THE CANDY HOUSE: Jennifer Egan in conversation with Danzy Senna

hey good evening everybody how great you're like there's so many in the audience this is our third program and um i'm comforted to see you all here and we're back at it so i'm jessica strand i'm the director of public programs the library foundation of los angeles we're also streaming this evening for those who couldn't make it down here so i'm going to tell those people and the ether if they want to ask questions after they just type them into the chat for those not familiar with the library foundation lfla is instrumental in supporting many of the programs at the los angeles public library from homework help to college prep to read baby read the list is long and the programs are vital in giving access and support to angelina's across this vast city tonight we're lucky enough to have two terrific novelists on our stage jennifer egan and danzi senna discussing egan's new novel the candy house to quickly synopsize or distill this novel into a few sentences is nearly impossible so i will let our guests discuss this intriguing book which contains a number of characters from the 2010 novel a visit from the goon squad suffice to say goon squad dealt with music world and the candy house delves into the tech world using it more closely looking at more closely at memory and memories and also as one of the characters says so aptly knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing without a story it's just information what's wonderful about egan's work is that she's constantly experimenting with form and genre never resting on a particular style from modern gothic to story cycle to historical novel her unpredictability keeps us on our toes and wanting more jennifer egan is an author of several novels and a short story collection her 2017 novel manhattan beach a new york times bestseller was awarded the andrew carnegie medal for excellence in fiction and was chosen by the new york city's one book one new york read her previous novel a visit from the goon squad won the 2011 pulitzer prize the national book critics circle award and the los angeles times book prize and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by time magazine entertainment weekly and several others as a journalist she's written frequently for the new york times magazine dansy senna is a novelist and essayist she's the author five books including her first novel cacaja and her most recent novel new people her writing has appeared in the new yorker the atlantic vogue and the new york times please welcome jennifer egan and denzie sam [Applause] [Applause] hello everyone thank you so much for coming um we're going to start with my doing a brief reading from the book and then having a chance to chat with my dear friend dansy which i don't get to do enough so i'm happy that you all will be listening and thank you so much to the library foundation and to all of you for coming out it's amazing to actually be able to have live events it's a joy i feel extremely lucky um writers have been hoping to do this for the last two years and few have managed it so i'm going to just read a couple of sections from the beginning of a chapter called the mystery of our mother one long ago she told us when we were just a hope in her heart or not even that because she never wanted children or thought she didn't a higher power touched our mother's head and said stop what you're doing two little girls are waiting to be born and you need to have them right away because the world is desperate for their brightness so she stopped studying anthropology which she really did love and maybe would study again someday when you're all grown up and don't need me anymore we'll always need you i'll always need you to that's for sure i'll try not to drive you crazy with my mommy needs tell the end well i stopped going to anthropology school and i married your daddy and we brought you into the world and here you are it all worked out perfectly where is daddy you'll see him next week he's taking you to ballet last time he never came i'll be here just in case he can't make a bun that's not important honey before ballet don't whine sweetie he threw tam tam out the window of the car he said she was moth-eaten that was unfortunate how could you marry him love is a mystery does daddy love you he loves you that's what matters he said we were young spendthrifts did he now he said can we not talk about what he said we're just telling you i don't need to be told i know your father very well how did she endure these conversations of course our father didn't love her any more than she loved him he was 15 years older than our mother twice divorced when they met with four kids two by each ex-wife how's that for a rotten prospective husband but he was charming a famous record producer and above all we later surmised he wouldn't take no for an answer why he wanted our mother to say yes is another mystery they had nothing in common beyond a taste for beauty his and beauty hers but she never lived by her beauty she was the kind of mom who rarely wore makeup who let her hair grow wild and didn't bother to shower on sunday her day off from the travel agency where she went to work after our father stranded her without any money to raise us our parents marriage collapsed when a san francisco high school student washed up on their malibu doorstep having run away from home and hitchhiked south after our father seduced her on a business trip we were three and four years old our father managed on paper to appear penniless he left our mother with nothing but us which by his calculation probably meant less than nothing but for our mother who had little else we were infinite she loved us infinitely in return and gave us that rare thing a happy childhood she never told us why she'd left our father much later he did on the occasions when our father showed up to take us to ballet we walked grimly down the cracked outdoor steps from our second story apartment to one of his many cars hello girls one of you want to ride in front we shook our heads it wasn't safe everyone knew that except him how about something to eat we've got time before your class we don't eat before ballet i can't do anything right with you two can i we shook our heads and he laughed and began to drive but when he pulled up in front of this the strip mall where the ballet studio was he turned around