Jennifer Egan on Writing as a Magical Mode of Time Travel & the Dark Side of Success

George Orwell once said writing a book was a “horrible exhausting struggle.”  Oscar Wilde, who had more of a dandy’s flair for the dramatic, compared the artist’s life to a “long, lovely suicide.”  Artists throughout the ages have romanticized their demons, believing torment a requisite component of the creative process.  “If my devils were to leave me,” luminous German poet Rainer Maria Rilke worried, “I’m afraid my angels would take flight as well.”  To create— we’ve been told— is to suffer.  Artists are dark and brooding, too temperamental to forge intimate human bonds, too promiscuous to be faithful lovers.  They’re deplorable drunks who most often meet their demise drowning in their own vomit or passing out in gutters.  They put their heads in ovens and chop off their own ears.  We glamorize these notions of the tormented artist as if it were somehow noble to be so desperately dysfunctional.  But being an artist doesn’t mean being miserable.  Despite our cultural fascination with the figure of the suffering artist, when asked why she writes in the altogether lovely collection Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan— like many of her fellow scribes— speaks with an ecstatic, almost rapturous love for her craft.  In response to the titular question, she replies she writes for the bliss of being transported to another world.  For her, writing is an act of enchantment, a magical mode of time travel in which she can live countless other lives without leaving her home:

“When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about.  I don’t think my husband can tell.  It’s a double life I get to live without destroying my marriage.  And it’s heaven.”

After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her tour de force A Visit From the Goon Squad, Egan ascended to the utmost heights of literary superstardom.  While securing such a prestigious prize might have assured others of their own genius, Ms. Egan didn’t let the applause go to her head.  Because she had served on judges panels herself, she had the insight to understand that luck had played a vital role in her success.  A Pulitzer didn’t designate her the voice of a generation or prove her superior literary talents.  If anything, all it proved was that A Visit From the Goon Squad had tapped into the zeitgeist— it had simply been the right book at the right time.  Though in the modern meritocracy we tend to conflate winning with being the best, Egan knows “making it” has less to do with a work’s objective quality than with subjective taste.  Whether you earn a critic’s commendation or a critic’s scorn, whether you garner illustrious prizes and rise to literary acclaim or toil away in bitterness and anonymity is largely a matter of chance:

“In one hundred years, if humans still exist, and if anyone remembers the name Jennifer Egan, they’ll decide whether I deserve the Pulitzer or not. The question doesn’t preoccupy me. I’ve judged a major prize and I know how it works. It all comes down to taste and, therefore, luck. If you happen to be in the final few, it’s because you’re lucky enough to have written something that appeals to those particular judges’ tastes.

I think my book is strong, and I know I did a good job. I also know it could have been better. There are plenty of books out there that are also good, and those writers could also have had the luck I had. Deserving only gets you so far. Winning a prize like that has a lot to do with cultural forces; with appetites at work in the culture.”

Though most aspiring young writers look longingly to the day they’ll arrive at the dazzling peaks of literary fame (not to mention probably sell their grandmother’s kidney to receive an honor as impressive as a Pulitzer), Egan speaks ambivalently about her newfound success: while on one hand, she’s grateful to have written a book so universally beloved, she— like novelists throughout time misfortunate enough to compose a massive bestseller— is tormented by the more than likely possibility she’ll never write such a popular book again.  Whatever she writes next will be compared to Goon Squad and inevitably be found less than.

When a “writer” is transfigured into an “author” and a “person” into a “persona,” writing is no longer a private act of creation undertaken for the sheer transcendent joy of putting one word against another— it’s a public act debased with worries of how we’ll be perceived by others.  Will the next book sell as many copies?  win as much praise?  Hurled into the limelight by the Goon Squad’s blockbuster success, Egan finds herself battling these voices more than ever.  Like many featured in Why We Write, she seems to yearn for the days before she was published, a time when she was not yet beholden to publishing houses or the public, a time when she wrote for no one but herself.  In order to maintain our integrity as artists and safeguard the playful exuberance of writing from the commodifying forces of the market, Egan suggests, we must write not for approval but for the joy of writing itself:

“The attention and approval I’ve been getting for Goon Squad— the very public moments of winning the Pulitzer and the other prizes— is exactly the opposite of the very private pleasure of writing.  And it’s dangerous.  Thinking that I’ll get this kind of love again, that getting it should be the goal, would lead me to creative decisions that would undermine me and my work.  I’ve never sought that approval, which is all the more reason that I don’t want to start now.

I’m curious to find out what influence this will have on my writing.  I won’t know until I start another book.  A scenario I could easily envision is the following: I start the book, feel it’s not going well, and start to freak.  My rational side says, “Let’s get one thing straight.  You’re going to hate the next one.  The whole world’s going to hate the next one.”  I have no idea why this one got so much love.

But part of me thinks, they liked my last book.  Hurray.  Now we move on.  The moving on will undoubtedly involve massive disappointment on the part of others.  It never happens this way twice.  In a way, I find that sort of freeing.  My whole creative endeavor is the repudiation of my last work with the new one.  If I start craving approval, trying to replicate what I did with Goon Squad, it’s never going to lead to anything good.  I know that.  Stop getting better?  There’s no excuse for that.”