“I Trust Almost Anyone More Than Myself” | Better in Person

Welcome and introduction

0:00This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

0:13Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode from our new TV talk show, Better in Person. My guest is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, and as good as a writer as she is, she is just as good at explaining her writing process. Better in Person is meant to be watched, so check it out on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or look for Better in Person on Apple Podcasts. But we're also putting out this audio version for anyone who prefers to just listen. As always, thanks. I think it's so easy to think, you know, everyone thinks

0:53the way I do, they're just doing all the wrong things. No, they don't think the way you do. They're doing things the way they think is right.

1:04This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Jennifer Egan. I love to recommend great books to friends, but some great books are hard to recommend because they're hard to describe. And that's because they are the product of an original mind, like Jennifer Egan. She is a novelist who has received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for A Visit from the Goon Squad, a kaleidoscope of a book about music and ambition and the nature of time and memory. Jennifer describes her brain as having one little corner that's always following

1:35her imagination. On the subway, she wears headphones that play nothing. And she writes characters that are nothing like her so that their consciousness is completely their own. Her work is admired by readers

Writing process and historical fiction

1:48as well as other serious writers. All right. So I think of you and a lot of people think of you as a quote, writer's writer. Does that drive you crazy or do you like it? I mean, if writers like my stuff, that's a pretty high compliment. So I'm happy to please anyone. That's my basic disposition. So, okay. So I'm just going to say, I love your writing, which is why I wanted you to be here. I think you do a lot of things, a lot of hard things really well. And the experience of reading

2:18your books leaves me very like full and also questioning for weeks after, which I love. That's great. So I just want to know if you feel your books are as rich and disorienting to write as they are to read. That's what I really want to know. I don't know if I would say they're disorienting to write. One of the aesthetic principles that I find myself using is that once I've done something, I want to work against it. And so that happens book by book. You know, having just written,

2:51for example, Goon Squad, which is very, it has a lot of lateral movement. It's fragmentary storytelling. A lot of the action is offstage. It feels very contemporary and there's technology in it. And it's funny because with Manhattan Beach, I initially thought, oh, I'm going to use some tricky narrative strategies. I'm going to try to do something that isn't just straight up historical fiction. And I think it was that trap of having been rewarded for being, you know, experimental that I thought, well, I'm going to be experimental now. But I found that the story, the work, the narrative

3:24utterly rejected those attempts. You tried with that book, right? I did try, but I gave it up quick. And what I found was that, you know, in writing about things like a shipwreck, you know, a gangland murder, you know, survival at sea, irony and fragmentation had nothing to offer me. Just do it. Just tell the story. Reading Goon Squad again recently, I was just shocked at how your descriptions of what are called handsets then, right? Handsets, they're called? Yeah. They're smartphones. They're doing everything then. But you must have written that in like

3:582000, it was published in 2010. So you're writing that in 2005, 6, 7, 8. iPhone was around 2007, is that right? I think 8. I never had one until 11. Yeah. But it's not just the factuality of the hardware and the software. It's the way people are using it in the book that felt, to me, extraordinarily prescient. Were you, I mean, do you feel it was prescient? Were you trying to be predictive at all? I think it's just that it takes much less time to write something than it does to actually invent

4:31it and create a product. So I end up like a couple of years ahead, but I don't think I'm really very far ahead. But anyway, so the only reason I went into the future then or ever is that I want to follow someone whose age has been established into a later part of their life. That's it. It's purely practical. And I don't have a choice. In fact, I so much didn't want to go into the future in Goon Squad that when I thought about how else I could revisit the future, the future life of Sasha's

5:04one night stand from chapter one, I briefly considered moving the timeline of the entire book back 10 years. But then I realized, oh, my God, I lose punk rock. No, no, no, no. I'm back to Elvis practically. So I had to do it, but it was not a particular wish to go into the future. However, I found that it was a lot of fun because I wasn't limited by present day technology. Did you think you were being slightly hyperbolic? I thought I was being satirical, which is a very difficult thing to pull off.

