“I Trust Almost Anyone More Than Myself” | Better in Person
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan talks about confidence, luck, and why it takes 35 drafts to get to the finish line.
If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, you can watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.
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This episode of Better in Person is presented by Chat GPT. Put Chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new Chat GPT desktop app today. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. And this is a bonus episode from our new TV talk show, Better in Person. My guest is the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan. And as good as a writer as she is, she is just as good at explaining her writing process. Better in Person is meant to be watched, so check it out on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or look for Better in Person on Apple Podcasts. But we're also putting out this audio version for anyone who prefers to just listen. As always, thanks. I think it's so easy to think. You know, everyone thinks the way I do, they're just doing all the wrong things. No! They don't think the way you do. They're doing things the way they think is right. This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Jennifer Egan. I love to recommend great books to friends, but some great books are hard to recommend because they're hard to describe. And that's because they are the product of an original mind, like Jennifer Egan. She is a novelist who has received many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for a visit from the Goon Squad, a kaleidoscope of a book about music and ambition and the nature of time and memory. Jennifer describes her brain as having one little corner that's always following her imagination. On the subway, she wears headphones that play nothing, and she writes characters that are nothing like her so that their consciousness is completely their own. Her work is admired by readers as well as other serious writers. Alright, so I think of you, and a lot of people think of you as a quote, writer's writer, does that drive you crazy or do you like it? I mean, if writers like my stuff, that's a pretty high compliment, so I'm happy to please anyone. That's my basic disposition. So okay, so I'm just gonna say I love your writing, which is why I wanted you to be here. I think you do a lot of things, a lot of hard things really well. And the experience of reading your books leaves me very like full and also questioning for weeks after, which I love. That's great. So I just want to know if you feel your books are as rich and disorienting to write as they are to read. That's what I really want to know. I don't know if I would say they're disorienting to write. One of the aesthetic principles that I find myself using is that once I've done something, I want to work against it. And so that happens book by book. Having just written, for example, Goon Squad, which is very, it has a lot of lateral movement. It's fragmentary storytelling. A lot of the action is off stage. It feels very contemporary and there's technology in it. And it's funny because with Manhattan Beach, I initially thought, oh, I'm gonna use some tricky narrative strategies.
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan talks about confidence, luck, and why it takes 35 drafts to get to the finish line.
If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, you can watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.