and peered at us in the back seat i'm your father you understand that don't you we nodded in stoney unison that's not nothing that means something he searched our cold eyes you don't like me why it was not a rhetorical question he was curious awaiting a reply we looked at our father closely for perhaps the first time his weathered surfers tan and longish blonde hair his crooked front teeth he watched us watch him and then he laughed how would you know you're just two little kids one day after ballet our father told us that we weren't going straight home we glowered does mommy know of course your mother knows what do you think i am a kidnapper he drove grimly our lack of enthusiasm clearly needling him we played rock paper scissors in the back seat and pretended he wasn't there hey try looking around for a change we were driving along a cliff the ocean shivering enormously below it seemed a different world from the parched flat one where we inhabited with our mother full of glittering cars in broiling asphalt lots eventually we descended the cliff and pulled into the driveway of a house with tiled roofs and magenta flowers overflowing its walls there were no other houses around it rock and roll crashed from inside the house but our father walked us straight past it to a beach whose fine white sand was different from venice beach where our mother often took us on sunday afternoons where are the people it's a private beach we're the only ones who can be here is it yours yes it's mine go ahead run around have some fun we stood watching him come on play when we failed to move he said i've never seen a pair of kids who wouldn't play it's your beach i'm your father my beach is your beach we like beaches with people you're very rough you two does your mother ever tell you that we shook our heads ah so i'm seeing the real you the real you plural no she is she may think so but i know better visibly heartened by this notion he unbuttoned his hawaiian shirt our father wore shorts year round day and night but we'd never seen him bare chested it turned out that today maybe always his shorts were actually swim trunks come on kiddos he said taking our hands and trotting us over the powdery sand toward the sea we don't have bathing suits you're wearing leotards that's the same thing it was true we each wore a sleeveless dance skin with an elastic waisted ballet skirt pulled over it and soft leather ballet slippers we'd gotten for christmas wait we need to take off our skirts he paused while we slid them off and folded them neatly on top of our ballet slippers two little piles in the blinding white i like that the way you take good care of your things we stepped into the shimmering water with our father the absence of a crowd of music playing on boom boxes of roller skaters and dogs and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks buried in the sand made it seem like an imaginary beach we swam with our father we were seven and eight years old and we remembered that swim as the first nice time we ever had with him thank you well it's it's um so wonderful to be with you here and we um first became friends when we were both in this sort of social experiment a fellowship program of all writers that we were all sharing the same central office and then we all had glass offices in a circle for a year and we were all writing our books and um and i am i was so struck i remember when you presented your work to us um you were talking about how your inspiration for your fiction really doesn't come from the autobiographical and just sort of an idea that will preoccupy you and i don't know if i'm getting it right but i was really struck by that because it's seemingly so different from how i come to writing novels but um but as i read your work i sort of keep coming back to that thought and wondering um what was the idea you were chasing and and what was the spark of it with this book um just for starters well it's usually a mix of ideas that are often really abstract and then times and places that feel really vivid and in this book there were some like some sort of general guiding ideas and then there were often kind of specific things i wanted to try in individual chapters so the general guiding ideas i mean they they really don't sound conducive to fiction because they're pretty abstract but i was interested in exploring space and how our relationship to physical space is changing as a result of virtual experience you know a visit from the goon squad was very much about time and i liked the thought of actually addressing space in a direct way also i was really interested in the paradoxical the paradox whereby we are so data-driven and and sort of data-oriented as a culture and yet our and our data obviously is is is helpful and accurate or it wouldn't be making companies like facebook and google so rich but it also fails to explain us on an individual level completely um and we remain very mysterious creatures uh to each other um and perhaps even to ourselves and data is is so bad at predicting really major things so i guess the relationship between data and interpretation or data and storytelling if you will that's another kind of abstract idea that interested me in terms of this particular chapter there were a couple of things i was thinking about too one was time and place very powerfully you know it's funny though i don't really know la very well so this is one of those occasions where i slay i'm kind of pretending um but that feeling of of the beach and this you know this sort of um sandy environment and and a connection with a parent i don't know somehow that is really what was driving me and then i very much wanted to write something in the first person plural that was kind of on my list so and i had a lot of trial and error before i actually arrived i had other family units i tried to do that with and it didn't work um so there's a lot of fathers and father relationships that i feel like they're preoccupying some of the stories in here but it was such an interesting reading experience because i felt such the pleasure of the traditional novel experience but you had once again completely sort of reinvented the form and and i was so moved by the end of the novel like you were pulling off this thing that i was i was like don't try this at home but jenny again can pull this off it's like a high wire act and um and so i was just interested like