also had some great times, and I met some wonderful people on that trip. In youth hostels, I was thrown together with a couple of remarkable women whom I’ll always remember. I wish I knew their full names and could find out who they are and where they are now.
That’s where the Collective Unconscious would come in handy.
That’s one of the reasons I thought of it, actually! 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. Anyway, there were good times, but then there was this refrain of fear. And it wasn’t just loneliness. It was out-and-out terror. I guess the definition of a panic attack is that you’re afraid because you’re afraid because you’re afraid. And, ultimately, I ended up having to go home. I reached a point where I just couldn’t go on.
Did you know what was triggering the panic attacks?
I still don’t really know. I think it was just what we would call anxiety, you know? But I had put myself in such an isolated situation, a kind of isolation that hardly exists anymore. I was at a nine-hour time difference from my home, and my home itself was breaking up. I think the first time it happened was in a youth hostel that was in a kind of high-rise building in Reims. And I just—my environment became suddenly strange to me, and I felt really alienated. I was so alone. That place wasn’t communal the way a lot of youth hostels were. It was this little room on an empty hallway in a modern high-rise. And there was no way I could have reached anyone to talk about it. But when those attacks happened, and they happened several times in the course of two months, I would actually write, during the attacks and afterward, to sort of process them. 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. And, somehow, I came home feeling quite sure that writing was the thing I had to do. But I also thought I was a mentally ill person, and was going to spend my life in institutions.
And only one of these things came true.
Yes, thank God. But for the first year of college I was haunted by those attacks. I didn’t tell anyone about them because I was so ashamed. I felt like I came from a different world than a lot of the other students. They came to college with their parents and supplies. I came with a suitcase on a plane alone. Things felt very fragmented to me. But it’s funny—the people I met in my dorm hallway are my best friends to this day. I really think of arriving at Penn as the beginning of being me. 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. And, in a way, I’ve never wavered from where I was heading within the first couple of weeks of arriving there.
And writing was what you were aiming at?
Absolutely. I worked for years with the playwright Romulus Linney. I started in his fiction class, and then we did an independent study. And I actually did a creative thesis. So I really was extremely focussed. I started submitting things to literary magazines on campus. I ended up editing the literary magazine.
How did you get from there to the first book?
First of all, I should say that I showed very little promise. I mean, it’s so hard to tell who will do anything interesting and who won’t. The people who shot out of the gate, full of promise, sometimes didn’t follow through fully. Anyway, I was pretty conventional and ordinary as a writer, but I had one thing going for me. I’ve heard other people say that they read books and thought, I can do better than that. I never thought that. I still don’t. I’m now sixty, and occasionally I’ll think, yes, I would have shifted things around a little here. 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. That sounds so weird. I don’t know if I can really explain it, but that was what I thought: other people were more real than I was.
In what way?
Their lives were what life was supposed to be, and my life was kind of an echo of that. I felt that other people were always doing things better than I was. And, when I failed, it felt like another manifestation of my lack of reality. So, for example, with modelling—and it seems so laughable now because, obviously, that was not a career that made a lot of sense for me—but what it felt like was other people were real and they succeeded, and I was fake and, therefore, I failed. Other people are real, and the world recognizes their reality, but I am kind of a figment. I’m just a wannabe person. That was a really hard way to live. And I think when those panic attacks came there may have been a sort of weird existential aspect to them. I kind of felt like I was just disappearing, or my brain was crumbling. It wasn’t like dying. It was like vanishing.
So when I decided that I wanted to write it was never with a sense of the tremendous potential that I would unleash on the world. And, therefore, when I didn’t really have encouragement it never stopped me. 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.
So putting the words down made you more real?
Yes, and it still does somehow. I feel like I am more myself on the page than I am any other way. I know for sure that I’m smarter if I’m writing. I can feel my I.Q. increase. It’s weird, you know? People will say, “Are you interested in writing a think piece about something?” And I’ll think, You don’t understand. I am not interesting enough to write a think piece because my thinking happens through writing.
Anyway, once I’d 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. It was not a story of, like, “No one is acknowledging my greatness!” There was no greatness to be acknowledged for quite a while. I wrote a creative thesis, which was a story collection, very conventional stories. One of them, much revised, ended up in my first collection. So there was something that was interesting there to be used later.
