Popular author closes Visiting Writers Series

Jennifer Egan explains evolution of her latest novel

BY ANDREW DAVISON
Staff Writer

MIDDLETOWN — Sometimes writers can turn misfortune into great opportunity.

Author Jennifer Egan explained how her critically acclaimed best-selling novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad” emerged from a lost wallet and a moment in a restroom, as she spoke to Brookdale Community College students at the college’s Visiting Writers Series finale on April 13.

In a New York City hotel bathroom, Egan said, she glimpsed an unattended handbag and wallet.

“I immediately felt very anxious because I have been robbed in innumerable ways,” she said.

The theft that haunted her most, Egan said, was when the thief called her after stealing her wallet, posing as a bank employee, and offered to change her PIN (personal identification number).

“I found myself haunted by that conversation because I had really expressed to her my anxiety and my worry about having been robbed, and she was very sympathetic,” she said.

However, always the writer, Egan said that she tried to imagine the conversation from the thief’s point of view.

“I found myself thinking, once the immediate horror of it all was over, who was she and what was that like from her side,” she said.

This experience coupled with the sight of the vulnerable wallet sparked the first of the novel’s several individual stories.

“I felt this sort of excitement that I had come to recognize over many years as a sense that something might lead to fiction,” she said.

Egan said she started writing from that moment of one woman seeing another woman’s wallet and taking it.

Writing from the point of view of a thief when she is normally the victim was an interesting perspective for her, Egan said.

“I don’t like to write what I know, because I actually like to write what I want to know about, what I don’t know about, what feels furthest from me,” Egan said.

After she finished this first story — at the time it was only a story and not the first chapter of a novel — Egan said that she was fascinated by a thumbnail sketch that described the protagonist’s boss, Benny, as someone who puts gold flakes in his coffee and sprays pesticide on his armpits.

“Thumbnail sketches that are funny are only funny because you’re distant from the person you’re describing,” she said.

“It tells us nothing about why Benny does those things.”

This led to a story about Benny, which led to a story about Benny’s wife, Stephanie.

In Benny’s story, the previously central character Sasha is viewed only in passing.

“I loved the idea of making a previously central character peripheral,” she said.

“We go from understanding her [Sasha] so deeply to seeing her very much from the outside through the eyes of someone who has absolutely no idea what’s going on inside her,” she said .

With three stories completed, Egan said, she decided to pursue it as a novel with three rules for each chapter: Each chapter had to be about someone different, had to feel different in mood and tone through technical choices, and had to stand completely on its own, she said.

Egan said she published several of the individual stories separately before she completed the novel.

She said she was inspired by television shows like “The Sopranos” that connect several different storylines throughout the season

Music, which plays an important role in the novel, also influenced the structure and creation of the novel, Egan said.

“The reason an album works is that there’s a lot of variety inside of it,” she said, which musicians emphasize through juxtaposition.

“My hope was that these parts that were extremely different from each other would fuse through a kind of chemical reaction into one story that would be made more powerful, not less powerful, by the fact that they were so different from each other,” she said .

Music also played a role in writing the novel, Egan said.

“Changing the mood and tone every single time I moved from one chapter to the next was actually very hard for me,” she said, and music helped her get into the mindset of each story.

In an interview, Egan said that while she always likes sharing with students, she particularly enjoyed her experience at Brookdale.

“The thing that was the most fun about that particular group was that a lot of them were in writing classes, but not necessarily as students who always wanted to be writers,” she said.

“I felt like I was reaching them at a really wonderful moment in their own relationship to writing.”

Afterward, Egan said that several students told her that it had been their first reading and they planned to attend others in the future.

“I felt like I had been part of introducing them to a certain literary experience, and that was really an honor,” she said.