because i've read some of your other novels that do kind of abide more by the kind of traditional novel structure and um and then i felt like you had so mastered that that you were able to do this other kind of inventive form where you're allowing these kind of different styles with each chapter different characters and i'm just wondering if is that sort of speaking to you now as a writer more and see more in line with the way that we are living and our identities at this moment than the sort of like the keep or some of your other novels that you know it's interesting i i think that i like doing all of it and i especially like doing something that's a contrast to what i've just done so i can't imagine having to well i did actually start this right after i uh finished a visit from the goon squad but i was mostly just kind of fooling around and gathering up material wondering when i might actually use it and how what it was such a pleasure to do something very different and in fact i think that for me writing this sort of traditional way whatever that means is actually a little harder i found writing manhattan beach a historical novel with a ton of research just so difficult and i think maybe because it took place outside of my lifetime so i couldn't use times and places that i knew which is really my main point of connection to what i'm doing so but i do think that like for example when i started working on manhattan beach i had the idea that i would use a lot of narrative tricky narrative elements i thought well i'm not going to just like set us in the past i'm going to have fun with that and kind of call attention to it as a device and wink at the reader about it and i thought oh that'll be so fun you know it'll be kind of like goon squad in the past it was so unsuccessful that way i mean it was just like painfully unsuccessful as my writing group very sternly told me one of whose members is here i think my friend lisa fugard whom i owe a great deal and who's an incredible writer also um anyway it was very clear that these narrative tricks were not suited to that material and in fact it was a relief to let them go and tell the story in a more direct way and just let the reader you know be in the past it's not like the reader's gonna lose their way and go into a fugue state because i'm not reminding them that in fact it's actually the 21st century so um like let's just have that experience but what i ended up feeling was that one reason that it that uh those tricks fragmentation irony some of that felt so ill-suited to that material may have been technological which actually connects to the point you were just making you know it was the last era before the small screen and somehow those techniques feel more at home for me and a story that's about life in our current media environment and i'm not sure exactly why that is but um and it may be that in the end i will write i would love to write more historical novels i really enjoyed it um and it may be that i can find a way to be more inventive in that realm um which may give the lie to everything i'm saying but it did strike me that you know fragmentation and a certain amount of disorientation a chronology some of that feels more akin to a kind of internet environment that we're all very used to inhabiting now right and we're i mean i don't know how many people have read this novel but you may want to tell them a bit about the like the concept and the the sort of thread that runs through it but i am really interested um because we're both gen xers and i feel like we're kind of you know the last generation to kind of come of age without that other screen defining our identity and um and one of the things that happened to me you know years ago like i started noticing that i was hanging out with younger friends and even friends my age and and i remember there was a moment when i was like playing with a finger puppet in a shop with a friend and they say oh let me take a photo and i didn't realize that if your friend takes your photo then that's just going onto the internet and it and like that was like the first time like my old gen x ass was like what wait that's going up on instagram that silly moment and every moment that you're being photographed is the moment that is there to share and to kind of and it really i just kept thinking about that as i was reading this novel and um i mean it was just such a heady experience reading this and thinking of you writing it over the last few years and it's sort of science fiction and sort of actually realism this novel um what you're doing here so i don't know just well so a couple of things so one thing is i'm older than you are i'm actually technically a baby boomer oh you're almost unbelievable i know i'm kind of glad about it now i feel like wow i actually can can span even to the baby boomers i'm a young baby boomer um but yes i mean i feel like i came of age without having experienced any technological in a telecommunications innovations that i was aware of other than call waiting and that was actually huge because without call waiting we had to get a second line when i became a teenager um so that i wouldn't you know so that someone else could actually use the telephone in the house and receive a phone call so you know each one of those innovations seemed enormous but um but there basically were very few um and so um wait i'm so sorry remind me of where i'm going with this i was talking about just you know my millennial friends taking my photo and then the science fiction realism yeah so that leads perfectly and i will just briefly explain what the kind of innovation at the heart of this is which by the way i didn't come up with until pretty late in the process i knew there would be an invention that would be important but i wasn't sure what it was the invention and by the way it's not this is not original apparently a black mirror episode involves something like this i and i i knew that anyway but anyway the idea is that a guy named bixbowton invents a something called own your unconscious which allows you to externalize your consciousness in full onto a cube for your own use and there are many uses you can look at your you can look at moments of childhood from an adult perspective you can identify people that you want to identify you can re-infuse that that whole consciousness should you have a traumatic traumatic brain injury or