I was provoked and interested in the relationship between data and the human experience. I’m interested in the way in which technological experience invites expectations that are simply not fulfilled as yet in normal life. I feel nonfiction is the place to do that. “I’m definitely not trying to offer judgements. If this sounds like a dystopian extension of the way we currently allow our data to be manipulated, Egan is not so sure. Our memories can be transferred to an external disk and then uploaded to the cloud so past events can be viewed from the perspectives of all present at that time. Tech Genius Bix Bouton is one of the returning characters and his invention of Own Your Unconsciousness is a recurring plot device. And in America, they’re with two different publishers!” The Memory Machine I don’t want people to feel they have to make every connection. I didn’t reread Goon Squad to work on Candy House until the very end. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of both books is they do not move in chronological order. “The word implies a chronological progression, which doesn’t exist. “They don’t want to call it a sequel because that implies you have to read Goon Squad first,” Egan explains. Though it revives several characters from A Visit From The Goon Squad, the publishers are at pains to dispel the notion of The Candy House as a sequel. Talking of selling the work, The Candy House is a dazzling ride across decades and multiple locations and viewpoints, employing a range of literary techniques to discuss ideas of memory and privacy in the changing digital world.
“I don’t assume anyone will do that if I don’t do it, and I also really like interacting with readers.” “I like to help sell the book,” she says. She’s happy to be back out on the road, something she sees as an important part of the process. “I found The Famine Museum incredibly moving. “I came with my family for the first time in 2011, to Strokestown in Roscommon,” she tells me over a cup of coffee as sunlight streams in the window of the hotel bar. Among many other awards, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.Įgan is in Dublin to take part in the International Literature Festival Dublin, promoting new book, The Candy House, and it isn’t her first visit to Ireland either, which with a surname like hers – “everyone came over during the famine” – is hardly surprising. Since then, there has been award-winning journalism for the New York Times Magazine and short stories in The New Yorker and Harpers, and six novels.Ģ017’s Manhattan Beach was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, although 2011’s A Visit From The Goon Squad is still, perhaps, her best-known work. at St John’s College, Cambridge, and worked the same menial jobs we all did while she learned her trade.
Born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, Jennifer Egan moved to New York in 1987 after completing her M.A.
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