Traveling Through Time and Memory: Pulitzer Winner Jennifer Egan on Fiction, Journalism, and Writing | Interviews

"I rely on my memory of time and space to write."

In 2010, Jennifer Egan published her most acclaimed book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, made The New York Times' list of the year's ten best books, and picked up many other honors along the way. It also put her on Time's 2011 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

A Visit from the Goon Squad spans half a century (1970–2020), telling the life stories of a group of people connected to rock music. The form is inventive: two parts (Side A and Side B), thirteen chapters. Each chapter is narrated by a different protagonist — a kleptomaniac secretary, an imprisoned entertainment journalist, a washed-up rock star — using a different narrative device (three different grammatical persons, a parody of journalism, a PowerPoint deck), and each has to stand on its own. At the same time, the chapters interlock, and in the end they form a single, complete story.

You may have noticed already that the novel's form sounds a lot like the rock music it describes. It is, in effect, a "concept album," each chapter a track. Egan says she was indeed influenced by the classic concept albums of the 1960s and '70s, such as The Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia. "Each piece sounds different from the others, and that's exactly what's interesting — pieces that sound different from one another collide and merge into a single story. That's the effect I was after."

By the time you reach the end, whether you're reading or "listening," you'll most likely sigh at the fates of the people in this "concept album," which is exactly what bears out its theme: Time's a goon.

The praise was plentiful, but nine years on, looking back at the book, Egan thinks it was overpraised. "I was one of the judges for the 2009 National Book Award, so I know firsthand that these prizes involve a certain amount of randomness and subjectivity. That book got a lot of good luck, and that much luck brings a certain amount of overpraise with it. Luck is a wonderful gift, but if all you have is luck and you still feel great about yourself, that's dangerous — you fall into a dangerous illusion (laughs)," she told QDaily.

Egan is a well-known American novelist and journalist. Born in Chicago in 1962, she grew up in San Francisco and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge. Before she wrote full time, she served food at the World Trade Center, typed at a law firm, and worked as personal secretary to a countess — odd jobs that left her with a store of life experience. As a novelist, she has published fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Granta, and written Emerald City, Look at Me, The Keep, and Manhattan Beach. As a journalist, she often writes features for The New York Times Magazine, on subjects such as homeless children and children with bipolar disorder, and has won several journalism awards; her most recent piece covered the effect of America's opioid epidemic on children and families. "For me, both journalism and fiction are processes of discovery."

On her fiction, a feature in The New Yorker called her a traveler through time: "She combines obsessive research with bizarre imagination, using craft to render scenes of the past, present, and future. Imagination drives Egan's explorations, but over the years she has worked hard to turn historical fact into vivid fiction. She is a realist with a speculative mind, a writer with postmodern tendencies but a traditional gift for prose. She is known for her fluid, unpredictable imagination and her dazzling narrative conception." The feature also tells the story of Egan and Steve Jobs. She was his girlfriend at school, and later turned down his proposal of marriage. After Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Egan got back in touch, and the two had a conversation that stayed with her. Years later, both had done what they set out to do.

Unlike many writers, Egan refuses to put her own story into her fiction. "I never write about myself in my fiction, and I don't even write characters similar to me. I also never write about people I know in my fiction. What I actually draw on is my memory of time and place — I wait for my memory of a particular time and place to find its own way into the fiction. That's typically how it goes for me when I write."

An early short story of hers about China, "Why China?", grew out of her memory of a particular time and place there, but neither the story nor its protagonist has much to do with what she actually lived. In reality, Egan backpacked through China with a friend in the summer of 1986. In the story, the protagonist is a man who travels to China after being suspended from his job pending a company investigation. "I think the reason I wrote that story is that some memory inside me spontaneously found its way into the fiction."

Egan calls that trip "incredible" and "unforgettable." She started in Hong Kong and went on to Guangdong, Kunming, Chengdu, Xi'an, Luoyang, and Beijing. She had planned to reach Shanghai as well but never made it, and her friend gave up at Chengdu and flew home. "Traveling in China as an American tourist was so hard back then — you couldn't find English signage on the street at all," Egan recalls.

