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

**Stephen Dubner** (0:00)
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Hey 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.

**Jennifer Egan** (0:50)
I think it's so easy to think, everyone thinks the 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.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:04)
This 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. That's because they are the product of an original mind like Jennifer Egan. She is a novelist who has received many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for a visit from the Goon Squad, kaleidoscope of a book about music and the ambition and the nature of time and memory. Jennifer describes her brain as having one little corner, it's always following her 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 as 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?

**Jennifer Egan** (1:58)
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.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:06)
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 hard things really well, and the experience of reading your books leaves me very full and also questioning for weeks after, which I love.

**Jennifer Egan** (2:27)
That's great.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:28)
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.

**Jennifer Egan** (2:38)
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. Having just written, for example, Goon Squad, which 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 experimental that I thought, well, I'm going to be experimental now. But I found that the story, the work, the narrative utterly rejected those attempts.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:27)
You tried with that book, right?

**Jennifer Egan** (3:29)
I did try, but I gave it up quick. And what I found was that in writing about things like a shipwreck, a gangland murder, survival at sea, irony and fragmentation had nothing to offer me. Just do it. Just tell the story.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:46)
Reading Goon Squad again recently, I was just shocked at how your descriptions of what are called handsets and handsets are called? Yeah. They're smartphones. They're doing everything then. But you must have written that in like 2000, it was published in 2010 So you're writing that in 2005, six, seven, eight. iPhone was around 2007 Is that right? I want to say.

**Jennifer Egan** (4:09)
Eight. I never had one till 11

**Stephen Dubner** (4:12)
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?

**Jennifer Egan** (4:26)
I think it's just that it takes much less time to write something than it does to actually invent it 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.