dementia so there are lots of reasons to do this um and there's also a possibility which is that you can share your consciousness all or in part to the collective consciousness which gives you access to the anonymous consciousnesses of everyone else who has done the same and it it feels familiar but for exactly the reason you're saying because even if you choose not to directly participate in this you are represented in it by all the people who have so your friend you know photographing you with the finger puppet would be the equivalent of someone that someone who was present that day sharing their consciousness and the whole experience of you with the finger puppet being represented and so there are people who abhor this representation they don't want to be in the collective consciousness and they don't have a choice because too many people near them are sharing so a kind of resistance develops of people called the eluders who cast off their identities all day get a t-shirt that says eluder like it's my favorite way to identify myself now well it's in a way it's sort of appealing kind of i mean obviously all of this is sort of a thought experiment but their feeling is it's not even worth being me anymore i that this identity feels too exhausted too known i'm sick of it so they um cast off those ident their identity and begin again as someone else but you can't just disappear from the internet without everyone noticing so they hire what are known as proxies to impersonate them online so that only people who would have expected to see them in person actually know that they're gone and proxies can range from at the cheap end of the spectrum a program that just uses whatever utterances it can gather to spew out you know dialogue that sounds like you or whatever else or you can actually have a human being serve as your proxy and i enjoyed positing that that fiction writers for example would be kind of good at doing that yeah um yeah so that's that's basically the that's the landscape the technological landscape that i'm imagining but in a way the fun of it really was just imagining people all of the drama that could evolve from that people using the device what they would use it for and those experiences um and then you know the rest of it escaping who who you know who helps people escape why do they do it all of that yeah and i i mean i'm so um it felt like in some ways this novel was also writing about being a writer and being a fiction writer there was some other subtext here to how we as fiction writers um edit and shape reality and memory and the sort of i'm teaching a class right now on auto fiction and so this really fit in like i would teach this as a way of thinking of sort of memory and the act of editing your own life to create a narrative um and and sort of changing yourself in order to kind of find that fictional freedom and um so i was i was thinking about all these ideas while i was teaching and then i read this book and i was like this is exactly kind of getting at some of these ideas um there's a new yorker cartoon that's a man sitting in a chair on the computer and his wife's in a negligee behind him tapping his shoulder and he says um i'll be i'm coming to bed soon as soon as i finish the internet and um you know the idea that like as fiction writers we're we're finding what to leave out of this this reality and this memory bank and we're we're constructing a whole reality as a way of getting to another kind of truth and this book seemed to like really keep coming back to that idea of of story and of you know the fact of information not being the story information being something endless um so i don't know yeah absolutely i do feel like in a way it is a book about writing fiction for another reason too which is as i said i didn't know what this invention would be that that this character would would make i knew it would be important but it was only as i worked on individual chapters many of which take place in the future and started to get glimmers of things that people could do in this imagined future and things that i wanted to do narratively so for example i thought i'd love to write a story or a chapter in which people can just see someone that they've glimpsed once in their lives like they can they can actually track them down and find out who they were who they are how they live you know what's happened to them and that was driven by my own curiosity to do such a thing you know there i i sometimes think about people that i just saw years ago and i think like on an airplane or something on the airplane walking down the street in new york right just these kind of glancing encounters that for whatever reason have stayed with me but you know even it with all the ease of tracking people down nowadays i don't have enough identifying information to do that but what if i could do a facial recognition surge so thinking that way is really what led me to it actual things that i wanted to do another idea was i was really interested in something i was thinking of as a kind of invasive omniscience like omniscience that is just so deep that we really know everything i mean you could a stream of consciousness in a way is like that but i love the idea of going deep inside one person and then really as deeply inside another that's also called the third person point of view right so in a certain way i feel like i was i was inventing a machine that could explain all the things i felt like doing narratively and make it easy for me not to have to come up with some sort of logic system in which people can identify people they've seen just once in their lives and so i end it was fun to find a way in this book to actually have someone use when you're unconscious or specifically the the product is hey whatever happened to dot dot dot um and this is a guy who's recovered um recovering from a drug problem who keeps thinking about the guy that he was buying drugs from when he was using and wants to know what happened to this guy and so he ends up putting attaching electrodes to his head and remembering damon this drug dealer very intensely at which point those memories are released to the collective and then facial recognition tracks down other memories from other people in which that same face appears so he ends up being able to essentially watch damon's life story um from anonymous viewpoints starting when the guy is a kid and concluding