5:37It was definitely satirical when you're reading it in 2010. When you're reading it in 2026, it's verisimilitude. I know. Even the water wall. Even the water wall. Because Sandy hadn't happened. I know. And they're building one now.

Adventure and fear in early life

5:48I feel like you also had more interesting jobs than a lot of people had by the time they become a young fiction writer. Like, a model for a little while. Well, that was before I was even in college. So that doesn't count. But what about the way it was put by your friend Barbara Mundy, who I happen to know also, something that you were just full of adventure in high school, but didn't necessarily know boundaries or limits yet. Does that feel right? Yeah. I mean, I definitely sought out adventure, but in a kind of quavering way.

6:22Oh, huh. It was also very fearful. It was kind of a strange combination. I sought out extreme situations, but I myself didn't really take extreme chances. What do you mean by that? Well, like, for example, you know, I hung around, or I liked to go to punk rock clubs, and I had a friend from high school who actually got, you know, became a heroin addict, and her whole world was people who were addicted to heroin, sharing needles. This is right before AIDS was named, and many of those people died. And I was in the company of her and her friends.

6:57Yeah. And I liked that because I, it was so far from anything that I knew already. Did you like it because it made you feel more in control than them or superior to them in any way? No, no. I felt like I was a wallflower and they were cool. You liked being around the electricity. It's funny. I think of you as much braver than you're describing yourself as. I think of you as having the heart of an explorer when I read you in fiction. Well, it's easy when you're writing in a room with, you know, but no, I mean, I did, you know,

7:28for example, I had a lot of phobias. I was terrified of flying. And yet, you know, I went to the former Soviet Union. I took propeller planes to Tashkent and Samarkand. So I was traveling alone with a backpack in China, summer of 86. So that was really difficult. And did you do that for the thrill and curiosity, or did you do it because you wanted to put your quavering self in a circumstance where you'd have to rise to the occasion?

8:00I was curious. It was extreme and extraordinary, but very uncomfortable. I guess what I'm saying is early on, I made a bargain, which was, I'm not going to not do something just because it's scary. And that has, that has dictated a lot of the decisions that I've made in my life. Like, I don't want to do anything. It's all scary. But again and again, I find myself thinking, if, why do I, why am I not wanting to do this? And sometimes there are really good reasons, one of which is that

8:31I'm afraid. But if the, if really the only reason is that I'm afraid, then the answer is I have to do it. I feel you just gave a different and very good answer to the question of how much Jenny Egan is there in Jenny Egan's characters, because they're often deeply unafraid. Yes. That's a big difference between them and me. I like writing about people who are unafraid.

Writer groups and reading aloud

8:54I heard that, so you have a writer's group. Yes. Which I think most people would be surprised to learn about you, that a novelist is good and accomplished and experiences you, still meets regularly with the writer's group and you give them feedback, presumably, and you get it on yours. Yeah. I dedicated the Candy House to them. I mean, I couldn't do what I do without feedback. I really need it. I really have to find out early, does this even feel alive? And what I found out early when I asked that question about the narrative voice of Manhattan Beach, which had a lot of

9:27tricky asides that called attention to the artificiality of telling a story set in the past, they loathed it. I mean, it made them angry. It seemed like I was talking down to them as if I thought the reader was going to go into a fugue state and not know that it was actually the 21st century. So I gave it all up. And I often find that if I make a good aesthetic choice, and an aesthetic choice is right, it's a relief. It's a relief to get rid of the thing I was trying so hard to save. So the idea of working against what I've just done, I find very satisfying. And

10:02the perfect example of that is, how can something be crazy, like really ridiculous, and also plausible, like actually logical? Give a, for instance, from your books. So, for example, in the Candy House, there's a guy who is obsessed with authenticity and what he perceives as the artificiality of everyday interaction. And this starts to really drive him crazy. So he looks for ways to prompt genuine reactions from people without actually hurting them. So you can't just attack people, for example, and get a genuine reaction. He's not a mean guy.

