American - Novelist | September 7, 1962 -
Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
Jennifer Egan
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
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People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
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We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
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Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.
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I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.
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Nowadays I'm more interested in what you'd call 'alternative.' Lately we've been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons, and Jenny Owen Youngs. I'm also pretty crazy about the Kings of Convenience, a Norwegian band that's been compared to Simon and Garfunkel.
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If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
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If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.
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If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.
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It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.
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