Yes. The more I can stay out ahead of the critical side of me, the freer I feel. That also includes art-stealing file-sharing platforms, denounced by Miranda Klines twin daughters, who take over their fathers music production company: Nothing is free! So its been essential for me. I worked for years with the playwright Romulus Linney. So I felt uniquely ill-qualified to do that work, and the way that that manifested itself was that the writing felt really dead. 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 you could only read aloud. So that was a major career leap, although, as with every career leap I have experienced, there was a kind of difficult aftermath. He remembers Damon, and then, through facial recognition in the Collective, he is able to view other peoples memories that involve Damon. The Collective Consciousness offers something very appealing, but it also has a dark side, and Im wondering if you surprised yourself with the manifestations of the technology in the book. Then I will walk away, but often I try quite a few things before I get to that point, because Im still, you know, waiting to see if some other approach might come to my aid. I love eavesdropping on people. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House comes together in pieces. That sounds so weird. And it wasnt just loneliness. And I think when those panic attacks came there may have been a sort of weird existential aspect to them. 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. It was a crazy two months. I dont really have to keep that much straight because I dont have much of a plan. And this is the foundation of the next novel? Ive heard other people say that they read books and thought, I can do better than that. Thats kind of what it boils down to: I had this face that reminded people of other faces, but there wasnt something striking there, which I took as a personal failure. It invites continuation. I had to start over, honestly. Is that intentional? And The Candy House, which is set in the not-so-distant future, revolves around a new form of technology. 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. Yes, and it still does somehow. The person who narrates the 1965 chapter, which describes how four young bankers leapt into the counterculture at a pot farm in the redwoods, is the daughter of one of the men. Her formal invention, her willingness to try anything, her attention to language, and also the way her books are full of ideas, and shes grappled with eras. Its 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. And I think thats somewhat true. Im kind of excited, because it definitely was frustrating, with Manhattan Beach, to feel that I couldnt find any more interesting way to approach the convention of historical fiction except to hit it head on. I ended up editing the literary magazine. Blake RickerRead More, The New England Revolution shared the field with some local soccer lovers Wednesday during a special skills clinic for children with disabilities. But I found that, actually, it felt impossible to get there without contending with the fifties. So, he was living there and running K.F.C. Shes witnessing a moment of liberation in her fathers life but also the beginning of the end of her parents suburban marriage. That makes me wonder what the witch is in this book. So Id convert disappointment into hope immediately. Thats one of the reasons I thought of it, actually! Whats 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. I think I was a strange young person. I mean, if we cant figure out how to cure mental illness, we clearly dont understand the brain well enough to externalize and view it. And one thing I know from experience is that, in order to do new things, I have to do them in new ways. Chris calls his organization Mondrian, presumably in tribute to his grandmother, who kept an authentic Mondrian painting in a modest tract home so impossible to secure that no company would insure it. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. I can write really fast at the beginning, and the faster the better in a way, because Im looking not to think about it too much. Its pure genius. Its important to me to hear about these very extreme experiences that I will never have but that enrich my understanding of the world and give me material that I can access later imaginatively. And what does it even mean to view consciousness? The protagonist is new. 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 felt that there was nothing to be involved with when it came to myself, that everything worth thinking about was outside of me. When we meet him in The Candy House, he has invented social media. It does everything I want to do and more, and it bears infinite rereadings, as far as I can tell. The annual clinicRead More, ORANGE CITY, Fla. (WHDH) An alert bystander is being credited with saving an 8-months old life after a Florida mother left the baby inRead More, A dedicated 20-month-old pup is making a major difference at Franciscan Childrens Hospital in Brighton. You helped her write her memoirs. At some point, we become aware that his daughter is telling the story. It was so useful later to have all that documentation. I couldnt seem to make anything much happen. When people would say, What do you do? I would say, Im a temp, and, you know, the conversation would often end quickly. So I sent him this new one, The Stylist. I remember this vividly. One bravura chapter, reminiscent of the famous PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad, is told in directives conveyed to an undercover agent through an implant in her brain. 