Then I had a scholarship to go to England and study at Cambridge. So I read English literature, which was fantastic, because I had been an English major at Penn at the time when literary theory was predominant. I had read a lot of books about books that I hadn’t read. I don’t really regret that, because it informed the development of my thinking, but by this point I needed to just read a bunch of books. So I did that. 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 understood that I could spew out a lot of material and then type it up, but I hadn’t realized that meant that I now had a really rough and barely coherent first draft that would take years of work to improve. I just thought that was the book. So it was very disappointing to find not only that people didn’t like it but that ultimately, when I could sort of gather my courage to read it, I found it pretty unreadable, too. I sent this book to Romulus Linney. And when I moved to New York, after England, he took me out for an Indian meal, and I thought he had read the book. But basically his only feedback was “You need to draw the reader in.”
In other words, he stopped reading on page 1?
Probably page 5! So the bottom line was: I didn’t publish a book until I was thirty-two.
Which is not unusual, or definitely wasn’t then.
No, it wasn’t, 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.
You once worked as a private secretary to the Countess of Romanones, who was a spy during the Second World War. You helped her write her memoirs. Did that experience help you with your own writing?
I think it did, actually. What was bad about working with the countess was that she had a hot temper and could be abusive. I felt kind of a shadow of her presence in my life all the time. 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 that was it. So she made my life possible. I mean, it was while working for her that I really got into a serious writing routine. Before that, I’d spent so much time just trying to earn money. I worked as a temp in the word-processing pool for Willkie Farr & Gallagher for a few months. I was living that hook-or-crook kind of New York existence, but it turned out that that took all my time. 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. 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. And then I would walk to her apartment and sometimes get yelled at for the second half of the day. But at least I’d have got some work done.
What allowed you to leave that job?
I got an N.E.A. grant. That was how I was able to do it.
Was that the first positive reinforcement for your writing?
No, I had started getting little bits of positive reinforcement. My mom had a friend, a guy named Blair Fuller, who had been involved with The Paris Review as a younger man. He gave me an introduction to George Plimpton, whom I don’t think I had any real contact with, but someone in his office said, “We’re having a party, come.” The Paris Review had what I guess are now these storied parties. And, for a newcomer to the city who had never really known any writers, it was kind of like mainlining the publishing industry. When people would say, “What do you do?” I would say, “I’m a temp,” and, you know, the conversation would often end quickly. But I was physically in a place that so much of the publishing world was moving through, and that was kind of wild. The Paris Review had many volunteer slush-pile readers, so I started doing that.
At the same time, I was looking for some kind of writing class, because I clearly needed help. I joined a workshop with Philip Schultz—the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who now has a kind of institute called the Writers Studio. He was then teaching out of his living room in the West Village. It was a fantastic, reasonably priced workshop. The way it worked was that he had quite a few people in the workshop, and anyone could bring in work. There was no limit. But you could only read aloud. The way that he managed to accommodate this potentially large amount of work that might come on any particular night was that he would stop people when he felt the room had heard enough.
It was like “The Gong Show”?
It was kind of like that. And, believe me, I was hitting that point very quickly—like, I was barely getting past a couple of pages. But it really helped me. I realized that Phil’s focus was on getting at emotional truth, which, in a way, matters more than anything else. If you can’t make people feel at least interest or curiosity, you’ve got nothing. And I think that approach was exactly what I needed. I would bring in stories, and no one cared, and, after a page or two, I’d have to stop reading. And I’d be furious in the moment. I’d think, Well, if you just let me read a little more... but that wasn’t true. They’d lost interest, so it was time to stop. I think that process began to get my work back on track. 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. That story ended up in my collection, and it was also the first story I sold—to The North American Review.
Then I worked with another writer, Tom Jenks, who is also still teaching. He was the literary editor at GQ at that point, and he was also teaching out of his living room. Around then I got the novel draft out and looked at it and thought, Oh, my God, what was I thinking? But the idea for the book felt unscathed by this effort, because the effort was so misguided, so wrongheaded. I had to start over, honestly. And this work routine of writing for four hours every morning—that was enough time to get a lot done. So that was how I ended up writing my first two books. I was working on them at the same time, the story collection and the novel.
And then how did you get them to a publisher?
I would go to writers’ conferences in the summers, which I think is a great way to actually get some feedback and make connections. I went to one in Park City, Utah, and I went to one in Squaw Valley. And at the Squaw Valley one I met Virginia Barber, who was my first agent.
