David L. Ulin: Welcome, everyone. How are you? I'm David L. Ulin. I'm the Books Editor of Alta Journal and I'd like to welcome you to tonight's meeting of the California Book Club. The California Book Club is a production of Alta Journal. Alta, I'm going to tell you, if you don't know the magazine or the book club, I want to tell you a little bit about it before we get started. We're the California Book Club. Every month we have a live discussion on Zoom about a book from what we like to think of as the contemporary California canon. Tonight, we'll be talking to Jennifer Egan about her novel The Candy House.
Alta Journal is a quarterly magazine or quarterly print magazine based in San Francisco that looks at the art culture, history and life of California and the West. We also have very active web presence, with weekly book reviews, California Book Club and other web-only pieces, so come to altaonline.com and check out what we've got. There's a ton of amazing and really wonderful material there. I'm very excited to welcome Jennifer Egan and her book The Candy House tonight. Tonight, she'll be in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and our special guest, Professor Ivan Kreilkamp. I am sure I'm mispronouncing that and I apologize in advance for that. I'd like to just sort of tell you about our partners without whom we could not possibly do the California Book Club. Our partners include Book Passage, Book Soup; Books Inc.; Bookshop; Bookshop West Portal; Diesel, A Bookstore; Green Apple Books; the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West; the Los Angeles Public Library; the San Francisco Public Library; Narrative Magazine; Vroman's Bookstore; and ZYZZYVA magazine.
When we do these monthly events, in the lead-up to each month's event, we produce and provide continuous content, all of which is free at the California Book Club section of the Alta website. If you haven't had a chance to read this material, you'll want to. There are essays from many talented contributors reflecting on tonight's work. We have an excerpt of The Candy House, an interview with Jennifer Egan, and other pieces. All of this is included in our weekly California Book Club newsletter, which is also free, so please sign up. Every California Book Club episode we've ever done can be viewed on our website so you can check them out. If you're a teacher, this is a particularly excellent resource. If you're a reader, it's also an excellent resource. This is three years' worth of book events at this point. We've just celebrated or we're celebrating our third anniversary with this event.
So, how can you support this work we're doing, bringing in-depth articles, essays, and interviews with authors like Jenny Egan to you? Well, you can join Alta as a digital member for $3 a month, or you can become an official member of Alta Journal for just $50 a year. You'll get a year of Alta Journal, the print magazine, you'll get a California book club hat, and you'll get our book, Alta's Guide to the Best Bookstores in the West. You can find out more about that information at altaonline.com/join. We'll also be hosting two in-person events in the next few weeks in celebration of our new issue: October 25th in San Francisco and November 1st in Los Angeles. Check your email for invitations and registration for those events. So, enough of me, it's a thrill to welcome Jennifer Egan to California Book Club tonight, and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague John Freeman and enjoy the show. See y'all in a bit.
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Hi, everybody. Nice to be back here. California Book Club. When we started this book club, the goal was to celebrate the best new writing from and about California and to look at writing coming from California that was basically making new stories possible or making old stories new again. And I can think of no writer that does that better alive now, certainly in the United States, than Jennifer Egan. I think a lot of you in the audience can probably remember exactly where you were when you fell into A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning concept novel of a book, a book which probably borrows a little bit from Tristram Shandy and the Canterbury Tales, in which you sort of follow and fall through a group of characters who are linked together, a book that's both about love and regret, but time and memory, set in the rock and roll industry.
In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan's seventh book, we revisit some of those characters, as well as some of their offspring, some of the tertiary characters, in a book that is set 10 years later in a world of difference in which now no longer the songwriting and rock and roll is the model of connection. It is digital connection. It is a book about technology, but it's still a book about love, about intergenerational friction between parents and kids. It's a book about time and innocence and our attempts to get back to that innocence. It's a book, sadly, about addiction and the ways that addiction kind of reboots our attempts to come back to the people that we once were or that just somehow becomes part of lives and destroys them. And I think at the heart of the book is that just a really aching sense of the need for us to connect and the ways that sometimes as we try to do that we do harm to one another.
It's such a joy to have her here. I think she's one of our most fantastic writers. You could go through any one of her backlist titles, from The Invisible Circus to Emerald City, a brilliant collection of stories, to her gothic, The Keep, to her most recent sort of historical novel. I could go on and on, but let's bring her on so we can talk about this lovely book. Jennifer Egan, please join me.
Jennifer Egan: Thank you so much, John. I'll try to live up to that.
Freeman: No, no, you could get so much more because this book is just absolutely really dazzling. I recently, I know you're a fan of Proust, and I went through, there's a national gallery in Paris that had an exhibit of Proust's great book, and in the beginning you watch Proust trying to edit In Search of Lost Time, in which I think he basically invented, through gluing on bits of the manuscript, the cut and paste hyperlink method that we all use in Word. I guess I want to start in a really just functional way, which is, how do you put a book like this together? I started writing down the characters and I got to almost about 100 and I started mapping out their connections to the people in the previous book and I thought, "This is the way you go crazy." And yet you can read this book entirely separate from its predecessors. So what did you do? Did you have a wall, A Beautiful Mind style, where you were mapping everything out, or did you just go and improvise?