As she remembers it, China was crowded, and it surprised her that people still kept a relatively harmonious order, and that it felt safe. She loved Chinese food, especially street food, though she wasn't quite used to seeing so many people spit on the street. She listened to people singing Peking opera in theaters and parks, and met backpackers from all over the world, some of them trying to pass as monks to sneak into Tibet. She still remembers the old buildings in the cities clearly — those old wooden structures were truly beautiful, she thought, and walking among them felt like stepping back in time; she regrets that so many of them were later torn down. She says she will never forget looking out a train window at land that had no end. "I'm sure China has changed enormously since then, but back then it really was endless — almost no sign of any towns. At night you'd see scattered points of light flickering in the boundless darkness…"

"It felt like I'd gone to a China where urban life hadn't yet begun. I still remember clearly seeing many women with bound feet, who I imagine are mostly gone by now — this strange juxtaposition of an ancient, feudal China with a modern one, women with bound feet hobbling down the road in men's jackets. So I think that trip let me see a China that no longer exists, and I feel very lucky for that," Egan said.

In January 2019, when we reached Egan by phone in the United States, she finished reminiscing about the China of 1986 and said she would love to go back and see what it looks like now — above all to Shanghai, the city she once planned to visit and never did. That has to do with her latest novel, Manhattan Beach, too. "I got interested in Shanghai because while researching Manhattan Beach I read a lot of material about seafaring, and Shanghai came up in it — it's probably the Chinese city sailors know best."

She had in fact planned to come to China this past January, but canceled the trip because she had to prepare for teaching. Egan is president of PEN America and teaches a course on the modern novel at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first class was on the 19th-century British writer Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers. Before class, she had her students listen to the audiobook. "Nineteenth-century novels tend to be doorstoppers — not easy to carry around — so I was curious whether, in a country like the US that's in the middle of a podcast boom, I could combine my students' interest in audio with 19th-century novels and see what effect that would have."

She is also writing a sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad, though she isn't sure it will become a book. "Sometimes we have some wonderful fragments, but the question is how to assemble them into a book. If what comes out in the end reads like a shoddy sequel tacked onto something good, I definitely won't be satisfied with it — I might just publish those stories separately and give up on a book. Still, for now I'm fairly optimistic about writing this sequel."

Q = QDaily

E = Jennifer Egan

Writing Is My Deep Connection to the World, and It Gives My Life Meaning

Q: As a teenager you wanted to be an archaeologist, but a later trip to Europe led you to decide to become a writer instead. At what moment did you decide? Why did you make that decision?

E: There doesn't seem to have been one specific moment, but I do think that trip to Europe set me on the path to becoming a writer. I've always loved reading, and looking back, I can find signs that pointed to my later becoming a professional writer. As a child, for instance, I loved playing imaginative games, and when I played with other kids I could be quite bossy, because I wanted to decide where the story went. Role-playing games were my favorite kind, but I didn't like acting — I just liked telling stories. As I grew up, there were many things I wanted to do that, in hindsight, all seem like metaphors for being a writer. For instance, I wanted to be a surgeon, because I was very curious what the inside of the human body looked like. The reason I say that's a metaphor for writing is that, to me, writing means exploring people's inner worlds. Later I found that people's inner consciousness interested me more than their organs.

Then there was archaeology. I think what drew me to it was the part about human civilization — how people in the past lived and thought — so I started exploring archaeology. But I increasingly felt something was off, because the work didn't seem to provoke the kind of thinking about humanity I wanted, or at least not the kind I was after. And, as you can imagine, digging in the dirt under a hot sun is pretty boring. So when I went to Europe — it was my gap year between high school and college, and I was a fairly unhappy teenager at the time — a lot of things happened to me all at once on that trip, and I had a panic attack.

But back then I'd never even heard the term. I believe we understand mental health far better now than we did then. At the time I just thought I was going crazy, and then somehow, in that extreme state, I felt my brain could no longer work normally, that my whole life was coming to an end. That's what an 18-year-old me thought. It was also in that extreme state that I somehow realized how important writing was to me — not important in the sense of "I'm going to be a great writer," I never thought that. More that writing was my deep connection to the world, and that writing gave my life meaning.

