Jennifer Egan has made a career out of taking literary risks. In an era where many authors find their niche and stay firmly within it, Egan moves restlessly from one form to the next—satire, historical fiction, gothic noir, even fiction told through PowerPoint. Her Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, stitched together thirteen interlocking stories across time, characters, and mediums, including a standout chapter rendered as a slideshow. In her follow-up, The Candy House, she picked up those narrative threads again, this time plumbing the eerie consequences of a future in which consciousness can be downloaded and shared.
But long before she was experimenting with epistolary tweet fiction or weaving Silicon Valley angst into speculative drama, Egan was just another young traveler backpacking through Europe in the 1980s—lonely, frightened, and unknowingly writing her way toward a calling. “There was a kind of clarity to being reduced to myself in this extreme way,” she told The Guardian. “Somehow in that extreme state, I wrote constantly; harrowing journal pages where I’m narrating my own panic. ‘I don’t understand why I can’t make it stop’—trying to understand what I was scared of.” That trip—and the journals it produced—set her on a path toward fiction.
Egan’s early career was defined by stylistic leaps between novels. After her debut, The Invisible Circus, she swerved into noir satire with Look at Me, then into gothic fiction with The Keep, before upending conventional form entirely with Goon Squad. The one throughline has been her refusal to settle. “I’m kind of looking for thrills, honestly,” she told The Guardian. “That’s what it’s about.” Each new book offers a creative repudiation of the last. “Whenever I finish a project, I want to do something totally different,” she said. “It’s a kind of ritual cleansing.”
That tendency to shed skins isn’t just about formal restlessness. It’s also a way of chasing something deeper—what she once called “the essential solitariness of humans.” Her characters are often caught between hyperconnectivity and private despair, especially in The Candy House, where a social media magnate invents a system that allows users to upload and share their memories. “We crave connection,” she told Rachel Barenbaum, “but the most defining aspect of the human experience is that we are fundamentally alone.”
Yet solitude, for Egan, isn’t something to fear. It’s a requirement. “I’m a pretty solitary person,” she said in a Goodreadsinterview. “Solitude is something that I live, that I need to do my work.” She speaks with clarity about that tension: how we want to be known, but also want to conceal; how technology enables sharing, but also performance; and how fiction, in the end, becomes a place where these contradictions can live side by side.
She is fascinated by secrets—by shame, by addiction, by the acts of concealment that run beneath ordinary life. She’s also deeply preoccupied with time: how it bends, how it leaks, how it rearranges identity. “I start with a time and a place,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s what I need to get started—and an intellectual question.” For Look at Me, that question was about image culture. For Goon Squad, it was time. For The Candy House, it was consciousness itself.
Still, for all the theory and structure behind her books, Egan’s process is surprisingly grounded. Her fiction begins not with outlines, but with mess—fragments on legal pads, ideas written longhand in near-illegible script. “The actual creation is always by hand, away from the computer,” she told WSJ. “My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around.” She accepts the badness of those first drafts as necessary. “Writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen,” she explained. “But then there will be good moments.”
In that, Egan is unusually self-permissive, willing to let writing be what it is before shaping it into something more. “The goal is to write regularly enough that it feels weird not to do it,” she said. “It’s very much like exercise in that way.”
Jennifer Egan’s daily writing routine
If there is a single unifying force in Jennifer Egan’s writing life, it might be rhythm. Her routine is less about structure than continuity—doing enough to keep the creative thread alive, but not so much that she’s depleted for the next day. “I usually try to write five to seven original pages a day,” she told WSJ. “If I go over that, I’m often really depleted for the next day, and I find it’s better to hold onto the continuity.”
Her writing days begin after she drops her children off at school, around nine in the morning. She often writes curled up in a battered gingham chair from Ikea, legal pad balanced on a lap desk, cats coming and going. She avoids her actual desk unless she’s editing. “Anything that involves typing or businessy stuff, I’ll do at the desk,” she said. “But especially with editing, which is what I really spend my time on, I’ll do 30 drafts of a chapter.”
Egan has written some of her most acclaimed fiction—Goon Squad, The Keep, parts of The Candy House—in longhand. She distrusts screens, with their illusion of continuity. Instead, she prints every draft, numbers each version, and cross-checks old pages for buried treasure. “I distrust the continuous present of a screen because there’s no history there,” she told WSJ. “I print out and save all my drafts so if I start to have that experience of something good having disappeared, I can dig back to what I’m looking for.”
Though she’s known for her intellectual rigor and structural innovation, her drafting process is surprisingly intuitive. She doesn’t outline in the early stages. Outlines come later—once she’s deep into revision. “Some of my revision outlines are 50 pages long,” she said. That process—revising, layering, stepping back to assess what she has—can last years. Manhattan Beach, for instance, took over a decade of research and rewriting. “The book required a more conventional telling than any I’ve employed in a while,” she told Harvard Gazette. “I’d call it a noir thriller, if I had to classify it.”
Even in her most experimental books, her routines remain the same: longhand first drafts, deep revision cycles, total commitment to finding the form that best suits the story. “Structural innovation only really works when the story can’t be told any other way,” she said.
In recent years, Egan has become more flexible with her editing process. While she still begins each novel by hand, she now revises both on paper and on screen. “I used to never write on the screen,” she said. “But with Manhattan Beach, I began to alternate between revising by hand and revising on the screen. I would see it differently.”
Editing, for her, is where the book really takes shape. “Between each big draft I try to raise each individual part up to a level,” she told WSJ. “It’s not so much about spotting problems as it is confronting, ‘What have I got here and what is it trying to be?’”
She writes alone, but doesn’t work in isolation. Egan has a close group of trusted readers who help her gauge whether her ideas are working. “I really like having a community of trusted collaborators,” she said. “I need a community to help me understand what’s working and what isn’t.”
That openness to feedback, along with her unflinching self-editing and refusal to be boxed in by genre, is part of what gives her work its depth and unpredictability. Whether she’s writing historical fiction or speculative epics about collective consciousness, Egan is always reaching for something new—yet unmistakably hers.
“You go from underrated writer to overhyped writer,” she told The Guardian, “and both of them feed insecurities. You worry about the next one. You’re grateful on the one hand, and feel excessively privileged, but you also feel performance anxiety and a kind of stage fright.”
And still, she keeps going—five to seven pages at a time, longhand, by the window, listening to the hum of the world outside and waiting to find out where her fiction will take her next.
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