10:37So he comes up with a practice, which is that he just starts spontaneously screaming in various situations. Now, this is ridiculous. Like, this is no way to live. Of course, people hate it. I mean, imagine if I started doing that right now. Give it a shot. Let's see what it sounds like. I don't know. I feel like the only screaming I do is when, like, a jump scare, like if there's a rat. Actually, a rat jumped into my arms. No. It did. It jumped out of our garbage can into my arms. I was holding a rat very briefly.

11:10Because it loved you somehow? No, we were both kind of startled, and somehow we were in that relation to each other. Anyway, so this guy does this, and it's a ridiculous thing to do, and it makes really no sense. And yet, it actually kind of does make sense, because he is doing it for a reason. It accomplishes a goal, and it becomes a little bit of an addiction. You know, once he gets used to the crazy thrill of watching everyone freak out, he finds that nothing else in his life can quite match that. So it becomes

11:44a habit, and it was very fun to write about it, because it is funny, for sure, but also it makes sense. And so using it was a lot of fun. It's a happy thing for me to find something like that. Okay. You said so many things there I want to know more about, but first I want to go back to your writers group. Presumably, you take turns, right? You bring a piece one week, and everybody reads it, then the next week it's somebody else. Is that the way it works, or not quite? We only read aloud. So that's, I really advocate for that, because first of all, the obvious, no homework. Second of

12:18all, we all have the experience of hearing the work at the same time, and there's something very unifying about that, even on Zoom. And I think that there's a natural triage that happens when you're listening and taking notes. It's much harder to obsess about little things. It kind of forces the big questions upon the reader. And, you know, music and rhythm are the basic tools of literary expression. So reading the work aloud makes me think about that.

12:50And do you, I don't know how to ask this, it doesn't sound a little in play, but how do you know to trust them? Well, I trust almost anyone more than myself, because I'm completely compromised. So, I mean, I'm not kidding. If the mailman walked up and said, do you want to read? I'd say, sure. Like, why not? That doesn't mean I follow every single directive that I get. I mean, that would be impossible, because people don't even agree with each other. So I have... That's what I really want to ask about, because in a group, it's rarely unanimous. So what do you do

13:22when you're split? And what I really want to know also is whether you've put things in a drawer that maybe you came to regret later, based on the writer's group response? No. I mean, basically, what I find is that I listen to everything. You know, we focus a lot on the positive, which sounds Pollyanna-ish, but it's actually a very good way to do it, because what is working is the roadmap for how to fix what isn't working. And it's very hard to hear anything positive if you've already heard negative things. So we always start with that.

13:56I find that in the moment, no matter what I hear, I'm often unhappy. You know, I have a... And if it's really problematic, like when no one liked my narrator in Manhattan Beach, I will have a period of kind of anger and hopelessness. Are you outward? Are you defensive? No. No. So you just... No, I just listen. Actually, that gets back to, you know, when you say, how do you know whether to trust people? One thing I am not that interested in is people giving me solutions. I just want to

14:28know how they react. So, you know, when someone gives me an idea of what to do, I immediately triangulate back to what problem they're trying to solve. And I will find my own solution to that problem if I agree that it's a problem. And I don't always. I think in the end, it's the gut that answers these questions and the imagination. So for example, if I have an experience where I'm very disappointed, I thought something was really great and I read it and it's very clear and people are nice, but it's very clear that nothing really happened for everyone. I will, you know, initially

15:03have thoughts like, I don't want to work with you anymore and I'm quitting writing. So, you know, kind of extreme reactions that are just expressions of frustration. I think a lot of writers who are listening to you now will take great solace in knowing that you feel like quitting all the time too. Oh yeah. Or just like, it's over. My best work is behind me and it happens to everyone. But then I'll often find that I have almost like a scurrying sensation in my brain, which is this problem-solving mechanism that is just spewing out ideas, even as I'm, you know, considering law school or whatever