These are all things I don't think I'd have discovered in ordinary daily life, but they surface in extreme situations, even though living through them isn't necessarily pleasant. Thinking about it again now, if this had happened in the world we live in today, ruled by hyper-connectedness, I wouldn't have had that extreme, isolated experience. Back then there were no cell phones, it was even hard to call home, there was no internet, no email. That was 1981. So I think if I had the same experience today — a panic attack, feeling isolated — I'd text a friend, I'd FaceTime someone. I'm not sure I'd still come to realize how important writing was to me the same way.

Q: You studied literature and later became a writer. What relationship do you think your writing has to the American literary tradition? Which American writers influenced you the most?

E: Ah, there are far too many. This year I'm teaching a literature course at the University of Pennsylvania, and the reading list includes work by many writers who influenced me a great deal. One of them is Edith Wharton. I love her work — her novels set in New York are wonderful, especially The House of Mirth, which I put on the syllabus. Some more recent American writers who influenced me a lot are Don DeLillo and Robert Stone. Oh, and I'm also very interested in American writers who lived abroad — one of them is Henry James, and there are many, many more.

Of course, it's not only American writers who've influenced me. I think every book, once written, exists in conversation with other writers' books — A Visit from the Goon Squad, for instance, is in conversation with Proust. Proust's In Search of Lost Time, like A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a story explicitly about time. So in a sense I treated In Search of Lost Time as a model for writing about time. And Manhattan Beach, I feel, is in conversation with several other books, among them of course Herman Melville, one of my favorite American novelists.

Moby-Dick is a masterpiece, but I didn't like it the first time I read it. I'm embarrassed to say that in high school, when classmates brought the book up, I always said I didn't like it, that I found it deadly boring. I didn't care about the whale, and nothing in the book grabbed me. But when I reread it, I saw its beauty. Melville also lived in New York, and he wrote about the relationship between New York and the sea. In any case, it was an important book for the writing of Manhattan Beach.

Another writer I can think of is Raymond Chandler, whom I love. He wrote a lot of West Coast stories, with a completely different atmosphere, and that was a big inspiration for Manhattan Beach too. When I write, I'm interested in the existentialist response to urban life — the mysterious, frightening, somewhat dangerous things that inhabit the urban landscape, and how they form an interesting juxtaposition with stories set by the sea. A story set by the sea seems to have nothing in common with noir, even to be its opposite, but the existentialist fear and danger in both are similar. In stories of the sea, humanity is surrounded by a dangerous and mysterious natural entity, the ocean; in noir fiction, humanity is surrounded by a dangerous and mysterious man-made entity, the city. So you can sense that these two kinds of fiction form an interesting juxtaposition. And I hadn't noticed this before I started writing Manhattan Beach — I learned it in the writing.

Technology Has Changed How People Examine Themselves and Talk to Each Other — Novelists Find That Fascinating

Q: You've been writing for many years now. If you had to examine yourself, what do you think really drives you to write fiction? What kinds of subjects tend to interest you?

E: I don't think there's one specific subject. I think what drives me to write fiction is largely the chance to live two lives through writing — a kind of escape, in a way, from real life. I like the feeling of getting to live another life. Of course, I also very much enjoy the real life I have. I have a husband and two kids, and our family is very lucky. Where we live now is cold, but our house has heating. I'm always aware of these things — that I have a very fortunate life — but I also love that feeling of stepping outside daily life and living another life in the imagination. If you think back on the children's literature you read as a kid, you'll find that a lot of stories are about exactly this experience. In The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, opening the wardrobe leads to another world. To me, all of this is a metaphor for writing and reading — it teaches me to step outside daily life and the ordinary progression of time.

Living in that second world is what writing means to me, and it's essential. What I want to give readers is that same pleasure of total escape. But I should add — very few works actually manage to do this. Creating an immersive experience for readers isn't as simple as it sounds; very few works pull it off, at least in my case. Such works are dense with ideas and wisdom. At the same time, I want to feel cultural force at work when I read. I love 19th-century novels — they're the best at this. Reading them, you become completely absorbed, but what you enter isn't just a specific moment in the story; you also come away with a deeper understanding of human life as a whole and what drives it. So writing that kind of work takes enormous effort. That's the kind of work I want to write. I try to create, within the book, an escape that immerses readers, that pulls them in, while also leaving them excited and refreshed.

Q: On the subject of your writing, I've noticed that time is a recurring theme in your novels. Do you have a particular interest in time itself?

