Priming the Pump

Writer's Almanac


Today is the birthday of American novelist and short-story writer Jennifer Egan (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1962). She’s best known for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), a book about rock and roll that ranges in time from 1970s San Francisco to a futuristic New York. The book has several experimental elements, with one chapter even told as a PowerPoint presentation. It took Egan three years to write the book, and she modeled it after Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a very long book about the passage of time, and claims to even have been inspired by the television series The Sopranos, a show about a morose mob boss. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character. When asked about how she came up with so many characters, Egan responded: “I don’t use people I know at all. I really value the shorthand, the compression of suggesting a whole life while actually having to render up very little of it. I feel tired of exposition and backstory; the more you can suggest without spelling out, the more you can encompass in the same space. Fiction writing is always about compression and suggestion.”

When Goon Squad first came out, people weren’t sure quite what to make of it, and it didn’t sell very well. A year later, it won the Pulitzer Prize and became an international best-seller.

Egan’s desire to be a writer began when she was backpacking across Europe as a teenager during the 1980s. She was lonely and depressed, and she missed her family. “There was a kind of intensity to the isolation of travel at that time that’s completely gone now. You had to wait in line at a phone place, and then there weren’t even answering machines. That feeling of waiting in line, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It’s hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I’m actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer.”

On writing, Jennifer Egan says: “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad is so popular that there is an app version of it, which allows readers to shuffle the chapters in whatever order they choose, like songs on a record album.