15:41it is. Surely you're not always in that state. How would you get in that state or what happens to bring you to that state? The state of having ideas? Yeah. Or are you always in that state? I am always in that state. Consistently, not just in the shower, not just on a walk. There's one little part of my brain that's sort of always following where I am imaginatively. If it's not, that's not a good sign. So, as I understand it, the book that you are sort of returning to now is not The Candy House,

New projects and postwar America

16:09not Goon Squad, but Manhattan Beach, yes? Yes. And what you're working on now is, I know, I don't think you like the word sequel or prequel or any of those? I don't think it meets the standard of a sequel in that it really is about someone else who isn't in Manhattan Beach. Oh, I see. So, it wouldn't, if I call it a sequel, lovers of Manhattan Beach are going to be bummed. Is it a character that's appeared in any of your books? No, it's a detective. Okay. So, it's a murder mystery. Set in California? Yes. San Francisco in the 50s. So, it chronologically

16:40follows Manhattan Beach. I'm really interested in the immediate post-war period. Because why? Well, Manhattan Beach was very much about the war period. And I guess I'm fascinated by what it felt like to be in the newly super-powered America with all of this wealth sloshing around. I'm very interested in the ways in which women had done all kinds of amazing things during the war and then, to some extent, at least bought into a kind of myth of domesticity or an ideal of that. I'm just

17:15interested in looking at all of it. It just feels like, well, that's what happened next. And I think what I'm ultimately doing, in a way, I guess, decade by decade, is moving up to the time that I know, having been born in the early 60s. It just feels like it's the story of the America I know. You know, World War II triumph to some degree, and very good luck that none of it was fought on our shores, followed by, you know, power and many things that have followed right up to today.

17:52So, I could imagine someone sitting here 50 years from now, looking back on the 20th and early 21st centuries and saying, you know, who's a novelist that really defines it in a way or reflects it? And I think you're on that list, if not at the top of that list, which I think is a remarkable achievement. Where did this appetite to do that whole arc come from, though? I didn't think of it as doing that. Manhattan Beach honestly just started with this idea about

18:22wartime New York through a kind of noir-ish lens. It seemed really fun. And is that from living in Brooklyn and seeing the hulking Navy Yard over there? No, I actually didn't know anything about the Navy Yard. I think it honestly probably started with 9-11 because New York became a war zone overnight. And many people reflected on, you know, what it had been like to be here during World War II. And I think a lot of us reread that E.B. White essay, Here's New York. And I guess all of that just got me thinking about what it felt like. But I really

18:54thought of it in a fun kind of crime story, noir-ish way. I love the noir. It's just a magnificent vibe. I wouldn't even call it a genre. It's just a mood. So that's really where it started. I had no idea what that book would be. I just bumbled from one thing to the next. And it's no offense. It's hard to believe because, well, I guess this is the way it's supposed to be. When the book is done, it feels like a fully baked recipe.

19:24Yeah, it took seven years. If you're bumbling, it's going to take a while.

Family history and police work

19:28Part of this so-called bumbling is pulling inspiration from the past. Jennifer had brought along some old photos, including one of her grandfather standing alongside President Harry Truman. Yeah, Edward Egan. So he was a cop. This is Chicago? Yes, Chicago. South side. It's a very, you know, kind of Irish-American stereotype. One of the things that he did was, even back when Truman was a senator, he, my grandfather

19:58and his partner, who's on the other side of Truman, were his bodyguards when he would come to Chicago. And they developed a very, a good relationship and continued to do that even after he was president. And he kept, my grandfather kept lots of letters, you know, from Truman thanking him for the good service. And they clearly enjoyed each other. There are pictures of them laughing together, the three of them. But there are also a lot of pictures of Truman being somewhere and then sort of a corner of my grandfather's head as he's sort of scoping out what's going on. And, you know, he was really, he was a real cop. I mean,