E: First, I think every novel can be said to be about the passage of time, even if the story takes place within a single day or a single minute — as long as there's some spatial displacement between the beginning and the end, that implies time passing. I think that's one thing that separates fiction from poetry. Of course, the only book of mine explicitly about time is A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I'm not inclined to write two books around the same theme. Ideally, I exhaust a theme within a single book. So I obviously don't want to write a second book about time — that kind of repetition would bore me.

There are other themes that recur across my books without being explicitly the subject — technology, for instance. Technology has always interested me. I grew up alongside rapid advances in technology; as I said, at 18 I hadn't yet witnessed the rise of communication technology, and in more recent years, things like the invention of the personal computer have left us dazzled. My interest in technology is a consumer's interest, but I also feel technology has bred in us an unfortunate obsession — it drains people's attention, and more important things get neglected as a result. That's my view as a writer, as an observer.

What fascinates me about technology is that it touches every part of life, including how people examine themselves — and that's exactly what interests us novelists most. Self-presentation and posting photos are a huge part of why social media matters so much. On another front, technology has changed how people communicate, how they talk to one another — and that's another thing that interests novelists. If you look at the earliest novels, they're full of letters people wrote. So novelists have always been intensely interested in how people use whatever communication technology is available to present themselves to others. As technology keeps evolving, the way people present themselves keeps changing too. That's what I care about.

Q: Many of your novels — A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me — have ended up predicting the future successfully. How did it feel to learn your predictions had come true? Why do you think you're able to do this?

E: I was shocked. And it seems to keep coming true, one prediction after another. There's a very popular children's song right now called Baby Shark — I don't know much about it, but a lot of readers have told me: oh my god, this is exactly like something out of A Visit from the Goon Squad. I've always been trying to write satire — that's my goal. But in America, it seems, whenever someone tries to write a satirical fable, it comes true. From an aesthetic standpoint, that's actually pretty disappointing, because what I keep trying to put in my books is something extreme, and by the end of Look at Me and A Visit from the Goon Squad, the extremes I hoped to depict no longer feel extreme — they've become realism for readers. As I said, from an aesthetic standpoint that's disappointing. But from a cultural standpoint it's terrifying. I was writing about some frightening futures, and they came true. That's not a good thing.

All I've ever really done is imagine the future — and not even a very distant one. I think the foundation of imagination is the present. I'm just using the present the same way everyone else does. And what I do isn't really imagining the future, even when these things come true within a few years. I'm not a futurist, and I don't have any special edge because of it. I think a lot of what other writers do is a kind of performance — they write out the cultural forces already playing out around them. I don't have that much control over what I do; I'm just trying to tell a good story, but in the writing it's always intuition that guides me, and aesthetics that lead me. Because intuition also operates within a cultural context, I suppose it's not so strange if my writing happens to lean toward however the future ultimately unfolds.

Why — and How Hard It Was — to Write a Chapter as a PowerPoint Deck

Q: When I read A Visit from the Goon Squad, I was surprised that you used a PowerPoint format to narrate chapter twelve. What made you think of writing a chapter that way?

E: For me, writing a chapter of a novel as a PowerPoint deck was really difficult. I'd wanted to use that format before, but it took a long time to make it work. And the reason I set out to use PowerPoint in the first place was the rule I'd set for the book — that every chapter had to use a different technical device. I felt like I was struggling to keep to that rule, because there aren't that many technical devices available. I tried a lot of approaches along the way, and most of them failed. At one point, for instance, I planned to write a chapter in epic verse — to this day I still regret it never worked out, but the fact is I'm a terrible poet, and I'd start writing and completely lose the thread. Another failed attempt used some of the conventions of drama in one chapter, like writing a script. That form had worked well in my earlier book The Keep, but it failed for this novel.

PowerPoint felt to me like it had potential as a form for writing, but it took a long time to grasp how to use it. Like I said about writing Manhattan Beach, I usually start with an initial idea — a place or a situation — and then follow that thread as it unfolds, but that approach didn't work with PowerPoint. So I thought: PowerPoint is an office tool, so I need a character who works at a company. Who could that character be? By the time I got to this chapter, most of the characters had already appeared. I planned to settle on one of them, but in the end I couldn't find the right one.