in when he's in orange in a penitentiary um and my protagonist is incredibly disappointed he had somehow hoped that damon would have accomplished great things but in fact learns that he didn't so this was just very convenient i mean there's no other way to put it this this device was a device for me um and it was it was driven a lot by narrative wishes but then of course yeah and the book does feel like we're doing exactly that of course so it has this other meta meaning but it feels like i've seen you know just like a sliver away from reality because of course we all go and stalk people online and look up somebody we knew in high school and start to find out you know we can do a lot of this stuff already um and the book seemed to me like it was gonna feel dystopian and then it didn't and by the end i didn't feel as hopeless as i as i thought i was going to and i'm just curious um because i'm an eluder i tend to have these very sort of like you know negative feelings about technology and about my children and their brains and what's happening to all of us um but i'm wondering like it didn't feel like you were as hopeless as i would have imagined myself to feel like i avoided this completely by writing my last novel in the 90s so that i could have someone stalk someone in real time without a cell phone and you went right into the sort of present and the future and um and i felt like there was some humanity intact by the end of this book even despite all of this vision that you had of of where we're going that felt very realistic yeah i mean it's funny one thing i love about writing fiction is that i find out what i actually think by doing it and i've repeatedly had the thought that something was going to be you know the question that i'm asking suggests a kind of negative outcome so for example with my novel look at me i was asking explicitly asking myself whether image culture has changed who we are to ourselves has it sort of encroached on deep private life and the very fact that i would ask that question suggests that i kind of thought the answer was yes but the book actually comes to the opposite conclusion and i think the same was true here you know i i never thought of the device as dystopian again my i was driven to it by my own curiosity about ways that it could be used both in narrative and in life you know i think i'd be the first to want to externalize my consciousness like i think it's kind of a great idea um so it and and i guess what i realized that i thought um as a result of right or i realized that what i think as a result of writing this book and i'm so glad to have discovered this because i do share many of your worries as a parent as a as an inhabitant of planet earth i mean i'm full of worries and dread but what i ended up feeling was i have an enormous faith in people i really do i have a lot of faith in humanity and in our ability to innovate and solve problems there's a lot that works against us there's no question and we can absolutely be our own worst enemies and we i think we need to work together more than we do and technology i think sometimes really discourages that but i just have a lot of faith so i guess the answer is i'm i turns out i really am an optimist um and that and and maybe two that's just what i needed as i was working on this book which i ended up working on you know certainly before the pandemic but a lot in the trump years and um and certainly during the pandemic when maybe being negative and and finding a bleak outlook or just inhabiting a bleed out bleak outlook almost felt repetitive to me you know it felt too much like what reality was and for me fiction is an escape i'm the opposite of an auto fictionalist i mean i if i get a whiff of my life coming in i am i feel dead and bored i've got to get away so i have to go somewhere where i'm not and yeah and somehow in the course of writing it i feel like i became more optimistic so i'm kind of grateful for that yeah and i i was grateful for it too because it was you know it's it's a source of great anxiety for me um although the encroachment of of the sort of collective consciousness and the um and the fact that we can know everything about everyone like i i don't want to know often when i'm reading a novel i don't want to know what the author had for breakfast and what they're thinking from minute to minute and i find that like this breaking the fourth wall is sort of um disruptive to my fictional experience and so um so i i was actually like it sort of shook some of my feelings in a good way too like i came came away from it a little bit surprised at my feeling less kind of binary about the whole thing um but i was wondering you know because it's you've called it a sibling to the goon squad and i love that as a term and i was thinking you know and then you also say you don't want to write auto fiction which i i really appreciate and i was wondering though you know are all of your books in some ways siblings and are there kind of um obsessions that you feel yourself keep you keep returning to and do you know what the source of those obsessions that's a great question i mean i think certainly technology there seems to always be technology even in a book like manhattan beach where where there's no screen technology but there's so much other technology and i don't even know why i was so obsessed with the equipment of deep sea divers yeah too much at the library too right uh i got the idea for there yes um but for some reason technology always seems to fascinate me which is odd because again as a as a sort of civilian i that's not the case at all i'm a late adopter an incompetent adopter i wait till the thing breaks before i'd get another one because i know it'll take me a while to figure it all out um so uh so i don't know why um why it is that technology seems to be a fixation but certainly medi mass media and its evolution and the ways in which that indirect interacts with our lives is a huge focus and i think that comes very much just from as i said my own background in the sense that um that's it feels like that's one of the big stories i've witnessed in american life yeah um so i think that's part of it and then there are certain themes that do come up and then i and there is certainly an autobiographical element to those their their fathers are everywhere i didn't get to know my father well um and i think i feel the lack of that