The New Yorker also comes into play here. I had a kind of breakthrough in Tom Jenks’s class. In Phil’s workshop, where emotional rawness was the focus and the goal, I had ended up writing a lot of stories about adolescent girls with complicated backstories, and these were very emotional stories because, even though I—then as now—never wrote about myself, that adolescent moment of girlhood will always be very available to me and powerful. The first story I wrote for Tom’s class, “Sacred Heart,” was one that also ended up in my collection. And everyone in the workshop loved it. But Tom was kind of nonplussed. He said, “Yes, it’s good, but you can do better.” And I thought, Dude, everyone loves it, it’s emotional. What’s the problem? And he said, “I have a challenge for you. I want you to write a story that has no kids in it and nothing about the past.” I remember thinking, You really have some nerve. Like, this is working well, and, plus, I don’t even know how to write a story like that. But for some reason it was a revelatory experience to be cut off from those paths of least resistance. And what I ended up writing was a story called “The Stylist” that had a very different quality to it than anything I had written. It was more interesting. It had more ideas in it. And it was so exciting to feel that happen.
Tom thought maybe he would publish that story at GQ, but it didn’t quite happen. I was devastated. But I was assiduously sending out my stories. 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. So I’d convert disappointment into hope immediately. And there were these little signs of approval that would come along, like a handwritten nice note or sometimes even a signed name. I had sent things to The New Yorker, and they would always come back with a form letter. 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., I’m going to send something to Dan Menaker, and I did. It was actually one of the adolescent-girl stories. He wrote a nice note back, and it was very encouraging. So I sent him this new one, “The Stylist.” I remember this vividly. 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 thought, It can’t be real because there actually hasn’t been enough time for the story to have even reached him. I thought, Is this a prank? But no one knew I had sent it. So that was Dan accepting the story. It was so thrilling.
I have to say—don’t expect that response time now!
You know, I don’t know how it happened. It seemed to defy possibility, but it was real. It had to have been a fluke of timing. So that was a major career leap, although, as with every career leap I have experienced, there was a kind of difficult aftermath. The story definitely got attention; it was by a completely unknown writer. So people were interested, and they would say, “Show me what else you have,” but everything else I had was clearly not as good. So you get these bolts of approval that sometimes come a little bit too soon, in the sense that there’s no way to really follow up. And I guess all of it speaks to the main thing I feel, which is that incremental success is absolutely the way to go, because that way you don’t get ahead of yourself. You can follow up good fortune with more work that can potentially bring more good fortune. And the thing that I could not understand as a younger writer—and it’s even worse now with social media—is that there’s this transcendent effect that quote-unquote “success” seems to have, like, “Oh, my God, I’m ascending. I’m levitating out of my ordinary life. And now everything will be different.” But that’s not what changes things. What makes real success happen is actually continuing to do better and better work. And so that hope for transcendence actually undermines improvement. That’s what’s so sad about it. I wanted success violently. But my ability just wouldn’t back me up. It just insisted on moving more slowly. And, in retrospect, I have to say I’m really grateful for that.
It’s also remarkable that Tom Jenks said, “You can do better.” How much better is that than saying, “This is the best you can do”?
It’s so true. By the way, I had met him at Squaw Valley, originally. So these writers’ conferences—I can’t recommend them too highly to young writers. Tom has been a kind of pole star for me.
It’s interesting that you said that that story, “The Stylist,” was the first one you put ideas into.
I didn’t put them in—I never can—but they were present. It was partly just thoughts about objectification that had arisen from modelling, but had also been substantiated when I studied literary theory in college. I don’t know if I can fully explain how, but the ways in which I see some of that thinking manifested in that story, and there’s a slightly—I don’t want to say a meta aspect to it, too, but it just felt like a more overtly intellectual story. It felt like, somehow, by moving a little bit away from this emotional hot area of adolescence, I could feel ideas coming into the story in ways that were exciting to me. Ideally, you’re doing all of it—the emotional part and the idea part. And, if you’ve got to pick one, emotion, for sure. But my feeling is always: Why not try to do all of it and more?
That idea content became a kind of trademark of yours. It’s present in almost all of your novels—ideas about image culture, about beauty, about terrorism.