Egan: I mean, it was sort of somewhere in the middle. I didn't worry too much about the connections. I tried in both books to just focus on the thing I was doing because I felt pretty instinctively that, sorry, this is the cat, that in order for this to kind of work as a big strong structure, each individual piece would have to be really strong. In fact, I resisted thinking too much about the connections between the chapters and the styles because I didn't want the styles to influence each other. One of the things I knew right from the beginning with A Visit from the Goon Squad was that I wanted each chapter to feel like it was part of a different book, and I found that kind of fun. I thought, "If I can somehow make it fused, even though it feels like each part is so different from all the other parts, that will be more interesting than having chapters written in similar ways that relate to each other."
So there's a lot of trial and error in working on these books that hopefully is not visible in the finished result. There are people I was curious of, I couldn't make the chapters about them really work, so there's a lot that kind of ended up on the cutting room floor. But I think that the one document that I needed, it wasn't a wall, but I needed to remember and remind myself of people's ages at particular moments so that I could understand what generation they all were and not try to impose intersections on people as if they would be the same age at a particular time, when in fact they were 10 years apart. So it's kind of a color-coded timeline of when everyone was born, what age each person was in every decade, where the stories that I already had fit into that timeline, and that I did consult a lot.
Freeman: So, basically, the book spans around 1980 to in the near future with a flashback to 1965 through enhanced technology. One of the most heartbreaking quotes at the center of the book goes, "An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope--and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault." I feel like you have these characters who are orbiting around each other like free electrons and the things that normally tied them together in different generations, like marriage, church, they're all kind of splintering. This book to some degree makes an accounting of that.
When I first encountered this book, it was because I read "Black Box" in The New Yorker, which has to be one of the most astonishing short stories I've ever read, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how, even though the stories are different, the styles are different, the characters are different, is everybody carrying their origin story with them in that sense? Do they all have a black box in their story? And to what degree is that factor of generational difference that's coming up through this splinter of marriages, to what degree is that a unifying factor of this book?
Egan: I think that the marriage and divorce element is in a way a factor of my age. I'm 61 and my mother and father divorce when I was really little. I actually don't remember them together. It was really the first huge wave of divorces in the sort of mid-60s. These were people who got married when they were incredibly young, started having children, and I think there was this sense that, "Wait a minute, we don't have to actually live this way anymore. There are other options. If this isn't the right marriage, we can have a different marriage." I think nowadays we know how to do divorce a lot better. Co-parenting is, I have witnessed it very successfully among my peers, but I think we were figuring it out then.
And so, for example, we moved to San Francisco, that was my California move, when I was seven. My father was still in Chicago, and that felt like a real chasm. Not only because you had to get on a plane, but the Midwest and the West Coast are really, really different places. I think that's one reason I love talking to you about California, John, and sort of what California is. I think I feel aware of that in part because I came to it having already known a very different kind of texture of American life, but I think... I'm sorry, this cat has a bell on her neck and it's ringing.
I think that of course we all do carry our backstory and our black box with us. To some degree, I feel like it's the job of any piece of writing that is getting at someone's interior life that it will have to push up against that black box or that backstory because that's what we all carry with us. Sometimes people reveal that, sometimes they hide it, sometimes they do a combination, but certainly fiction is the interior narrative art form, so it is my job as the writer to make intimations of that story come to the reader.
Freeman: I love what you just said because the great challenge of this book is that you're writing in an era of enormous externalization and yet you're proving that the novel can still go in, the novel still has an exclusive and elusive quarry that only it can provide. One of the things that emerges out of this book, because you have a lot of famous people, in minor ways, in this world. There's Bix Bouton, who's a kind of tech entrepreneur who we meet on page one who's invented a piece of technology which allows you to outsource and externalize your brain and your memories. And there's various people from the previous books, like Bennie Salazar, who was a famous producer, and Lou, who was his mentor, and people who were in bands with them.
Sometimes in the midst of that, notice they're all men that I just mentioned, the lives of women can kind of get submerged. I feel like one thing, the candy house, to me, it became this endless metaphor. "Oh, the candy house is adulthood, the candy house is the internet, the candy house is drugs, the candy house is marriage." I realized that one thing you're doing is slowly bringing to life the lives of women, mothers among them, who were made invisible to some degree by the excessive, not excessive, but perhaps the outsized fame that the men gain in their fields. You allow Miranda Kline, who's created a sociological theory about affinities that becomes the basis for the technology that Bix invents, to be both present and absent. I wonder if you can talk about writing characters like these women whose lives have been eclipsed into your book and what that means, and sort of what elements you have available to you to dramatize their lives that's maybe different from the male characters, or am I just being too gendered about it?
Egan: No, I actually love that you're saying this. I haven't really thought about that, but I have a few things to say. One is, the world that I grew up in was a very male dominated world, and I would extend that into the publishing world. I mean, when I started publishing in 1995, it would not have been remarkable ever to find five white men as the finalists for a major prize, for example. You wouldn't see that now. It would be outrageous. I think that's a wonderful change. It just feels like things are more open. There is not just an expectation that the person who did it the best would be a man.