So when I sold this book to the publisher, it didn't have the PowerPoint chapter yet — I still didn't know how to use that form well. I wrote the PowerPoint chapter after I'd turned in the manuscript. After turning it in, one flaw in the novel kept nagging at me — the character Sasha. I kept trying to find a way to look at her from a later point in her life, and I couldn't. If I left out Sasha's later fate, that felt unfair, because it would make Bennie seem like the story's main character and Sasha only a minor figure. Then, all at once, an idea came to me — to write a chapter, presented as a PowerPoint deck, from the point of view of one of Sasha's children — and I had a feeling it would work, that it would go more smoothly than what I'd tried before.

Another reason I used PowerPoint, and an important one, is that for me the way into a piece of fiction is a sense of time, place, and atmosphere. The reason Manhattan Beach couldn't successfully begin at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was that the sense of time, place, and atmosphere of that location wasn't as strong for me as the winter beach was. In the same way, if I'd imagined this chapter as simply a company employee telling a story on PowerPoint slides, that story would have had no atmosphere at all — I couldn't have been drawn into it. But when I imagined a desert scene presented on PowerPoint slides, I could feel that exciting atmosphere. That's what convinced me PowerPoint would work. So I wrote that chapter, in which Sasha and her family end up in the desert — and my editor had no idea this chapter was going to be added to the book. She was very surprised.

Q: What were the hardest parts of writing in PowerPoint?

E: Oh, god! Writing visual fiction in PowerPoint is nearly impossible. A big problem is that you can't depict action in PowerPoint, because the format lacks continuity — it's a fragmented, static narrative tool, and a story needs to move forward. You can create some continuity by clicking through the slides one after another, but when you need to show a crowd interacting or in motion, that continuity is very thin. Still, I think one reason I was able to pull off this chapter in PowerPoint is that there's very little action in it — almost nothing concrete happens. If I'd written this chapter the conventional way, it basically wouldn't have worked, because it couldn't have conveyed a sense of visual scene.

Another problem with PowerPoint is that, visually, the format has a very cool, office-like quality — because we basically associate PowerPoint with work, which makes it feel tidy and clinical. This particular chapter's story, I think, is actually quite emotional, with a strong emotional pull. So I didn't want to present it in a conventional fictional form, or it would come off as sentimental — like, oh, everyone loves each other, everything's going to be fine. God, I didn't want to write that. The cold, clinical quality of PowerPoint as a form happened to counterbalance the abundant emotion in the story. I could feel the balance between the two.

Overall, if you want to innovate formally — and I love doing that — you also have to understand that a new form is hard to get right. Unless you can innovate narratively as well, formal innovation alone won't work. If you just think being unconventional is cool, then a traditional form is probably a better fit for you.

If I Hadn't Been a Journalist, I Might Never Have Written Manhattan Beach

Q: You wrote Manhattan Beach because of its connection to 9/11, and your original idea was to span the story from the 1930s and '40s all the way to 9/11, but in the end you only wrote the 1930s and '40s. Why did you abandon your original plan? What exactly drew you to that particular period?

E: I think one reason my original idea changed is that as I was writing this book, my thinking kept drifting closer to a present-tense point of view, which created some narrative awkwardness. In fact, I was writing a present-day narrator who kept reminding readers of things from the past and telling them that many years had gone by. And we all know a lot of other things happened during those years too. In my original plan, the narrator's vantage point mattered a great deal — it could lead readers into more recent history, including the period after 9/11 and the second half of the 20th century.

But in the opening chapters of the book, I found that a present-tense narrator was a jarring interruption. I didn't like writing it that way. I didn't like breaking the illusion, the sense of being in the past, that I was trying to build for the reader. So I immediately discussed this with my writing group, testing the approach by reading it aloud — how did it sound? Did it feel alive? But every time the present-tense voice suddenly appeared, it reminded us that these events had happened long ago, so long ago that a lot had happened since. Nobody liked that jump. So I realized I had to give up the present-tense narrator. Once I made that decision, the center of gravity began shifting toward the historical period around 9/11, and the original plan no longer held.

In a way, that answers your question about why the 1930s and '40s fascinated me. The pleasure of it, it seems, lay in that illusory presentness of the past. That's the opposite of my previous book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, where I chose to roam freely through time. We're always sensing what will happen in the future before we're aware of what happened in the past. In the context of A Visit from the Goon Squad, that kind of roaming was interesting. But in the context of Manhattan Beach, the interest seemed to lie only in the wartime atmosphere of the '30s and '40s.