and so i keep you know sometimes i feel like i'm writing about absent fathers and i think oh that's so boring stop doing that but then i seem to be getting very involved in father-daughter relationships so you know i mean the family structure even though i don't think of myself as writing about family very much explicitly you know that is what we all start with whatever it may consist of and so i think that does come through and another you know thing that appears a lot is you know brother-sister relationships um i had a brother i was very fond of and he was a very fragile person who had mental illness and so you know that but but it's it's never direct it comes sideways and slant in a and that makes it more i think alive as fiction that you're not kind of coming at it directly um i mean but but i will say this auto fiction reads the same way you know we can't tell the reader just wants to be taken somewhere that feels alive and so i hand it to someone who can do that through using their own lives it's certainly i can't do it um so i think wherever the heat is is kind of where we're all going to you know write something that just feels rich and alive yeah um but i do i i do see um i do see some of these through lines in my work and i think my wish to avoid repeating myself is so strong that that is another reason i really like using unusual forms because if i can make an unusual form work what that means and there's so much trial and error involved in this but it means that i've somehow landed on a story that can only be told that way because it just if you if you're writing a story that could be told conventionally let's say which is a vex term but um it's not going to work in powerpoint it's not going to work in 140 character utterances for twitter or email yeah exactly but if i can find something that does feel alive in those forms i'm telling a story that i couldn't have told otherwise and that's really exciting so that's one reason i do this there's a lot of frustration involved and a lot of waiting um but when i can make it work i feel like oh that's great i sort of got outside of my path of least resistance and i did something different yeah and and you're finding stories everywhere which i love you know that we don't think of an email thread as a story but that's the most hilarious chapter in this book and it's just emails yeah i mean the funny thing is though you know the the earliest novels were often epistolary so that goes way back and i've wanted to do that for a long time so that was i was i was very happy to finally find a way to use that so much fun um it was pretty fun to do that yeah um and this is just other people ask questions but i had one more thing i was interested in just selfishly um that you're juggling so many different elements in your life like we aren't childless 21 year olds you know staying up all night writing our novel but we're juggling real full lives and um and then on top of that you've written this novel through sort of all this cataclysmic change and that sort of news cycle being so much of a sort of assault on that dream state that we want to be in as novelis and so i was just wondering sort of you know how you've sustained your focus and kind of faith in the novel form in this time that we're living in well i think one one advantage that that i have is because i'm not writing about myself not knowingly uh there's a kind of detachment always of what i'm doing from the context in which i am and and i like that separation so in a way that protects me a little bit from the vicissitudes of political life um daily life all of it you know i feel like if i can do the thing i'm trying to do i actually am apart from all of that and if the project is has its own center of gravity which doesn't happen right away but if i'm further along and it's really sort of taking shape it can be an incredible distraction a really welcome haven honestly from from events there are times when when my sense of peril is so strong that i just feel like i keep staring at my phone thinking i'm gonna get important news but i do find you know and this is sort of back to faith in human beings and and the the sense of you know how do we get away from some of this technology we're so trainable i mean if we've learned anything in the last two years it's how relatively easily we can adjust our habits and i find that you know so i turn off the notifications or i don't have any technological devices near where i'm working guess what within like 15 minutes that repeated wish to to check is gone so i try to train myself yeah um and retrain myself it's an ongoing process the other thing i will say is i you know i don't have little kids at home i now have an empty nest as of the fall but up until then i often felt that i was getting nothing done it really felt like that all the time but i found that i was doing more than i than i gave myself credit for or could even really perceive sometimes and it's amazing how even in a situation that feels chaotic just putting in some regular time does add up you know i think of graham green who apparently wrote a perfect page every day which resulted in a novel a year i mean page today that seems so little but yeah if it's good and you can just keep going i mean and he was drinking by noon yeah i mean if he if he could do that you know um yeah come on no that's when i i remember at the library you had children in elementary school or i had a one and a half oh my god because the rest of us were being so unproductive and you would come in and work and then you know put in that perfect page and then leave and we were like sitting around chatting going to yoga let's start drinking at four and we were the ones with all the time in the world but your constraint made you much more productive well i definitely had a pillow in my desk drawer and i would close the shop into my office and like put it on my desk but um yeah i mean i think that's the other thing you know having a full life does sometimes force you to be um to use the time you have so yeah well i want to make sure people have time to ask their questions so i'll open it up feel free to shout it out yeah i'm sure we'll hear you yes a little bit of oh hello um gosh i didn't think i was gonna get the first question but i'm ready i was wondering if you could yeah i was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the sort of good and bad