But I do think I grew up in that world. My mother had me very young and then she had my brother. She ended up starting her career in her 40s and became a successful art dealer in San Francisco. But that was true of a lot of women. They got into these early marriages. The expectation was that the guy would work and they would raise the kids, and it was very hard to have a career at that point. So I feel like my growing up years spanned that change, so that's one response.
Another kind of odd thing, and I'm not sure it relates directly to this, but I tend to skew male when I write. I am not sure what to make of that, but it's my most comfortable place, is to write from a male point of view. I think some of it is that I'm the opposite of an autofiction writer. I don't like to write about my life. I feel bored if I feel like I'm in a familiar territory that is recognizable as my own life or personality or people I know. And so, writing from a male point of view is kind of instant guarantee that I am not writing myself. So there is that tendency in my work to lean male and I have to work really hard to push back against that and to keep it 50/50 in a book like this because I only have a certain amount of control over what works and what doesn't.
But one interesting thing is that I think in a way it is a book that you could read, and I'd never thought about this, as the story of those men yielding to a younger generation of women. And the one example I would give is there's only one person who's a major character in Goon Squad and Candy House, and that's Lou Kline. We see him in a very dominant state in Goon Squad. Even though we see him dying, he is still completely running everything. But we learn that, we don't meet them, we learn he will have these two younger daughters and that one of them will take over his business. That's all we know in Goon Squad. And I thought, "Okay, who dominates Lou? Who ends up taking control of Lou? It's got to be those girls." And that was very intriguing to me, and I sort of knew that that would be true but didn't know how I would approach that narratively or who they would be, and that was a big and fun discovery of The Candy House.
Freeman: Oh, I love that. Yeah. You get to know how all the different characters imagine the lives of their parents to some degree, quite a few of them. I don't know if you know this Sharon Olds poem, "Strike Sparks," in which she looks at a photograph of her parents and is imagining them at this young age and sort of begins talking to them and say, "God, if you only knew how much unhappiness you would create. I want to take you and smash you into each other at this moment and sort of allow you that moment of friction so that you can also peel off from each other," which is, I think, a very real reaction to having parents and having the mystery about them. I wonder if you could just read briefly from the book, because there are some wonderful passages, including the one I think you're about to read, where people speculate about their parents and then suddenly their parents are revealed to them in real time.
Egan: Yeah, I mean, of course our parents are the great mystery to us because we can never know them as someone who's not their kid would know them. This chapter is called The Mystery of Our Mother, and I'm going to just read right from the beginning, just a little bit.
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 two, that's for sure. I'll try not to drive you crazy with my mommy needs.
Till 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.
Freeman: Those are the two sisters narrating collectively, right? Or it begins in that way, but then you realize it's one, I think it's Melora, who's telling that story. They have three half-sisters, Roxy, Kiki, and Charlene, otherwise known as Charlie. They're the daughters of Lou and Miranda Kline, the sociologist or anthropologist I mentioned, whose theory becomes the basis of this book. And this is one of my favorite chapters of the book because you have these incredibly powerful zooming memories which remind you of how something can come back to you. Among the details here, maybe I'm misremembering, Lou takes one of his daughters to London. Am I...?
Egan: Yes. He takes Roxy to London. She remembers that trip very, very fondly and decides that she's going to externalize her consciousness so that she will have access to the collective and can watch that trip from her father's point of view. But then she sort of chickens out at the last minute realizing that she might hear or see things that she doesn't want to know about how her father saw her.
Freeman: Yeah, this opens up such a can of worms, epistemologically, just emotionally. One of the things that prompts Roxy, who we meet later and she's in a kind of drug rehab program in San Francisco living on O'Farrell Street and is inside her father's memory as he's scratching his groin and walking around the house and is annoyed that he's taking his daughter to London. And she says, "Okay, that's it. I don't know if I want this stuff. My memory is better." And among the pieces of technology that Bix invents is "Whatever Happened To...?" And some of the things that are part of this book are so fabulously just like life, which Facebook was like when you first started to use it, was suddenly everyone from every aspect, every era of your life came zooming back.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about chronology and living and how important that is to us, and to what degree you think it's part of the way a novel is told. You've said before that you want a novel to go lateral rather than to go chronologically. But when you scramble the chronology of life and suddenly your eighth grade girlfriend is turning up in your Facebook feed, it's confusing, to put it mildly. And I wonder if you ever, in the beginning period of social media or technology, if you experienced that yourself or if you were simply just watching its effects on culture, and then I guess also, what does that mean for the novel and chronology?
Egan: Well, I have never been a big social media person, so I sort of came to it late, but I'm always so interested in what happens to people. Whenever I see anyone, I want to know what has happened to every person we know in common because it's the best story in the world. I mean, it's plots unfold... especially when you get to be my age, plots unfolding over time with, at this point, huge changes, not just in terms of life but also even physically. So it was super fun when I finally got on Facebook to actually just see what some people looked like, having not seen them since high school. But I'm not even sure I had been on Facebook yet. In fact, I'm not sure Facebook... I can't remember. When I was working on Goon Squad, I had not had much experience with social media.
I should also say that I did not realize that there would not be chronology when I was working on A Visit from the Goon Squad. When I was working on the chapters, the chronology tended to go backward, so I thought, "There is a chronology. It's very clear. It's going to go backward." I knew I hadn't invented it. Charles Baxter did it, Martin Amis did it. But I thought, "It's different and that'll be really fun." I had a terrible shock when I read the chapters in that order and found that the book was actually really flat. It didn't gain any momentum. And I thought, "Oh my God, why? Why is this happening?"
