Opening Lines:
So you were only 26 and already had published in The New Yorker. What effect did that have on your career?
Jennifer Egan:
Well, you think, oh my god, then everything must have been easy, but it was in some ways a little too soon for that to happen to me because that story was by far the best thing I had done. Everything else I had was significantly less sophisticated. As inevitably happens if you’re a total unknown and publish in The New Yorker, a lot of people come forward and said, “Oh wow, what else have you got?” But when I would show them what else I had, they were actually not that interested. And at the time, there was no guarantee that I was going to do anything else especially interesting. That story really hung over me and cast a long shadow, and I felt that I would never even match it, much less top it. And that that was thing that everyone was interested in, not what I’d been doing before. So that was tough in a way, although these are the problems you want. You want to be publishing and making leaps.
Opening Lines:
With all that pressure for a follow-up, what did you do next?
Jennifer Egan:
At that point, I decided to take another crack at the horrific first novel I’d written because when I re-read it, which was very painful, I discovered that I’d done such a horrible job, I’d so utterly missed the mark, that in a way I felt like I hadn’t really touched the idea that I had wanted to deal with. It felt like I had just kind of aimed in the wrong direction and the target was still there and that made me want to give it another try. So I essentially threw that out. I can’t really say I rewrote it, because I didn’t save a single word, but there were certain basic impulses and plot moves that really fueled the next attempt, and they were the same as the first in some ways. And that is what ultimately became the first novel that I published, The Invisible Circus. It was a long evolution.
Opening Lines:
Looking back now, what would you say was the toughest obstacle you faced in the years between when you first decided to pursue writing as a career and when you actually got your first book published?
Jennifer Egan:
I think the toughest obstacle was the question of why I was doing it. Although in a certain way, it wasn’t that tough since I was compelled to do it, but there was no one telling me this was a good idea. I had gone to an expensive college and gotten a good education, and then gotten another degree with a scholarship in England, and now I was working as a temp? My parents and family were wondering what I was doing. So that part was hard. Just that question of why was this a valid thing to be doing. At the same time, I think that if you’re a person who is going to be stymied by questions like that, you’re probably not going to really keep writing, because in a way, it’s a crazy thing to do. So I would say, I think the hardest part was not getting so down that I just stopped. I just was down. I felt like life was passing me by.
Opening Lines:
How did you prevent yourself from getting to that point where you might consider giving up on writing?
Jennifer Egan:
I used certain little tricks. For example, I continued to send out a lot of stories. These were the days of sending stuff out in the mail with a self-addressed stamped envelope. As soon as I got back a rejection – which I did all the time because I would send out eight copies at once – I would immediately put it back in an envelope and send it out again because I knew that as soon as I’d put that envelope in the mail box, I started feeling hopeful again. So I tried to immediately turn disappointment into hope.
Opening Lines:
Finally, what is the one piece of advice you wish you could have given yourself when you were starting out?
Jennifer Egan:
The biggest advice would be don’t worry about the business. Forget who’s up and who’s down, it changes all the time. It feels huge, it feels immutable when you’re younger, and it’s really the most mutable thing. You just keep getting better, that’s all you have to worry about, and it’s so hard just to do that. You should just flush the rest of it out of your head. It’s literally nothing. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know it for sure. If I could get back the hours I spent worrying about who was who and who won what and why I didn’t get it – it was literally a complete and utter waste of my time, and you know time is the thing we don’t have enough of. Anything that’s wasting time and distracting you has got to go.
