“I Trust Almost Anyone More Than Myself” | Better in Person
with Jennifer Egan
26 Aug 20264 min read31m
TL;DR
Jennifer Egan tells Stephen Dubner that she trusts almost anyone's reaction to her work more than her own — including hypothetically the mailman — because she is 'completely compromised' as a judge of it. She describes writing A Visit from the Goon Squad as an accident: she thought she was killing time and avoiding Manhattan Beach. Her core creative principle is that once she has done something, she wants to work against it — which is why her Pulitzer-winning experimental novel was followed by straight historical fiction.
Key Moments
Jennifer Egan
“Irony and fragmentation had nothing to offer me. Just do it. Just tell the story.”
Egan explains why she abandoned experimental narrative techniques when writing Manhattan Beach — a shipwreck and gangland murder story rejected those strategies outright.
“I actually thought I was killing time and avoiding working on Manhattan Beach.”
Egan reveals that A Visit from the Goon Squad — her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — began as an accidental distraction from the book she was supposed to be writing.
Jennifer Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist best known for A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fragmented, kaleidoscopic book about music, ambition, and the nature of time and memory. Her work is admired by readers and fellow writers alike, earning her the reputation of a 'writer's writer.' She is currently working on a murder mystery set in 1950s San Francisco, a companion to her novel Manhattan Beach.
Takeaways
1
Don't ask for solutions — ask for reactions Egan explicitly does not want her writer's group to tell her how to fix problems. She wants to know how they react, then triangulates back to identify the underlying problem herself and finds her own solution. This separates diagnosis (others can help) from prescription (only you can do that for your own work).
2
Work against what you just succeeded at Egan's core aesthetic principle is that once she has done something well — like the fragmented, experimental Goon Squad — she wants to work against it in the next project. Manhattan Beach became straight historical fiction precisely because the experimental mode had nothing to offer a shipwreck or gangland murder story. Resisting the trap of repeating a rewarded style keeps the work alive.
3
Read aloud in feedback groups — no homework required Egan's writer's group reads work aloud only, never distributing pages in advance. This creates a shared, simultaneous experience, forces focus on big structural questions over small line edits, and keeps music and rhythm — the basic tools of literary expression — front of mind. It also removes the burden of homework.
4
Start feedback sessions with what's working, not what isn't Egan's group always leads with the positive, which she says is not Pollyannaish but practically useful: what is working is the road map for how to fix what isn't. And it is very hard to hear anything positive once you have already heard negative things. Sequencing feedback this way preserves the creator's capacity to absorb it.
5
Goon Squad's future-tech wasn't prescient — it was practical Egan did not set chapters of Goon Squad in the future because she wanted to predict technology. She did it because she needed to follow a character whose age had been established into a later part of their life — and moving the whole timeline back 10 years would have cost her punk rock. The 'prescience' was a side effect of pure narrative logic.
6
A good aesthetic choice feels like relief, not triumph Egan notes that when she makes the right aesthetic decision — such as dropping the experimental narrator in Manhattan Beach after her writer's group hated it — it feels like relief, not loss. The relief of letting go of something she was trying hard to save is itself a signal that the choice was correct. Resistance to a good cut is often attachment, not instinct.