I realized that hewing to chronology basically eliminated a lot of fun surprises for the reader because the time at which we want to know what happened to so-and-so or what so-and-so used to be like is when we've just seen so-and-so, not however many years later we have to wait in the chronological order for that moment to arrive. So chronology, I let it go purely because it got in the way of reader satisfaction and payoff of curiosity. With every choice, you gain and lose things, and chronology is normally very helpful because in a certain sense, every piece of fiction is about time passing, you could argue. It's always about something happening. Even if it's a minute, time passes and things are different. But in the case of these particular more kaleidoscopic books, chronology is too rigid and it eliminates some of the fun.
Freeman: This is a great segue to bring in Ivan Kreilkamp, who's a professor at Indiana University and the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, because in part he's looking at time and its passage and its role within Goon Squad and fiction in general and talks a little bit about your relationship to Victorians and other work. I'm going to call you Professor because you are a professor. I have Professor Kreilkamp. Would you come on and ask some questions of Jennifer Egan, please?
Ivan Kreilkamp: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. It's a real honor and a thrill to be here and I'm delighted to ask a question or two. I'm going to start at the very beginning with your first epigraph from Emily Dickinson. It's the first stanza for poem number 632. I'll just read that. "The Brain--is wider than the Sky-- / For--put them side by side-- / The one the other will contain. / With ease--and You--beside". And why not go on to the next stanza, too? "The Brain is deeper than the sea-- / For--hold them--Blue to Blue-- / The one the other will absorb--As Sponges--Buckets--do--"
So, one could make a case, I thought, that as the epigraph from Proust was to Goon Squad, Dickinson's poem is perhaps to The Candy House. Your novel can be read as a sustained exploration of some of the questions her poem so brilliantly raises. How does the brain or the mind contain the world? How can a small organ weighing about three pounds hold our entire consciousness, decades of memories and dreams and visions? I found what seemed to me subtle reminders of Dickinson's poem throughout the novel, because inspiration for Own Your Unconscious comes from an animal scientist experiments in externalizing animal consciousness, such that a researcher can, to adapt Thomas Nagel's famous title, imagine or see what it's like to be a cat.
Of course, the implications of your epigraph become more clear when we first see characters literally externalizing their consciousness into small containers, so Lou's whole consciousness is put into a little box. Later, there's reference to a woman who suffers a grave accident and doctors opened up her skull. That's how Roxy feels, as if her brain has been released from a cell it outgrew. So, okay, here's my question: I just wanted to ask you about how you think of the implications of Dickinson's poem and of what it suggests about the human brain and consciousness as a presence in your novel.
Egan: Well, I think I didn't have an epigraph for quite a while, so I think that the poem, I discovered it and thought, "Yes, this is exactly what I'm interested in," but I think I approached it, it's interesting, the technology in the book, which certainly is a throughline, this machine that lets people externalize their consciousness and in a way more crucially share all or parts of their consciousnesses as the price of entry to witness other people's thoughts and memories, that fell into place as the throughline kind of late, surprisingly enough, in the book. There are many chapters in which it doesn't appear at all, and that is partly because I wasn't thinking about it the whole time. But what I did think about it, and I think you're so right to point to that epigraph as sort of the touchstone, just as Proust was for Goon Squad. Goon Squad is very explicitly about time, which is obviously a very abstract concept and not necessarily fun, but my hope was to have fun with it. I conceived of The Candy House as being about space in the same way that Goon Squad is about time.
To me, the window into the strangeness of thinking about space is actually consciousness, partly because, as you say, our brains are so small and yet our entire relationship to the world is filtered through them. It's also, it is the ultimate mystery about each of us, which no one else will ever really know, no matter how much we try to expose ourselves or tell them, is what the world really looks or feels like to another person. So I found my approach to consciousness being very spatial. I was interested in the infinity, if you will, of each individual person, and yet the fact that we're all packed together in cities, in countries, on this planet. It feels almost inconceivable.
In fact, I think there is a kind of unreality about other people's consciousnesses. There's a moment where Roxy is lying in bed and she can sort of hear her neighbor moving around in his apartment and she has these moments of thinking like, "Oh my God, he's actually there even when I can't see him. He's living his life," and she almost can't believe it. I think there's a little bit of that disbelief in all of us because we only know ourselves. So it was that paradox that really, really interested me. Of course, this kaleidoscopic ensemble approach is what lets me try to reveal or solve some of these mysteries because I go in deeply into so many different people's minds.
Kreilkamp: So did you come up with the epigraph towards the end? Did it occur to you as an apt one?
Egan: It's funny that I remember exactly when I thought of it. I knew the poem, but I hadn't thought of it for an epigraph. But I was at a show of one of my favorite living artists, Sarah Sze, and she, I find her work to be just thrilling and really generative for me. I feel sort of like she somehow creates visually some approximation of what I'm trying to do verbally. She read the first stanza of that poem and I thought, "Yes." So it was a kind of kismet moment of artistic connection, which I've felt with her before.