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. I felt kind of a shadow of her presence in my life all the time. And it was on that trip that somehow the goal of writing became very clear. And I thought, If this material can affect me this way, there has to be a book there. Thats right. So it was very disappointing to find not only that people didnt like it but that ultimately, when I could sort of gather my courage to read it, I found it pretty unreadable, too. EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Egans best-selling novels A Visit from the Goon Squad and its sequel The Candy House are getting the TV treatment in a big way as A24 has optioned the rights to the books with Olivia Wilde attached to direct the series. That seems so artificial. 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. WebDiscover the book. I was thinking about this list of utterances that I was generating in the voice of this person on her spy mission. So its a tremendousI dont want to say gift, because that sounds so clichd, but it feels like a real advantage to be able to do that. Instagram, Twitter and TikTok can monopolize all of your time, driven by what the novelist Jennifer Egan calls humankinds ongoing hunger for authenticity.. . Group, a Graham Holdings Company. 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. Nick Kroll and Jason Mantzoukas have all kinds of chemistry. But no one knew I had sent it. It does all of that, and you cant put it down. Im 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 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. The 13-year-old boy was being evaluated when heRead More, (WHDH) Cambridge native Ben Affleck checked into rehab again as he continues to seek treatment for alcohol addiction, according to TMZ. Journalism is a chance to have that experience in the real world. One of them, much revised, ended up in my first collection. If you think about the eighteen-seventies, its basically the beginning of the Gilded Age, and yet none of that stuff existed yet. . It seemed to defy possibility, but it was real. 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. Can we talk more about that? 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. When I was first married, it felt like, Thats what you do when youre married. Tara Edwards is now suing Scripps Media Inc., the company that owns Channel 7 News, seeking $100 million, according to attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who filed The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox. He was a real playboy. Anyway, Im just catching up on the genre, and I love the feeling that Im allowed to because its research. I came with a suitcase on a plane alone. I wish I knew their full names and could find out who they are and where they are now. 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. I just thought that was the book. My curiosity tended to be applied to the characters who are the most opaque in Goon Squad, characters who seem almost dispensable, because theyre so minor; that automatically made me curious, because, of course, there are no minor characters in real life. OpenAIs chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. I still dont really know. Thats so interesting. Because theyre looking at social media. And I had this idea that my year would be devoted to archeology. This interview is drawn from two conversations. TV viewers got a rude awakening in Denver, Colorado, during a live morning newscast. I have a writing group that I rely on very heavilyI actually dedicated The Candy House to themand 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 Im doing is working at all. I guess the definition of a panic attack is that youre afraid because youre afraid because youre afraid. I sent this book to Romulus Linney. Well see. The Paris Review had many volunteer slush-pile readers, so I started doing that. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. And, for a newcomer to the city who had never really known any writers, it was kind of like mainlining the publishing industry. So I think my house would have to be covered with hard candy: shiny, delicious nonfood. Were there notes and ideas that you didnt find a way to use? I really think of arriving at Penn as the beginning of being me. Photo by Getty Images Plus. repudiate is too strong a word, but, if Ive got used to doing something, I like to cut off that possibility to see what happens next. I dont know if I can fully explain how, but the ways in which I see some of that thinking manifested in that story, and theres a slightlyI dont want to say a meta aspect to it, too, but it just felt like a more overtly intellectual story. So Ill keep a list of structures that Im curious about, but my entry point is always the physical environment. In youth hostels, I was thrown together with a couple of remarkable women whom Ill always remember. The first story I wrote for Toms class, Sacred Heart, was one that also ended up in my collection. 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. He was not a gorgeous guyvery short, sort of funny-looking, but all swagger. In Phils 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 Ithen as nownever wrote about myself, that adolescent moment of girlhood will always be very available to me and powerful. Things felt very fragmented to me. 