20:34my uncle used to tell a story of standing with my grandfather outside the courthouse in Chicago, and my grandfather was sort of giving a steely look to everything around him. And my uncle said, what are you, what are you looking at, dad? And my grandfather said, just trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys. Did you feel you grew up in a cop family or not quite? Yeah, I think I did feel that. I mean, my father wasn't a cop. My father was going to be a priest, another Irish American trope. And I think one of the fun things about working on Manhattan Beach,

21:07after I got interested in World War II, the noir, that sort of led me to the waterfront. And that led me almost immediately to the Irish Americans, because the Manhattan part of the Port of New York, the docks, were completely controlled by the Irish Americans. And in fact, the movie On the Waterfront arose from a lengthy expose of those injustices. My father was long gone by the time I was doing this research, but I really felt like I sort of understood the world that made

21:40him for the first time. One feature of which was just a tremendous reluctance to really talk about emotions. If I had to give a one-line description of what sets you apart from most other novelists in that realm, it's that the degree of psychological astuteness is very, very high. I feel like you understand all of your characters very, very, very deeply. And so maybe doing what you do to see how

22:11people feel and think and experience things, maybe that's something that comes naturally to you. I don't know. I think it comes naturally, but in a very crude form that I have to make much better. If I just start writing, for example, I feel sometimes that I almost get glimmers of someone and I can kind of almost get a strange compressed montage of what their life might consist of. I'll have a sense of a room, a relationship, a history, a tone of voice, an era. It's just like a possibility. And then it just

22:46flickers and is gone. I mean, I'm kind of doing it right now. But that doesn't make a book. I mean, that's just generation. So I can generate a lot of stuff, but then it takes an enormous amount of effort to control every word, ultimately. A really nice point to reach is when I feel like I really understand the entire picture, chapter by chapter, what needs to happen, what needs to change, what I'm trying to bring out. And that editing part is, I really find that so fun because I'm solving problems.

23:22I'd love to see your whole outline. Will you show it? Sure. Okay, good.

Manuscripts and editorial drafts

23:26Jennifer also brought along some of her manuscript in progress, the detective novel set in San Francisco in 1952. So this is just a timeline when people were born. The earliest birth is 1890. Because as you said, it's not just about how old the people in the story are. What about their parents? What about their parents? Sort of how long does living memory go among the characters? So that's one thing. And then I'll have sort of, you know, this is my list of characters. I have some color coding here. It's

23:58very fancy. Red needs rethinking. I had a very specific goal for myself with this, which was no abusive language toward myself. So for example, I would... Oh, is that new? Yes. It's a new way of functioning because I would go through these drafts and I would write, you know, terrible or whatever, like, this is boring. And I found that it actually really brought me down, you know? And so I decided I would try to say things in a nicer way to myself. So red is needs rethinking instead of not working,

24:32for example. I can't remember what... What's the blue highlight there? That looks serious. Oh, I think that means there has to be another way to use that person. Gray means it's probably going to go. So you can see there's a lot of gray. There's a lot of gray. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of rethinking here. Okay. And then there's... What are these chapter or these category headings? So there are factual questions, so many of those. And red is still unanswered versus making progress. Note the positive tone. And I number the drafts. If I continue to... Once I'm at

25:10like draft six, there will hopefully be a lot less of this, you know, all of this marking up. And how do you feel about this book at the moment?

