Jennifer Egan

Thank you, David Foster Wallace.

I love Jennifer Egan and Look at Me is actually, I think, criminally underrated.

I haven't read it.

Impressioned.

yeah

I'm really interested in the experimentation of short fiction so Jennifer Egan talks about short fiction as an act of compression and the writer Flannery O'Connor talks about the possibilities that that compression opens up she describes it as a way to escape the short form of fiction so I'm wondering in addition to the actual form as a constraint are Are there other writerly experiments or constraints that you place on your work? And if so, what possibilities have they allowed you to discover? Olivia, Maxine?

Yeah, I think by having this one was... you know, originally meant to be a standard memoir and meant to be a lot longer, but the short form allowed me not to give it a tidy ending.

It was a good constraint in the fact that it didn't have to end conventionally and it could just end rather abruptly.

Yeah,

so it's A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

I've given some of Egan's books away on the podcast before, but never this one.

This is one of my favorite novels.

And I think there's other examples, you know, like when you're writing an epistolary story that gives you the sense of familiarity and you can always play with that.

Or whatever Jennifer Egan was doing with that PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad.

She was having fun, right? She like wasn't being pigeonholed into whatever you would expect a publisher to want when it comes to form, right? She was, she was experimenting.

She was trying something new and it is super engaging.

I ended up reading the first book second.

It's called The Candy House by Jennifer Egan.

It's a sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It is about a society in the future where you can upload your brain and consciousness and likeness to effectively a cloud.