In a way, my books are very different from one another, but I think the idea content is a real throughline. I mean, hopefully, it develops; I don’t want to just be hammering away at the same stuff. But, yes, it is amazing that in my first novel, “The Invisible Circus,” I was already reaching for the things that interest me now. The power of the image and image culture, its relationship to our inner lives, terrorism as an epiphenomenon of image culture, just as modelling is—I kind of brought those two ideas together in my novel “Look at Me.”
And I guess really, at bottom, what I’m reflecting on is the great technological revolution that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, being technically a baby boomer—it’s a long generation, and I’m at the tail end of it. But to go to college before having an answering machine and then to witness what’s happened since has been absolutely staggering. I continue to want to understand how technology changes us. The subject feels inexhaustible because the technology keeps changing.
And then you imagine new technologies for the future.
Yes, and they come true, generally!
That’s right. I really hope “The Candy House” won’t come true.
Me, too, although there are appealing things about it. 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. Phoebe sees her sister as having been real and herself as being kind of a shadow person. And the big transition that she makes in that book is that she inhabits herself and her life as a real thing.
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. Not only that—I had saved every map and drawn circles around each site that I visited. It was so useful later to have all that documentation.
Now you would just check your Instagram.
Oh, my God. It is really sort of amazing to think of how different that trip would be now.
You couldn’t take that trip now, because it would already be processed as you were taking it.
Yes. I mean, I do think that there’s an existential misery at the heart of social media. The feeling of being unreal compared with other people is, if anything, worse now. And I’ve 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? Because they’re looking at social media. It’s so clichéd to express anxiety about things being different than they were when one was young. I can’t even utter those words because it’s such a downer. But I will say that I worry about what happens when there’s no more solitude, because, without it, I’m not sure if I would ever have figured out any of the things that have made my life great, you know?
I don’t know. Maybe I would have. It’s so easy to say. There’s such a tendency to privilege one’s own story and think that somehow everyone else has to have that story, too, and I don’t want to make that mistake.
Except that you’re unusual in that you think your story wasn’t real. Most young people think they’re the center of the universe, and you thought you were a shadow person.
That’s so interesting. It’s true that most young people tend to be self-involved. I think maybe I was the inverse of that. I felt that there was nothing to be involved with when it came to myself, that everything worth thinking about was outside of me. I think I was a strange young person. I’ve noticed with my kids and their friends that you don’t find young people questioning adults about their lives very much. But that was all I did. I thought, These people are real, I’m not, let’s find out what it’s like to be real. It fuelled this constant desire for information. And I’m so happy, actually, that I was like that, because I ended up having so many encounters and conversations that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. If I could pick one tool to bring with me into the world, it would probably be curiosity.
What element of current technology do you think has effected the greatest change?
Well, I always think of antibiotics. When I hear any sort of backward-looking romanticizing of, let’s say, early twentieth-century or nineteenth-century life, I feel it’s just a lie. If you go to a graveyard and see how many women were dying in their twenties, probably in childbirth... That’s not really the question you’re asking, but it is something that I reassure myself with, because medical progress inarguably has made all our lives better. I’m 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.
In terms of technology, it’s so hard for me to evaluate what is good and what is bad, because I am kind of afraid of all of it. The Internet seems dangerous to me. I feel a hesitation, a wish to slow things down. I don’t like everyone staring at their phones. I can get into a state of mind where I’m ready to die over it. I’ll just think, Oh, my God, it’s Armageddon. But then I think that all that is really boring. Everything about what I just said, all those emotions, all those sentiments are dull. So, again, back to curiosity—if I can access my curiosity, I’m suddenly totally fascinated, because I think, What are they looking at? What are they saying? What are they doing? Can I see? I love eavesdropping on people. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t have judgments about technology, actually. The judgments I have are generic. You don’t need to know me to know what they are. All you need to know is that I was born in 1962. But the curiosity part—that is where I can start to make a more individual contribution to the conversation.
And the Internet is actually a faster way of satisfying curiosity. When I think about having to look things up in an encyclopedia from the library when I was a kid...
We have an Encyclopӕdia Britannica collection still! When I was first married, it felt like, “That’s what you do when you’re married. You get an encyclopedia.” And they threw in the Great Books.
Are you willing to talk about why you’re so interested in the eighteen-seventies?