25:20Hmm. That's a good question. Hopeful, but tentative still. Tentative, meaning you're not sure it's going to work? I mean, with a murder mystery, it either works or it doesn't. You know, there's not a lot of room for... It just has to... It's very... It's like a math problem in a way. And so that's what's so challenging about it. I mean, genre is fun for a lot of reasons, but it also is... It has rigorous demands. And so the question is, can I meet those demands and somehow also supersede them and do all

25:55the things I would normally want to do in a novel? What happens if it doesn't work? I don't know. Have you ever thrown away a complete book? No. I don't think I would do that. I would just try to figure out how to fix it. How many drafts were there for Goon Squad, let's say? Hard to say because I wrote it in a particulate way. Certain chapters, probably 30, 35. So Goon Squad, if I recall, many of the chapters were published as short fiction in The New Yorker

26:27and elsewhere, correct? Was it intended to be a novel? Not initially, no. I thought I was just... I actually thought I was killing time and avoiding working on Manhattan Beach. Oh, you're kidding. No. Oh. So... But then I realized that I was enjoying... I was enjoying having characters appear more than once. I was enjoying moving back in time. And I thought, oh, why don't I just write a book? Will Goon Squad be a film someday, do you think? It has a new, very interesting deal. So we'll see. I think that'll be number seven.

27:00On that one book? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Maybe six. People are optioning it for one year or two years and then they don't get it done and then it reverts? No. They've often held onto it for much longer and then it will go in and out of other deals with that same producer. I think they're really hard books to figure out. And I'm not really... I mean, I have no ability as a screenwriter. So I'm just so glad that I don't have to work in that medium. But how would you feel if your books are made into films that are anything less than awesome?

27:32Look, most things aren't awesome. I mean, you know, I feel like that's... I have nothing to complain about. I know, but you spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of attention on writing a book that many people consider a great book. And then it gets turned into a mediocre movie. Wouldn't that be a... It really seems like a first world problem. Do you know what I mean? Like, I just feel like... I mean, if... I guess... You really aren't judgmental at all, are you? Well, I just feel like, really? Am I going to get furious? Because my... I think that the movie

28:02made from my book isn't what I would hope. My God. I mean, I should be putting that energy into writing better books. You've won a lot of awards by now, I have to say. What's it like to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction? That's kind of cool. It was very shocking. It was really... I just... It did not seem like the kind of thing that would happen to me. I knew it happened to people. It just... I mean, in a way, it shouldn't have been because I was old enough by then. I had been a judge for the National Book Award. So I know that

28:35prizes are basically good luck. You please the right small number of people. Maybe you're the compromise choice, you know? That's how it works. It's just people making choices. But then prizes have a kind of iconic quality once they are given. And I just never thought I would win one. Do you think that there's a Jenny Egan effect that when you're about to publish a book, you think there are publishers who say, I don't want my new novelist going up against Jenny Egan. She's going to win the prize. I really doubt it. I mean, I can't believe anyone would be really thinking that way.

29:06Again, there's just so much luck to it, you know? I kind of assume I would never win another prize because I feel like I have been very awarded and possibly over-rewarded. Yeah, I guess I just don't think... Are you sheepish about winning awards? No. No. I just recognize... Do you feel you deserve it? I mean, if you... That's like... You're saying, do I deserve good luck? No, no. Sorry. If we could subtract good luck and what you just said about the randomness and maybe it's a compromise, et cetera. But on the merits of the work, do you deep down feel you

29:40deserve it? I think the merits of the work were good enough to be in the mix to get the luck. So I guess I deserved to be in that pool. Right. Yeah. But that's a big pool.

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Family memory and mental illness

30:54Well, I wanted to ask you about your brother, who I know died by suicide maybe seven, eight years ago. Nine. Nine years ago. How did his death affect you? Um, I don't know. I mean, it's a sad, it's an ongoing sadness. It's, of course, way worse for my mom. I'm now her only remaining child. So, um, I think, I don't know beyond that. I mean, I feel the loss,

31:26of course. Um, I really do. So, I'd love to talk to you about that relationship. I don't know if that's a good conversation. I love talking about him. You do? Yeah. Why do you love talking about him? Because I, I want to keep him, I, I don't want him to disappear. So, I feel like when I talk about him, I'm sort of bringing him, I, I, you know, he felt very invisible. He felt like life had really passed him by because he, he couldn't live a mainstream life. What was his situation? He was schizophrenic. So, he was, he heard voices all the time. They could be tamped down with

