Q&A With ‘The Candy Home’ Creator Jennifer Egan
These books, if I can make them work, simply change into a really good car for plenty of improvement and experimentation alone half. MT: It seems like a extremely thrilling process personally that you’re employed via when you are building every chapter narrative and the way they fit collectively. It’s not cerebral – effectively, that’s not true. Egan: It’s. It is a very intuitive course of. It is an alternation between intuition and evaluation. That’s why 50% of it ends up on the cutting room ground, as they say. I take the very best and attempt to work with that and shape it into something significant. So that’s my process. It is an alternation, however I place a high worth on intuition and improvisation. I rely on my intuition to provide you with a very improvisational draft, after which I evaluate them very critically. It’s the place I get quite a lot of my greatest stuff. MT: So, if you had been saying that you just were nonetheless curious concerning the characters 12 years in the past, and that’s what drew you back to it – do you feel like you still have that curiosity?
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” you’re saying, “Oh, what was that like? ” So a form of backwards pattern of curiosity, having curiosity be satisfied backwards as a substitute of forwards. I was very excited by that as a result of there are all types of advantages that it provides the reader. The reader already knows the long run, so the reader experiences the current with a selected character in a really totally different way than we do if we’re just questioning, “Gee, what’s gonna occur? ” as the character is. That kind of relationship to time and narrative has been exciting to me from the very start. I couldn’t make it work in a straight backwards chronology, however it’s my basic feeling that in books like this, discovering out what did happen is as enjoyable or extra enjoyable than finding out what will happen. That’s what makes me assume starting with “The Candy House” could be extra satisfying. It’s not a neat sequence.
” and that was a second the place the machine really crystallized for me. “Ah, I get it. She’s utilizing a machine that lets her see recollections by way of other people’s eyes.” That was so thrilling to me as a result of it let me do something that you actually can’t do in fiction that easily, which is to justify being in two people’s first-individual viewpoints at the identical time. I mean, of course, you possibly can form of do anything in fiction, but I really like the thought of a know-how that enabled and justified that. Inside, there’s simply the guide that we’re holding in our hands. Once I defined the machine and was actually leaning into the best way individuals fetishize the color that their cube is and etcetera, I would sometimes imagine myself giving one of those cubes a giant kick and simply having it disappear. Because in a way, what I’m doing in the ebook is shifting by a collective of different factors of view and reminiscences as I move by means of my 14 characters’ points of view.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited for clarity and length. Mississippi At present: I didn’t notice after i began it that “The Candy House” is a type of sister novel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” – one other e book to add to my reading record. Jennifer Egan: I really suppose that going in the direction that you’re going, starting with “The Sweet House,” I think is optimal. MT: I’m curious, why do you suppose that’s optimal? Egan: Well, I’ll again up a little bit, I had initially thought that “A Visit From the good Squad,” would go in a backwards chronology. It’s not a sequel, it’s only a related world. That ended up not working very properly, so I ended up having no chronology, just organizing it round curiosity. However the reason I thought it might go backwards was that I was really delighted with the form of unexpected surprise of, as a substitute of saying, “Gee what’s gonna happen?