Kreilkamp: Cool. Okay. All right. I had another question, goes in a slightly different direction. You've commented before that you were a theory nut as an undergraduate student at UPenn, and this longstanding interest in literary and cultural theory is evident in the novel in the ways Miranda's anthropological research is adapted into the social network Mandala? I would guess that the relation of Miranda Kline to Bix Bouton and his Mandala is probably a nod to the relation of the work of the French theorist René Girard on mimetic desire to Mark Zuckerberg or perhaps Peter Thiel and Facebook.
Miranda is devastated that her children have sold the rights to her research to be used in this way and feels profoundly betrayed. If the choice is one between individual vision and corporate business, The Candy House is certainly on the side of art and imagination, but I think part of what makes it work so well as a novel is that you also acknowledge the ways that ideas can in fact sometimes become bigger and more powerful and impactful when they're appropriated and used in new ways, including as big business, and that this is not always, or at least only, a loss or a corruption.
Bix's Mandala and Own Your Unconscious don't only represent a cheapening or a corruption. His creations really do achieve some of the aims we seek in literature and art, or that was my take at least. Bix really is a kind of creative genius, I think the novel suggests, notwithstanding his indebtedness to the more purely cerebral ideas of the anthropologists. So I just wanted to ask if you might speak to that tension or balance in the novel, and perhaps about your thoughts more broadly on these topics. That is, what happens when a pure idea or inspiration or imagination becomes commodified or commercialized or simply scaled up to a mass audience? How and when can this be something other than a cheapening? Such questions are not irrelevant for any creator today, I would assume.
Egan: I think I come at it more from the point of view of wanting to understand the mindset of the person who is inventing whatever it is. I mean, I think it's very easy, and I say this as kind of a technophobe, certainly not someone who's particularly enamored of new technology, I tend to see the detriments of it. I think that's kind of my bias. "What do we lose with this new invention?" But the truth is that in my experience, most people who do anything, who make anything, passionately believe that they're making the world better with that thing. That's really what drives them. The evil geniuses really mostly exist in movies. It's very convenient to think, "Oh, yes, tech giants have decided to destroy the world by making all of our children be addicted to screens." That's not really how it works. So what interests me is what it feels like to be on different sides of that equation.
I don't think about cultural commentary at all as I'm working. In fact, if I felt like my fiction was leaning into some kind of cultural commentary, I would really pull back from that because I read for fun, I want to be transported, amused, and most of all just plunged into the point of view of someone who thinks about the world really differently than I do. So in my case, of course, being kind of a technophobe, a person whose creative expression happens in the form of technological invention is going to be really far from my point of view and very kind of fun to inhabit the mind of.
But of course, I think anyone with any relationship to technology knows that there are a lot of unintended consequences. I mean, look at the automobile. Talk about unintended consequences. It took us a really long time to figure out that these machines as they have been traditionally built, are incredibly destructive and we have to find a different way to get around. But I think the cycle of excitement to disillusionment and fear has gotten faster and faster and faster, to now, with ChatGPT, I feel like I've heard about all the scary things before I've heard any really coherent argument for why it's fun and good. The cycle is so short that it's just like, "Oh my god."
So anyway, again, as a citizen, as a parent, as a person who caress about books, I have all kinds of thoughts about technology that you can probably predict, so there's no point in my saying them. As a fiction writer, I wanted to know what it feels like to make it, what it feels like to think you don't have another vision and therefore will disappoint people, and what it feels like to create something that runs away from you, as Bix's invention ultimately does, because he thinks the point of Own Your Unconscious will really be that we can now all finally reclaim all of our memories, own your unconscious. What he doesn't count on is that the sharing of private life and thought will become so ubiquitous that social media is ultimately just kind of eradicated by it because everyone thinks social media is so fake compared to the authentic quality of pure consciousness. This, he did not predict and he is appalled by, all of-
Kreilkamp: Yeah. And Miranda feels that her work has essentially destroyed private life. I mean, it's almost Oppenheimer-like in that way.
Egan: Another case of unintended consequences.
Kreilkamp: Yeah.
Egan: Exactly. It's the way that all of that feels and the drama inherent in it that interests me as a fiction writer. And so it was a lot of fun to get in there and make some discoveries.
Kreilkamp: Well, it was great fun to read. I'm going to sign off now, so thanks, John.
Freeman: We'll probably bring you back in at the very end. As you were talking there at the last part of your chat, I was thinking about how heartbreaking it is for Drew to relive the drowning that is part of Goon Squad, and how, in some ways, even though you've described yourself as being a technological skeptic, the book is very sympathetic to what people originally want to go back for. Who wouldn't want to go back to relive their youth, to relive their happiest memories?
I had the strangest experience, as I'm sure you have, when years after my mom died, my dad sent me a tape that he and her had sent back and forth to each other in the '80s when they were across the country from each other, because that's how they communicated because phones were expensive. My mom would send a tape to him an hour long and he'd send one back. I had this hour-long tape of her voice, and her voice was totally unrecognizable to me. She had an upstate New York accent, which I completely forgot about. There's something very, very jarring about those realizations.
