Village Voice, 6/8/18
“A kind of gorging, gulping, transporting experience of being lifted out of my life: That’s what I’m looking for as a reader, and that’s what I hope to provide as a writer.”
Interviews for: Manhattan Beach
Back to Manhattan BeachNPR’s Fresh Air, 12/18/17
For Novelist Jennifer Egan, ‘The Joy of Writing is Being Delivered Out of my Life.
Lit Up, 12/13/17
“It’s a little like following trapped doors, or the suggestion of trapped doors. The first quickening was about the idea of New York during World War II. The next quickening was about the waterfront. The next quickening was about the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It felt like a real artifact of the war then.”
Carnegie Shortlist Interviews, 12/15/17
“My writing process, mostly by hand for fiction, is geared toward accessing my unconscious, from which, ideally, characters arrive wholly formed and usually even named. I feel less in the position of “creating” them than of recognizing them, inhabiting them, and trying to bring to the surface their contradictions”
The Guardian Live Books Podcast (UK), 11/21/17
“Writing entirely outside of my lifetime was extremely challenging, because the only things I actually use from my own life, is times and places that I know.”
Fashion Magazine (Canada), 12/05/17
“With Manhattan Beach I was more interested in the trajectory of America as a superpower: where it started and the why and how and what that felt like. And then I just wanted to write a book that addressed the issue of female power, which I felt like I had never done.”
Prospect Magazine (UK), 12/11/17
“The obsession with time in Goon Squad was somewhat informed by my research for Manhattan Beach because I was talking to all these people at the end of their lives and they were reminiscing about their youths. It was impossible not to think about how short life is really.”
Red Magazine (UK), 10/16/17
“Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I’ve used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.”
BBC Radio 4: Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, 11/23/17
“I started looking at images of New York during World War II, and the first thing that struck me was that it was all about the water. That was unexpected because you can live in New York for years, as I had then, and barely experience the water. I followed the water into the various worlds that come together in this book.”
The Pool with Sam Baker (UK), 11/16/17
“As I writer, I’m looking for transport. I’m looking to live a different life.”
ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts (Australia), 10/29/17
“I got interested in the waterfront because I was looking at pictures of New York during World War II, and what astonished me was the omnipresence of the water. It was the conduit for human beings and everything they needed or used. It was the only way anything or anyone got anywhere.”
Dallas News, 10/25/17
“I guess there was just something thrilling to me about dramatizing someone going under sea. It has such an archetypal storytelling aspect to it. It just felt inevitable.”
City Pages, 10/26/17
“I was really interested in New York during World War II, specifically what it felt like to sense the juggernaut of American global superpower beginning to form. What was that moment like?”
CBC, 11/02/17
“It’s not enough to know what people wore or smoke or drove in a particular time and place.”
Slate: “I Have to Ask”, 10/26/17
“There’s a feeling I have to have in order to write fiction: an excitement about a particular time and place.”
The New Yorker, 10/16/17
“Egan often dreams about finding a door that leads to an unknown room, like the one that Anna senses in metaphor. Sometimes the door leads to a garden. They are wonderful dreams. They are dreams about writing.”
SF Gate, 10/23/17
“Lots of little details about the women and the things that happened to them found their way into the narrative. For example, the fact that the air smelled like chocolate — that was one of those details that a number of different people mentioned.”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10/18/17
“I feel like every book I write requires its own voice in which to be told… The big challenge for me, with each book, is to find a new voice, with which to tell this very different kind of story.”
Write the Book, 10/11/17
“I had long wanted to write a book about female power. This era seemed like a great one to explore. There were so many more restrictions on female behavior than there are now, and yet, as of the war, everything was open to question. Lives were changing.”
The New Yorker Radio Hour, 10/06
“Fiction has a magical quality to it, in the sense that no one really knows where it comes from. It’s like dreaming.”
New York Times Book Review Podcast with Pamela Paul, 10/06/17
“New York felt like a war zone for several months after 9/11… It made me think about the trajectory of American global power, and wonder about the future of that trajectory, but also, wonder about the past of it: World War II.”
NPR, 10/05/17
“It was such a thrill to finally feel like I had imbibed enough information that it felt natural to me. It felt like time travel actually.”
Goodreads, October 2017
“Anna just arose the way my characters always do. I started writing, and there she was.”
Publisher’s Weekly, 09/15/17
“Until this novel, it had never crossed my mind to think about the collective memories of people alive at a certain time,” she says. “But who isn’t constantly thinking about their own past?”