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 doesnt have in the same way. I went to one in Park City, Utah, and I went to one in Squaw Valley. 'The Candy House' is a brilliant portrait of intersecting The person who invents the technology becomes a kind of throughline for The Candy Housea guy named Bix Bouton, whos a minor character in Goon Squad. A lot of people dont even remember him. But I did get some work, so I was earning money. That story ended up in my collection, and it was also the first story I soldto The North American Review. Tell Hank: (855) 247-HANK. In terms of technology, its so hard for me to evaluate what is good and what is bad, because I am kind of afraid of all of it. She explains that the reason she knows what happened to him is that shes using his externalized memory. You said that you dont write about yourself or people you know in fiction. I had never heard of her, but Ive read a number of her books now. Boston, MA 02114 That was how I was able to do it. Wilde also will exec produce along with Jennifer Fox. How did you decide which characters from Goon Squad to explore in The Candy House? 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. If A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time and music, The Candy House is about experience and art, although the novels four sections (Build, Break, Drop, Build) refer back to the musical structures of Goon Squad. 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. 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 just couldnt find the right vibe or structure or physical environment to write something that was worthy of inclusion. You can learn an unbelievable amount about people without even going to a whole lot of trouble. So these writers conferencesI cant recommend them too highly to young writers. I started submitting things to literary magazines on campus. He was the literary editor at GQ at that point, and he was also teaching out of his living room. I feel alienated from characters like me. 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 isnt. I want my narrator to call attention to the artificiality of this convention. So I went and lived with Loy, and that was an absolute madhouse. And I guess the challenge always with structure is to find the story that requires that particular structure. When youre writing something like this, do you end up with outtakes, chapters that just dont fit into the puzzle? Anyway, there were good times, but then there was this refrain of fear. Like a Washing Machine Drum on Spin Cycle, Shivs Good News Could Change Everything on, Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men, The Secret to Netflixs Most Heinously Addictive Show. The Candy House and Goon Squad are ensemble pieces that, hopefully, work in a sort of kaleidoscopic way, with many different individual stories fusing into a larger narrative that has an arc, but a looser one, like that of, say, a serialized novel or a TV programsince thats where many people get their serialization now. . I didnt usually write the two projects literally back to backI didnt put down one and pick up the otherbut I had a system where I would do one, take a break, then do the other. Jennifer anchors NewsCenter 5s Weekend So its always trial and error. All rights reserved. Jennifer Egan is not only publishing a new novel but its a sibling sequel to her Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.. Like Goon Squad, The Candy House features a cast of intersecting characters: a tech tycoon who spearheads a new era of online sharing, an anthropologist who Im all for trigger warnings. They came to college with their parents and supplies. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. It doesnt come easily to me. First of all, I should say that I showed very little promise. Me, too, although there are appealing things about it. And where did that idea come from? That is a kind of catalytic discovery for him that gets him out of his house and into action. He is preoccupied with what became of the guy who used to sell him drugs, and he knows only the guys first name, Damon, if it even was his first name. I was going to say that you often sound like your own fiercest critic; I havent heard many writers be as hard on themselves as you are. Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. It really shows you. Stories like Jennifer Egans make me want to continue my subscription to The New Yorker and discontinue my prescription to anti-depressants, a reader once wrote in. Im interested in people who are not like me. Ideally, youre doing all of itthe emotional part and the idea part. Theres not a lot of filler in Jennifer Egans radiant new novel, The Candy House, a sequel of sorts to her 2010 Pulitzer-winning bestseller, A Visit From the Goon Squad. But one sentence in the new novels penultimate chapter does strike me as unnecessary. And he said, I have a challenge for you. 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. After Bix leaves, the other two end up going swimming, and Rob drowns. Its packed with ideas, it offers brutal social commentary, and yet its hard to say exactly what that commentary is. Anyway, Uncle Loy, as I called him, introduced Kentucky Fried Chicken to Japan. 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. I had a kind of breakthrough in Tom Jenkss class. 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