parts of being this pulitzer prize-winning author like that label and how that changed your life for the good and bad and everything that comes with you know putting it on your books and all that type of thing well i mean there's no ques you know we are a brand oriented culture so having a brand like that on your books and name is unbelievably helpful and useful in very practical ways like finding new readers um and you know and and getting reviewed i mean things that i absolutely did not ever take for granted um and so i'm i couldn't be more grateful also having judged prizes and also having been kicking around for quite a while before i had that good luck i understand very clearly that it is good luck you know winning a prize feels very it looks so iconic from the outside but in fact it just means that you managed to please the right handful of people that year or maybe you were the compromised candidate but you were the only one they could agree on i mean that's that really is how these things work but all of that messiness kind of disappears once the the the thing has been bestowed um so i i feel aware of all of that and and so happy for that luck on the the book is great you're a great writer so i just want to say but it's not just luck yeah but i but i do know that thank you and i'm proud of that book but i will just say again that you know there are a lot of good books luck is a funny thing you know it's something extra deserving is not enough oddly you need a lot more than that um so so and i felt very aware of that so the negative side of everything i'm saying and my awareness of all of that was that i felt really overvalued um and i and i felt like a huge correction was going to come my way and that made it really hard to work on the next book which was really a hard process um it was also just happened to be as i said earlier kind of cutting myself off from the thing that i most need which are times and places that i know so the result of all that was that i was pretty freaked out for about two years of work um and i really felt like maybe it was just over for me like that was kind of it and then i ended up saying to myself you know if that's true you know if winning this prize actually is gonna result in my never doing anything better than that then i was probably done um and so okay you know great luckily i got a prize before i kind of threw in the towel um you're like wikipedia page done so um yeah so so and in a way i guess i just felt like i had to give myself permission to not not get better which is always the goal and the danger i i fee another thing i feel really grateful for is that my good luck came later in my career because the goal is always to keep getting better and i think for me anyway that would have been really hard to do if i had felt so much pressure as a really young writer i began very slowly and everything was pretty incremental up until that point and so i i guess i had enough tools to help me through that um but i'm not i don't think i i'm not sure i just would have had the the inner compass to find my way toward getting better if i had been over rewarded too early so those are some thoughts about that is totally yes here but i found it so interesting it makes me wonder about to what degree you might feel under the influence of ideas that's an interesting did everyone hear that um you know i of course i mean i i was playing with with jung in naming this um collective the collective consciousness um i mean it's it's a it's a different notion from his but his is really interesting to me and something that i think about a lot in my writing because his idea was that there there is actually a collective body of knowledge that we partake of that includes i'm i'm really sort of uh reaching back now to like college courses but myths um you know there's a sort of a deep well of knowledge that we as humans share i think that's probably a vexed notion now in certain ways because i think we're more aware than ever of the the different cultural realms we come from and the idea of there being sort of one pool is it seems potentially more problematic but putting all of that aside my writing method is completely geared toward accessing um forces knowledge uh and and just cultural assumptions that my my context beyond what i could consciously implement so i'm looking to have the moment around me with all of its complexities and nuances and cultural assumptions touchstones shared history i want all of that to act through me because that is where the interesting stuff lives far more than in my conscious mind which is probably more likely to go in directions that other people's in this room would you know i think there is a kind of a surface level at which we are thinking sometimes in in similar ways and i'm looking to kind of get beyond all of that and certainly looking to get beyond my critical tendencies which are likely to be telling me that's no good i don't like that sentence you know back up start over my method is all about hurtling forward writing by hand and thereby hopefully surprising myself and the very fact that i can be surprised um suggests that i'm trying to bring to bear more knowledge more consciousness than i than i have in my in my immediate thoughts interesting i want to make sure other people get a chance to ask questions because we only have five minutes yeah i was i'm not aware of that work but i am very interested in the relationship between fiction writing and dreaming um but there is a joke in this book which is that there's a couple who um in their marriage vows what was an agreement never to make each other listen to their dreams um because let's face it people's dreams are so boring to everyone but themselves so true yes you had a question having with having a uh a continuation in this new book with some of the characters from goon squad did you have any like apprehension or anxiety about revisiting some of these characters especially characters that were i mean pretty beloved from a pretty beloved book was there any sort of thoughts about that had you done that before um you know the characters that i revisit are pretty minor in goon squad with the exception of lou the father in what i read to you he's the only one that we really see at any length in goon squad that we also see from multiple angles this time other than that they're mostly so minor that readers unless someone has