Q: You started preparing to write Manhattan Beach back in 2004 — you read a huge amount of material, did a lot of interviews, and did on-the-ground research. That working method is a lot like a journalist's, and you write nonfiction yourself sometimes too. Did you ever think about writing the story of Manhattan Beach as nonfiction?

E: No, but I did once write an essay about how it felt to read a series of letters a wife and her husband exchanged in the 1940s. They met, and got to know each other, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Through that, I came to know this now-dead woman personally. But what fascinated me more than any one person's story was the era itself. I didn't have one specific nonfiction story to tell, and a specific story — like that wife's — could always be folded into a portrait of the era anyway.

So I didn't feel the urge to write nonfiction, but if I hadn't been a journalist, I might never have written this book. The amount of work before you even start writing is enormous — I had to read research and historical material across many fields, and without having built up a certain amount of research training I don't think I'd have had the nerve to get through it. As you know, a journalist is always starting from zero, always feeling like they know nothing. You feel your own ignorance, but you're also used to teaching yourself quickly in the middle of reporting a story. So while writing Manhattan Beach, even though I felt ignorant, I also had a kind of faith that I'd be able to acquire the knowledge I needed. That faith came from my professional experience as a journalist.

Q: The Manhattan Beach project spanned a long time — you prepared for years and didn't actually start writing until 2012, with a stretch in the middle when you went off to write A Visit from the Goon Squad. Generally, the longer and more extensive the preparation, the harder it is to know when the right moment to start is. So I'm curious — why did you feel ready to start writing in 2012?

E: In a sense, you could say I followed my intuition. I think one problem in writing is that early on, I don't know where to start, and I don't know where to stop either. For me, the ending of a novel is a very intuitive thing. If I had to plan it out ahead of time, that would actually be a bad sign. When I write, I want to feel like I'm "somewhere" — that sense of "somewhere" is almost dreamlike — and I didn't feel it while writing Manhattan Beach until partway through, after I'd finished A Visit from the Goon Squad. What surprised me was that when I started Manhattan Beach, I'd assumed the story would take place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and in a sense, the story did end up there — but at first I thought that's where the story would begin.

So in the early writing stage, I couldn't feel any pull from the story — I kept trying desperately to build the story out from that location, but nothing came. I couldn't sense any narrative momentum; my curiosity just kept spinning in place. Then, at some point, once I'd pulled away from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a scene suddenly came to me — a father and daughter heading to a winter beach. I sensed at once that this was the entry point. But I was also anxious, because that scene wasn't set in the 1940s — it was set in the 1930s, and I hadn't even started researching the 1930s. Overall, I just had to wait for the right moment to arrive.

Q: Could you describe in more detail what happened once you sensed that entry point?

E: Ah, I went out, and then I started writing. You know, in fiction there are always a lot of things happening at once. If there's only one thing going on, that's actually not great, so simultaneous things all interest me. It all started with a long drive, two people heading to an unfamiliar place. The adult is nervous; the little girl is very perceptive, and senses that her father is nervous. Beyond that, there was a lot more. Then I just let my intuition run free. In a first draft, I try to let my subconscious do the work as much as possible. Because first of all, I don't have a very clear idea of how to write the story or what's going to happen in it; and second, if I do it consciously, what comes out ends up being less interesting. I need to feel surprised while I write. I follow the initial thread, and as the story unfolds I keep being surprised along the way — and readers feel something similar as they read.

Good Writing and Reading Keep Us Clear-Headed and Harder to Manipulate

Q: You just mentioned that your trip to China, and your memories of it, sparked your creativity in some way. How do you see the relationship between real-life experience and fiction writing?

E: I think for me, the part my personal experience and memories play in my fiction isn't something I use deliberately. I never write about myself in fiction, and I don't even write characters similar to me. I also never write about people I know in my fiction. What I actually draw on is my memory of time and place — I wait for my memory of a particular time and place to enter the fiction. That's typically how it goes for me when I write.