I feel like that's where this novel really gouges you emotionally when you discover that you cannot retrieve things. That's where, to me, it feels like I can see the Proustian in you. Proust is always sort of folding back on time and trying to recover things and is so brilliant the essayist and observer, but there's a loss there that no matter 350,000 words per book of description can never retrieve. I wonder if, in your writing life, if this has been not a theme but something chasing you to some degree. If you fall in love with Proust, memory will always be there. Perhaps there is some feeling, even if you're not writing autobiographically, that you're retrieving something even as you're inventing it. Is this you making peace with that, that you cannot retrieve things?
Egan: That's interesting. Well, I guess one thing I would say is, although I don't write about my own life, I really use places that I know, so in that way, there's a lot of retrieval. I'm so grateful that although in a lot of ways I have a really terrible memory, I have a very good memory for places and the textures and the details of places.
So, for example, John, you asked me to write a little something about California for Freeman's, and I sort of whined and at the last minute said, "Oh, I don't think I have time," and you said, "Oh, come on." And so I did. I wrote about the deep heavy forests near Mendocino that I remember vividly from really wonderful family trips that my mom and stepfather and brother and I used to take, and just the richness and the quality of those forests, some of which have burned more recently. I wrote this very short thing for you, and then I found myself longing toward that forest, and that really led to a really important chapter in The Candy House called "What the Forest Remembers," which is where the technology revealed itself narratively to me for the first time. So you kind of were pivotal, John, in this whole process.
But I think that what I'm doing sometimes with regard to place is retrieving that place and thereby the self that I was when I experienced it, even though I am totally absent from these narratives. It happens again and again. I witnessed the punk rock moment in San Francisco in the late '70s. I was not directly involved. I was a total wallflower. But I was really interested and curious and I watched very carefully and I waited so many years thinking, "I have to use this somehow. How can I use it?" And then all of a sudden there was an opportunity in A Visit from the Goon Squad. So I do think revisiting places is a huge part of my creative process, and partly because I am reaching across more and more years.
The last thing I would say about time passing and nostalgia, and your anecdote about your mom is so poignant because there's a part of me that thinks, "I don't know if I would want to listen to that." It's the nature of time passing that it feels like loss. Ultimately, it is about loss. If you're lucky enough to live a long life, you are going to lose a lot of people along the way. And other things happen, like in In Search of Lost Time, World War I happens and the world of Proust's childhood becomes a battlefield. So there's always loss in looking back, and so the question is how to do that without just disappearing into nostalgia because that actually can be a little boring. The good old years. There's a danger of cliche there. I guess what I try to do is use the richness of that kind of longing to render up the details, but then remove myself so they don't apply to me and I'm just using them to set other stories.
Freeman: I love hearing you speak about that because I was just in San Francisco wandering around Clement Street, Montgomery Street, and Mabuhay Gardens is in the book, and there's almost this liturgical power of street names. I'm from Sacramento and I was on the corner of Sacramento Street. I love the way that this book evokes places, and hearing you speak of it as a book about space is just absolutely illuminating because it makes me realize that space is so essential to memory. Memory is a space, and that even though you put it in this strange unit in your head, and externalizing it doesn't make it any less uncanny. In fact, it just highlights the uncanniness that it lives inside of us. In that piece you were just describing which walks around the San Francisco of your youth in the '70s, and you're describing being barefoot, which just made my heart kind of leap up. I was thinking, "Oh my God, what was on the street in San Francisco in 1972?" And you-
Egan: Lot of bad stuff.
Freeman: Yeah. You sort of edge around the city and describe it so fantastically beautifully and so economically. But you also start to elicit the kind of feeling that the '60s was over. It was a backdraft, a kind of slightly nasty backdraft in some ways, and that there was a moment that the city was losing the city of love and the city of illumination, and it was moving towards the city that would birth the tech boom. I wonder if you can think about that connection more as a thinker, and I know it's not the theory of the novel, but it is a place where the actual space of a city becomes an imaginary space that, God, the rest of the world lives in now, in some way or other. There's a billion people on many of these devices.
Egan: It's so strange, because I grew up in San Francisco in the '70s. I graduated from high school in 1980 and I really have only lived there for one summer since. I had never heard the phrase Silicon Valley. The personal computer had barely been invented. Now, of course, it was there, and people were working hard, but I was looking back. I felt like I had had the worst timing ever because I was growing up in the '70s instead of the '60s, hence the bare feet and other kind of lurching attempts to recapture what I had never experienced at all, and I'm sure idealized very wildly. I think all my friends did. So, in a way, I write about punk rock in A Visit from the Goon Squad but that wasn't what moved me. This is exactly why I like to just keep myself out of it. I was obsessed with The Who and wanted to marry Roger Daltrey. So that had nothing to do with any of the punk rock, but the punk rock was also there.
But what's interesting is, in researching my novel Manhattan Beach, which takes place during World War II, I realized that in a way, when I moved to San Francisco with my mother and stepfather and little brother, we were part of a massive post-war migration west that had everything to do with the technology and the industry that had already gone to the West Coast and just the West generally during World War II because there was so much space for production, which was a huge difference from the East Coast. So in a way, Silicon Valley and the tech boom and all of that are really a consequence of World War II and all of the industry that occurred then.