32:01medication, but in order to silence them entirely, he was basically catatonic. And also, he had a really serious alcoholism problem. And those two things worked very badly together. Um. Younger than you or older? Six years younger. And what was your relationship like growing up? Really good. He was very much, I would say, a golden boy. I think anyone who knew him would probably use that same phrase. He was really spectacular. Natural athlete, um, a natural leader. I don't think I'm wrong when I say that if anyone had looked at the two of us,

32:35they would certainly have thought he was probably going to do better than I did. What was it like when he started having the symptoms setting in in his early 20s, I guess, or something? So, you're in your mid to late 20s. What, what did that do to your life? That must have been chaotic. I didn't know, we didn't know what it was that we were seeing. For how long? A long, way longer than we should have not known. Oh, how come? I mean. I think when you had, well, first of all, public awareness of mental health was much less in the 90s. I mean, there's no comparison. Like we, the fact, the number of times an average person

33:10will use the phrase mental health, unheard of then. So he hid it pretty well. Yeah. And I think it's amazing what you can deny if you don't want to believe it's true. Unbelievable. I mean, I think also if you haven't seen psychosis, it's very hard to recognize it. I can, I can pick it up instantly, but that's because I've spent so much time with a person who's psychotic. Um, so I think it was a combination of not wanting to believe him doing a really good job of still

33:46seeming, you know, he was incredibly handsome. I mean, there were, he was just sort of quick on his feet. There were, there were things that hit it. Um, he was in the care of doctors who seemed not to know what they were seeing or at least weren't sharing it. So there was some bad healthcare there that I think, uh, made it harder to know what was going on. And then, uh, and just a general lower cultural awareness of it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so sorry for all of you.

34:17Me too. I mean, it's hard not to say, gee, if all of that happened now, how could things have been different? Impossible to know. But it does make you think about the way in which we're moving through time in an interesting way. I mean, I happen to have a father who died at a young age from stupid stuff that would today be treated. 57 years old, hypertension, stuff like that, that, you know, one generation ago. Well, it's, it's so easy to think about all the things that are wrong with quote unquote progress. And obviously we're all, you know, everyone's terrified of AI and there are lots of things

34:50to be scared of. Are you terrified of AI? I haven't engaged with it enough to be terrified of it. You don't use it in your research? No, I haven't. Oh, oh really? Oh, okay. I would love you to play for 15 minutes and just say, how would the novelist Jennifer Egan think about this blank character, whatever? I can't find the words to tell you how revolted I am by that possibility. I am so not going to do that. I mean, I, I just object to it so strenuously.

35:22On what grounds? Because I, well, first of all, let's put aside the fact that it stole all of our work and scraped it all. It seems to embody groupthink and every cell in my body is trying to get beyond groupthink. So why would I pay to have even further processed groupthink spewed out at me? Now, granted, having not done it, I can't really be too judgmental about it. Um, that's okay. I'm also very good at critiquing things I know nothing about.

35:52Sometimes it's easier. Yeah, absolutely. Um, don't let evidence get in the way of the good story. I feel like I'm not, some kind of processed product of everything that's been said and written, including all of my work is not, that just reminds me of something like spam.

Consciousness and the mystery of life

36:10Like, I don't want it. The thing that strikes me as singular about your work, um, is that when I think of the early novels and why people wrote novels and read novels, I feel like mostly that has been replaced by versions of reality TV, okay? Because it used to be that we had no way to know someone's interior life. And I feel like now we have trillions of representations of people's interior lives, but they're kind of crappy versions.