I do take notes when I travel. One chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad is set in Naples — I went to Naples before writing it, and though I may have stayed only three or four days, I took a lot of notes, so the finished chapter ended up with a strong sense of atmosphere. The images of punk and rock music in the novel, and of 1970s San Francisco, also come from my memories. I was a teenager at the time, not a punk myself, but I'd seen some, so I drew on those impressions and memories of punk to create a new context. To me, that was an entirely new story.

That's how I work when I write. It was the same with "Why China?" In fact, in Emerald City, a lot of the stories take place in different locations. One story is set in Mexico, also because I went there with my family as a child; another, "Sacred Heart," is set at a Catholic girls' school — as a child I went to a school in Chicago called Sacred Heart. So I've actually drawn on a lot of memories. I rely on my memory of time and space to write.

Q: I've seen that you're also planning to write a memoir, which seems very different from your refusal to write about yourself. So why do you want to write one?

E: I'm not exactly looking forward to writing a memoir, but while gathering material for Manhattan Beach I realized how much I depend on people's memories of their lives and their willingness to record them, and that made me feel a certain responsibility to record my own life at some point in the future. I'm grateful to the people who recorded their lives — it helped my writing enormously. So I think that if I can write down and record my own impressions of the world as it is now, that will also be of use to future generations.

Q: You once said: "Fiction is my deepest love, but I also love journalism. Journalism keeps me thinking alertly, and reminds me the world is out there." Since you've had success in both fiction and journalism, what does each of them mean to you?

E: For me, both journalism and fiction are processes of discovery. When I write fiction, I'm trying to discover an imagined world, rather than discovering unfamiliar parts of a world I already know. But with journalism, in the process of gathering material, I discover a lot of facts I didn't know before. The difference is that for fiction, writing itself is the means of discovery — I use a lot of methods while writing to activate my subconscious. With journalism it's different — it's more about being led to an interesting, compelling story. When I write journalism, I try to distill and condense the huge amount of material I've read. When I write fiction, it takes a long time — my writing efficiency is relatively low. I still write by hand, and it usually takes years before I produce anything decent. With journalism, I have to condense what I know into an article an ordinary reader can understand, and I need to write fast. Gathering material, understanding the issue, writing it up — all in one go. In short, writing journalism and writing fiction are very different, even though curiosity drives both.

Q: In March 2018, you became president of PEN America. Nearly a year in now, do you have any major takeaways from this role?

E: This job takes up a lot of time in my life, but it's an honor to do my part for freedom of speech. First, I think one of the tasks is to champion literary practice. I feel this tradition is increasingly threatened today by screen technology, so I'm glad this job lets me assert and uphold the value of literature today. Protecting freedom of speech is also very important, so that writers can write freely.

And, as everyone knows, we have a president who is incompetent, and possibly wasn't even elected in a legitimate way. He's tried to silence the press. PEN is honored to be able to work actively with the media on this front. Even though PEN isn't a political organization — we have Republican members and Democratic members — a lot of people feel we're in the middle of a crisis brought on by incompetent leadership. As citizens, we need to take the initiative to help keep things stable during this unstable period. The work at PEN makes me feel like I'm taking part, that I'm acting.

Q: Speaking of which, I'm reminded that in December 2018 you published a piece in Time titled "We Need Writers More Than Ever, and Our Democracy Depends on It". What do you think is the writer's responsibility in this day and age? Is it to speak the truth and defend democracy?

E: I believe that speaking the truth, and being allowed to speak the truth, are both essential to democracy. And right now, social media and image culture are oversimplifying a lot of facts, and they're easily exploited by outside forces — when other countries want to manipulate something, for instance, they try to influence what's happening in America through social media. The 2016 election shows this well — the Russians got into our social media and helped put Donald Trump in power. It's simply unconscionable.

But writing, unlike social media, is complicated. Writing is always complicated. It renders conflict and contradiction in layered, concrete form, which is exactly the opposite of oversimplification and easy manipulation. So I believe that through good writing and good reading, we can stay clear-headed and alert, and our minds become harder to manipulate. We need to be careful about everything now, because too many forces want to control people, and people who don't think carefully are always easier to control. So the work of PEN, and the work of being a reader, is to keep us mentally alert and strong, so that we aren't manipulated by those outside forces.

(Wang Sui also contributed to this article — our thanks!)

Cover image: The Who. Banner image: Iggy Pop. Source: Wikipedia.