That connection is fascinating to me, and I really, really want, we'll see if I ever can pull it off, to write a novel set in the 1960s, the novel I wish Ken Kesey had written, he was the perfect person to do it, or Robert Stone, but Stone ended up writing nonfiction about it. They were both there, and I just feel like why... There's some great nonfiction about the 1960s, but the really psychedelic '60s novel never quite happened. So I'm very interested in the counterculture as a post-war phenomenon that really was a prelude to the tech hub that we now see there.
Freeman: I would love for you to write that book. You mentioned wanting to marry Robert Daltrey and loving The Who. After university, you moved to England and studied there and got an MA. I've never felt more Californian than when I was in England. People would always talk to me about Los Angeles and they'd get this sort of sunny look in their eyes. Someone once explained it to me. They were like, "John, you don't understand. We don't have a California in the UK. There's no Las Vegas. There's no place you go on this island, in Great Britain, where you can start over." And it made me realize that I was sort of living, not in Candyland, but I was living in an imaginary place that had such a resonance for people. I wonder if you had anything similar because you wrote some stories that came out of your time in England, I think, or they were published there first in 1993, and your first, The Invisible Circus is an East Coast book. What happened to your sense of being a Californian when you went to England?
Egan: I don't know that I felt specifically Californian. I just felt very American, which was a really useful discovery because I think it's the nature of being the citizen of a superpower that it just kind of goes without saying that one's point of view is universal. When I got to England, what I realized was that I was really loud, I wore really bright colors that sort of looked ridiculous, I was really inquisitive and friendly in a way that was kind of alienating. So I realized that I was just a real American, and I needed to tone that down big time. But I think it was not as refined as feeling Californian per se, although I think being Californian may have made me even more cartoonishly American than I would otherwise have been. So I think my sense of myself as Californian in a way has strengthened the longer I've been away from it, interestingly, because I really haven't lived there as an adult, but all of the writing that I've done, often inspired directly by New York, seems to lead me back there.
And again, just back to Manhattan Beach, which is all about maritime stuff, I find myself thinking more and more about San Francisco and really California as a state of ports, of maritime life, of all of the transience and adventure that goes along with that, and the San Francisco that I grew up in, in a way, as a factor of that kind of port history. I've actually gotten very interested in San Francisco in the '50s, and I'm actually trying to work on a book set in San Francisco in the '50, kind of in the crime genre, which partakes very much of this feeling of this sort of an end of the country, sort of going to the place where you can leave a lot of other stuff behind and reinvent yourself in a city that was formed very last minute and almost overnight during the Gold Rush. I mean, the more I read about San Francisco history, the more fascinated I become. So I do find myself feeling that those roots ever stronger in myself and wanting to use that place, because place is so generative for me, in more fiction.
Freeman: I'm so happy to hear that. Julie Tolleson, who's listening, says, "Manhattan Beach is unbelievable. I learned so much and it was an incredible story." Craig Charleson and Yevir Roman who are also listening, have questions about how you edit a story into shape. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the elements of a short story are for you, Jennifer, to work, to function. I'll bring Ivan back in here too, because, Ivan, we were talking here about the sort of history of the novel, in sequential, linked fashion, maybe you could jump in after Jenny answers.
Egan: I think, for me, the process is very similar regardless of the length of the project. It definitely starts with intuitive blind outpouring because that is the only way I can get to the good material and sort of get beyond what I have come to think of as groupthink, meaning just the stuff that anyone would think of because it's sort of at the most surface level of the discourse we all participate in. I mean, ChatGPT, I guess, is now sort of a technological embodiment of groupthink, but I was already aware that if I sit down and think, "What story should I write?" I'm going to come up with something that isn't that interesting. It will be very familiar. But if I start with a place and I write from that place, I seem to be able to get below all of that to more interesting material.
But of course, it's also a total mess because I don't know what on earth I'm doing. And sometimes that mess can go on for a really long time before I reach the end of a draft. Then I type it up and I read it, and of course there's a sense of horror sometimes at the mess that I'm looking at. But, ideally, there's enough there that's interesting that I can say, "Okay, here's some interesting stuff. What am I going to make out of it? What does it feel like it wants to be?" From that point on, I'm much more intentional and try to work around what I have that's interesting to basically see what shape it seems to suggest, and then through lots and lots of rewriting, and a lot of feedback, I should add. Feedback is a huge part of my process. The Candy House is dedicated to my writing group. Through feedback and revision, I shape and trial and error and throw things out and create new things and work steadily toward accomplishing, embodying the work that I thought I saw suggested in that raw material.
Freeman: Ivan, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you see Jennifer Egan's work, this book and the Goon Squad in particular, how you see it within the long structure of the episodic elliptical novel that has always existed from the very beginning and how that perhaps differs from a world in which the American short story as it grew out of the slicks and descending from Edgar Allen Poe and Melville and writers of that ilk. Do you feel that Jennifer Egan is writing a different kind of elliptical novel because parts of this book can function in that world as short stories alone as well? Parts of this novel, if you lifted it out, you wouldn't miss the rest of the novel. I mean, it's really wonderful to have the rest of it. I wonder if that's the same case of Canterbury Tales or some of the other books that you mentioned in your work.