36:42And they're also not interior. It's an illusion. It's an illusion. I mean, if you're looking at a picture, you're not inside. I think the job of fiction is exactly what you're saying, to give us the experience that we will never have in real life of being inside a different consciousness. I mean, it's like, it's like being able to fly. Like, you can't do that as a human being. And so in order to actually accomplish that, unless one is writing straight autobiography, empathy and, and I guess extrapolation would be the other tool of finding ways to move from

37:13one's own experience into other experiences. But empathy is that bridge. Empathy is what makes it possible. I feel if I read male novelists, if there was a male Jenny Egan writing the same books, the same characters, I feel like his descriptions of those characters would be dripping with disdain and judgment. And I don't feel that in you. And I want to know, well, I don't. And I think that's one reason I think why I love to read you. And I think why other people do too. But do you feel that's a gender element?

37:47No, it shouldn't be. That's interesting. I hadn't actually thought about that. I mean, it's interesting, too, because I, my go-to is a male point of view. So that also- What do you mean by that? Well, I just mean I'm most comfortable writing from a male point of view. And I think the reason is it immediately takes my own experience out of the picture. You know, it just immediately separates the person I'm writing about from me. But what you just said is, I think, so important, which is, you know, part of putting a reader and myself inside a completely other consciousness is, and I think of this explicitly, the measure

38:25of my ability to do that is the degree to which that person's choices, whatever they may be, and as you say, sometimes cretin-ness or really bad, mean, should not only be understandable, but they should feel essential. We should be so deep in there that a thing that is clearly bad should feel necessary and right. That's what it's like to be a person doing something. I'm totally with you up to the point where you, the writer, don't feel the need to tell

38:57the reader how to feel about that behavior. I don't think I- I think the reader can figure that out for themselves. I think that judgment is not very interesting. I'm actually not that interested in people's judgments. I just feel like how- that's not how I want to spend my time. You know what I mean? I mean, you realize you're casting yourself as a deep anomaly and that most people seem to be extraordinarily interested in other people's judgments. I know. I guess I am an anomaly. Okay. The big question.

39:28I just want to know what you're after. Like, what you're trying to accomplish. In the end, I like to feel that in some way I confront the mystery, whatever that means. In other words, I think one reason judgment is so boring to me is that there's nothing mysterious about it. We're getting the answer. That's- that- I'm much more interested in raising questions that- that somehow push us up against something that feels eternal.

39:59And by that, I don't mean- I- I'm not a religious person, but, you know, I think we can all agree that human life is somewhat mysterious. All of life is. We don't know why, how long it will last, what's beyond the beyond the beyond. I mean, the big questions have yet to be answered and maybe never will be. So the feeling of pushing up against the magnitude of all of that is something I like to at least imagine I'm trying to do. And on a more immediate level, I just want to tell a good story.

40:35One of my very favorite things about your writing is I think every book ends really well. As a reader, there's no better feeling than having been with a bunch of characters who are often disparate, sometimes not connected at all, going in and out of time, going into time periods that the reader may not be very familiar with. But because you're a magician, you bring them all together and the emotional experience is complete and whole. So I'm hoping you can end this conversation in a fruitful way because I don't- I don't

41:06really have any ideas.

41:09Um, I don't know. It's so funny because this is like- this is the- my attempt to end this book that I'm working on and I feel like, wow, can I turn this- Oh, maybe you need my help with your big pile of mess there. I don't know what the right ending is, except to say it's incredibly fun to talk to you. Always. Ditto. Right back at you. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you. Jenny Egan. Jennifer Egan. It was so, so much fun. I, you know, I would have done it for six more hours, but I realized it would have been

41:39a long time. I hope you enjoyed this audio edition of Better in Person with Jennifer Egan. If you want to see the conversation and some of the other photos that she shared, check out Better in Person on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or on Apple Podcasts. And let us know what you think. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. We will be back soon right here with more Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.

42:12You were just saying how much you hate John Didion. Do you want to continue with that? No! Or should we start a fresh stand? I do not.

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