Yes, I am. I’ve settled on the eighteen-seventies because it strikes me as the last decade before all the inventions that we think of as twentieth-century, though really they’re not: widespread camera use, widespread combustion-engine use, incandescent light. If you think about the eighteen-seventies, it’s basically the beginning of the Gilded Age, and yet none of that stuff existed yet. So that is what interests me about that decade, and the fact that New York had a population of a million—it was a city, it had the grid that it has now, this house existed—but a few hundred miles west the landscape was still undeveloped and contested and in the process of being stolen. Certainly, about as different from a city as you could get. And the idea of those two worlds coexisting in time is really interesting to me.
And this is the foundation of the next novel?
I don’t think so, no, because it’s going to take so much research. “Manhattan Beach”-level research, for sure. So that would have to be one book out. There’s another one that I’m hoping to publish first, which I’m a little stuck on, but I’m still hammering away.
Does that one have a contemporary setting?
No, it’s nineteen-fifties. I really want to continue with the time frame that I started with “Manhattan Beach.” I’m interested in the immediate postwar era, having written so intensively about the war years. Where I thought I was trying to go was the nineteen-sixties, which I very much want to write fiction about. But I found that, actually, it felt impossible to get there without contending with the fifties. And I continue to be very interested in genre, so I’m reading a lot of crime fiction. If all my dreams come true, I will publish a crime novel set in the fifties, followed by this really wacky eighteen-seventies book.
Is the novel set in the fifties a follow-up to “Manhattan Beach” or unrelated?
It is related, but I’m not sure how exactly. I’m not sure that it will be deeply related. The protagonist is new. If that book even works—and that is still a question mark.
I feel very uninterested in writing about contemporary life at the moment—although that’s not totally true. The nineteenth-century book feels embedded in a contemporary context. As I told you, when I was working on “Manhattan Beach,” I had all kinds of ideas about narrative tricks that I would use to connect the book to the present. But it turned out that those tricks were ineffectual and actually irritating. 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. I’m kind of excited, because it definitely was frustrating, with “Manhattan Beach,” to feel that I couldn’t find any more interesting way to approach the convention of historical fiction except to hit it head on. And I’m now feeling like maybe I can. We’ll see.
So you’re reading a lot of crime novels now. Have there been any writers or books that have had a strong effect on you?
I’ve always loved crime novels, but I haven’t really let myself read them that much for a couple of reasons. One is that I find them so addictive that they actually interrupt my life. I think probably the best whodunnit I’ve ever read—certainly, contemporary—is “Presumed Innocent.” There’s psychological richness, it’s very hard to guess who the culprit is, and it’s heavy on atmosphere. It takes place in Chicago, where I’m originally from. But there are lots of other great crime stories. For example, there was an American crime writer named Anna Katharine Green. She wrote a book called “The Leavenworth Case,” in the eighteen-seventies. She was an inspiration for Agatha Christie and a very successful novelist in her day. I had never heard of her, but I’ve read a number of her books now. I’m really into Ross Macdonald’s crime novels. Like so many crime novels of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, they’re very dated. They are insanely sexist. It’s almost unbelievable that people were allowed to publish these books, because the casual sexism is just impossible to metabolize for a contemporary sensibility. But they’re good stories, and I’m enjoying them. There were also some really good Agatha Christies I hadn’t read, particularly “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” which is just a knockout. Anyway, I’m just catching up on the genre, and I love the feeling that I’m allowed to because it’s research. I find myself thinking more and more about how a good crime book works and why.
Now, none of that means that I can write one. 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.
Are there noncrime writers who have been inspirations for you?
Oh, yes. I would say that there are books that feel like they’re part of my literary DNA, even though someone may or may not see that while reading my work. And then there are also books that matter for each individual book of mine. And, often, there’s not a huge overlap between those two.
So my literary pole stars would be Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison—specific books, like “The House of Mirth,” “Invisible Man”—and probably “The Great Gatsby,” Shakespeare. 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. In the nineteenth century, I’m an Anthony Trollope freak, but I didn’t actually come to Trollope until the last few years, at my mom’s suggestion, so I can’t claim that as literary DNA. A nineteenth-century writer I read earlier whom I admired and thought about a lot was Émile Zola—especially his journalistic approach to fiction in “Germinal,” which is both an indictment of the horrors of a coal miner’s existence and just a great novel.
Dostoyevsky was someone I really loved at an earlier age. I haven’t read him in quite a while. And the Brits, I mean, “Middlemarch”—I think it is one of the best novels written in English, no question about it. As a single, stand-alone book, I’m not sure anything can top it, actually. No other nineteenth-century writer, in English. Maybe “David Copperfield,” but I think not even.