Kreilkamp: Yeah, I mean, I guess, I think when I first read Goon Squad, one of the things I loved about it was that it felt a little to me like a great 19th century novel that had sort of crashed into the late 20th century and sort of fractured. I feel that about Candy House as well. I mean, there's a lot of the DNA of those great 19th century novels that aspire to in some way kind of match the breadth and grandeur of the social world. And Middlemarch, Bleak House, Trollope somehow account for a whole social world in this incredibly ambitious way. I kind of feel like Jennifer's work does that, too, but in conversation with the technologies and the modes of communication and the jargons and so on of our moment. I guess Manhattan Beach is a more traditional novel. It doesn't feel blown apart in that same way. But I really appreciate, again, that sort of classic novel structure that's in the background of your work, Jennifer.
Egan: Well, I appreciate your saying that because I love 19th century fiction and 18th century fiction. I love the swagger and the scope, and it contains a lot of storytelling devices that we as a culture adore in serialized television. We just don't tend to look to our fiction for those qualities. And by that I mean characters who go in and out of focus, often covering a huge range of time, and even a story arc that may not be obvious episode to episode, but we know in the end what it was about. I just love all that stuff. But I do feel that somehow when I end up writing about contemporary life, fragmentation seems to serve me better than the more straightforward narrative that I used, for example, with Manhattan Beach.
I actually thought I would get pretty cute in Manhattan Beach, narratively. I thought there would be bells and whistles and winking at the reader about how we all know that it's not really 1942, it's actually the 21st century and 9/11 has happened. But this is why I'm so glad I have a writing group, because when I would read them the story and the narrator would do that stuff, they hated it. What I realized was it wasn't suited to that material. That's a big adventure story with a shipwreck and gangland murders, and fragmentation and irony just had no place in that story. I think so often the storytelling approach is really demanded by the material and my job is to figure out what approach will let me tell a certain kind of story, what the story demands of me narratively. That's a big challenge every time.
Freeman: We're getting towards the very end of our hour. Speaking of chronology, and you mentioned 9/11, Jennifer, and I found in just a cursory skim of various things that you worked in the World Trade Center back when you were just beginning to write. This idea of one of the most talented writers of our time wandering around pouring water or whatever in the middle of a building that would later be exploded by a terrorist attack felt surreal in a way. I wonder, since this book is about retrieving time periods, or the attempt to and the inability to, if you could bring us back to the person that was doing that, and you're at the element now where you seem to have so much power and control over so many different elements of storytelling, who is that person 30 years ago? If you could go into the own consciousness, what do you think you would find in her head when it was 11 o'clock at night and it was time to shut down the restaurant?
Egan: It's such a great question. I think about that sometimes, in the form of wondering what on earth made me think this was ever going to work out. I mean, I didn't even get into any MFA programs. I tried. I had no reason to think that I was ever going to have a writing career, and I also was very under-confident and remain so, and I actually like that because I think you work harder that way, or it feels that way to me. I never assume I can do anything. I just think, "Well, it probably won't work out, but I'll really try." So then I was so driven. I was working like crazy and had a lot of jobs. Some of them were really unpleasant. I ended up being a private secretary for three years to a pretty abusive boss. I think that in a way, though, I was not very different from the way I am now. I was very focused on the particular story I was trying to tell and consumed with the need to tell it. That organized my entire life.
So, for example, when I was a temp, the Port Authority job was catering, I catered for the Port Authority, which was in the World Trade Center, but I also was a temp, I was a very fast typist, and that was the era of floppy discs. I would bring a short story I was working on a floppy disc and slip it into the computer and work on it when whatever boss I was working for wasn't paying attention. I have this memory of one time I was printing something, a long story, and the boss came out and of course thought this would pertain to him because it was his printer, so he walked over and he picked it up, and I thought, "Oh my God. How am I going to explain this?" He looked at it and it made so little sense to him, I can't remember what, I think it was the insurance business, that he just put it down as if a poltergeist had sent it through and it had no relevance, and walked away. And I thought, "Oh my God." So I think I was exactly the same, actually. That's what I'm realizing. I was really the same. I was just a lot younger.
Freeman: Well, I'm glad that the story wasn't intercepted and you, for whatever reason, were not thwarted, at least then, because it's been just an unbelievable pleasure to read you over the years and to watch your mind go in different directions with each book and try new things. I hope if you haven't read The Candy House yet, this is quite a book, and there are seven others before it, which also are quite wonderful. If you have, Jennifer Egan, it's been a pleasure. Ivan Kreilkamp, a real big pleasure. Thank you so much for giving up an hour on your Thursday night. And David, I think this is the time where you come back in.
Egan: It's been a joy. Thank you, everybody, for reading and for joining the discussion.
Ulin: I agree. I just have to say, I also used to do that at jobs, not on floppy discs, but I'd bring little notebooks and sit in the corner and write or wherever. So I really related to that last anecdote. Thank you all. Thank you to Ivan and John and Jenny. This was a fantastic conversation. The interview was recorded, I know there were some questions in the chat about that, and will be available at californiabookclub.com. Don't forget next month on Thursday, November 16th, the California Book Club selection is Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda, another really wonderful stylistically fascinating book. Also, a reminder about the Alta membership, altaonline.com/join, or the $3 digital membership. Please participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as we end this event. Take care. See you all next month. Have a good evening, everyone. Thanks for being here.•