read the book recently which by the way there is no need to do before reading the candy house and i did not myself and made a lot of factual errors i had to correct when i did finally reread it um but uh yeah it was really um what piqued my curiosity about certain characters was precisely the fact that we know them so little so i didn't worry too much that a beloved character would would be changed i never i with a couple of exceptions because point of view gets a little crazy in this book because i have people looking through other people's consciousnesses so whose point of view are we looking at exactly it's sort of more than one at a time but in general um i'm not inside the same points of view of the major characters in goon squad so i i didn't i had many worries i'm i'm a warrior um but uh but that i worried that the book would be perceived as less than and not um up to a beloved book but i didn't specifically worry about the characters yes in bag oh okay there and then there i've got the mic i would really love to hear you talk a bit about what what the novel does for you because one of the things i find so interesting about your writing what everybody finds interesting about your writing is your exploration of all these multiple forms this came out in the conversation uh this evening and yet you keep writing novels which are pretty traditional form so well i see the novel as being the most versatile form actually and i would include anything image based in that judgment um i think we're we're very inclined toward images and that becomes more and more the case but anything that is starting with an image is putting us on the outside of the person whose mind we are hoping to penetrate to me fiction is the one narrative art form that actually puts us on the inside and the fact that there are no images is a critical part of that we have to make the images we use language in our brains to do something that feels like it actually solves one of the big barriers of human life which is that we are completely isolated inside our own minds and nothing can change that you can surf the internet for as long as you want and find out you know all about what happened to whoever but it doesn't really change that fact so that to me is what fiction does and why it matters and the funny thing is to me the not you know the novel was invented to be a kind of eclectic grab bag and from the very start novels were pulling every other kind of discourse into themselves whether it was legal documents letters um you know tristrum shandy a very early novel has graphic elements in it there's a black page um so to me that gives me license to i i when i do what seem to be extreme things i see that as the most traditional use of the novel form actually it's it is unlike epic poetry which which i think couldn't do some of this it is invented to be a flexible elastic hungry um invader of human minds and and that's what i like i love that we have one last question back here and i'm just going to add that i'm happy to keep these conversations going in the signing line i'm sorry to cut anyone off without them having a chance to talk um well my last name is egan too so i wonder if there's maybe a connection there if we upload our unconsciousness we might find i don't have a distant relative [Laughter] but my question is actually about time and in goon squad and in the candy house obviously you bounce around a lot in time but both works at least for me are very future facing and so i am i think in in candy house you write into the 2030s which isn't that far away and i just have a question about um kind of the affordances and the challenges of writing into the future great question i would never do it if i didn't have to um i've been thrust into the future because if i want to to visit people who are clearly born at certain times later in their lives i don't have a choice with goon squad where the future was actually 2020 um i i was dragged there kicking and screaming and i so much didn't want to go there but i but i wanted to visit my character alex at a later point in his life that i briefly considered moving the entire timeline of the book back like 10 years which would have had people remembering elvis i mean it was it was crazy like there was no way to do it i i really didn't want to do it so and that's because i don't really feel qualified i'm not i'm not that conversant in sci-fi i don't even feel a deep interest in it as a genre i'm sorry to say that and i hope it doesn't offend anyone um and therefore inventions and ideas that i have i know will not will not really be a useful entrance into that field because that never is the case if you're not really well-versed in what you're doing um so all of that makes me not want to do it but that being said there are some big advantages to writing in the future number one of which is that you can make up anything you want i mean of course i can do that anyway but it becomes an invitation to think forward and posit easy solutions to logistical problems as one example there's a chapter in here about a woman who is working as a spy in 2032 and trying to um gather information about about men who are believed to be plotting against america and so but she and so she's she needs to record them she wants to actually create a record of what they're saying and doing and i remember in the moment thinking okay but how can she do that where how does she have a tape recorder with her and the minute i had that thought i realized ah no she has she has a recorder implanted in her she has a camera implanted in her of course i could i could posit that in present day um in a present day narrative and for all i know this may actually already happen but um but it just it was sort of a gleeful possibility that writing into the future um made available to me so i i've come to enjoy it but i i never expect to be making a contribution to the field in terms of invention and that's why it was no surprise that you know black mirror and maybe this vendor's movie um you know this is these ideas are not new the the fun of it was actually exploring them narratively and seeing what would happen in people's lives in response to all of it thank you so much thank you bo thanks a lot thank you all for being here come next tuesday we have sarah schulman and then at the oritani we have john waters the tuesday after that thank you all thanks good night you