And then more contemporary people: I was a huge admirer of Robert Stone. His work I consciously tried to emulate very early on. I love Don DeLillo. I think my whole generation has been so shaped by his work. Also, Joyce Carol Oates, someone I’ve read for a very long time and really admired. Her formal invention, her willingness to try anything, her attention to language, and also the way her books are full of ideas, and she’s grappled with eras. “You Must Remember This,” her postwar fifties book, had a huge impact on me.
But, if I had to pick one novel that has meant more to me than any other, it would be “The House of Mirth,” no question. It does everything I want to do and more, and it bears infinite rereadings, as far as I can tell. I’ve never managed to exhaust it. It’s funny, it’s smart, sentence by sentence. It’s packed with ideas, it offers brutal social commentary, and yet it’s hard to say exactly what that commentary is. So it holds onto its mystery. It’s not polemical. It’s emotionally wrenching, and yet it also has a kind of coolness to it. It’s unsparing. And it’s a tragedy in the Greek sense. I feel its literary roots going so far back, which I love. It does all of that, and you can’t put it down. It’s pure genius. And it’s 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. She had to write it under tremendous pressure, and she did it so well.
For some people, deadlines really help!
I know. It really shows you. It’s so spectacular. And it’s also one of the first “highbrow” books that I read for pleasure. I just found it on the shelf and started reading it and was, like, “Oh, my God.”
Whose shelf did you find it on?
My mom’s. My mom’s a huge reader—she taught me to read, and we’ve been exchanging books and book ideas ever since. Another book I pulled from her shelves was James Baldwin’s “Another Country.” I absolutely loved that novel, which I reread recently. As in so many books written in the fifties and sixties, the way women are written about feels jarring to a contemporary sensibility, but it’s still great. It was a very exciting book for me to encounter on my own as a teen-ager.
The books you come across randomly at that age are the books that stay with you.
Yes. And also I was reading “Another Country” in the late seventies. 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. So that was a really important book for me. I’ve thought about trying to teach it. It gets very hard because of the sexism, but I think I may try. I have taught another book I absolutely loved as a teen-ager, “Manchild in the Promised Land,” by Claude Brown. I’m not going to say it’s great. It’s deeply problematic from the standpoint of sexual mores and violence against women. But it’s basically a very autobiographical book about a guy growing up in Harlem, and it was a massive best-seller in its time, which was the sixties. I think I read it very sociologically as a teen-ager, maybe anthropologically. I was always so driven by a desire to get outside of my own world, and I felt like it did that for me. Anyway, I assigned it to my class at Penn, having not reread it, and my T.A.s were horrified at first. Some of the students really loved it, but it felt very tricky to teach it.
The big lesson that I learned is: don’t ever assign a book without having read it recently, because our standards are changing, and that’s all for the good. I’m all for trigger warnings. Let people know what’s coming. But it’s all about framing and giving people the ability to metabolize something so that they have the option of enjoying it. With “The House of Mirth,” I was vividly aware of the antisemitism, so I prepared my students properly. I did not do that for “Manchild in the Promised Land.”
So that’s a challenge, but I think it’s a really important challenge. If we as readers can’t metabolize writing that may, in some ways, offend contemporary sensibilities, we cut ourselves off from an enormous amount of rich work that could benefit us as readers and writers. We’re in such a tender moment culturally, for good reasons. But I also look forward to the point when we can somehow acknowledge the offense, recognize that the work would be better without it, which is always true, and yet also acknowledge that the work is utterly worth reading.
While working on fiction, you have sometimes also taken on journalistic assignments—for the Times Magazine and other places. At the moment, you’re reporting a piece for The New Yorker. Is there something you get from journalism that you don’t get from writing fiction?
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. It’s just such a privilege and a joy to be thrust out of one’s own life and into other people’s 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. I love that feeling. It used to be frightening, because I thought that I might disappear altogether. But now it just feels like a superpower. I mean, invisibility is a joy if you can reinhabit yourself eventually.
You’re kind of describing the process of reading fiction.
That’s true, absolutely. Journalism is a chance to have that experience in the real world. It’s 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. So it’s a tremendous—I don’t want to say gift, because that sounds so clichéd, but it feels like a real advantage to be able to do that. It becomes so easy, I think, as a middle-aged or older person, to just settle into your own experience. And I feel it is essential that I do precisely the opposite.♦
