Jennifer Egan

		Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, and the bestselling The Keep. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the L.A. Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and "The Bipolar Kid" received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Find her at Jennifer Egan and on Facebook and Twitter.

The following are excerpts from an interview conducted by Jeremiah Chamberlin and presented in Glimmer Train Stories, Issue 90.

I Knew

So by that time I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I never wavered—ever—from that point. Not that I was confident; I had no reason to be confident. And I often had no reason to be confident, because anyone would agree that I didn't stand out as being particularly talented or gifted, ever…

But I continued on pretty much undeterred. And so in a way I've come to think that it was really a good thing, because I think I was just someone whose abilities developed very slowly. But I was very determined and committed, and so even without that external validation I was able to find a way to keep myself doing this, and I feel that it equips me well for the long haul, because there are a lot of times where you don't have that kind of external validation. You have to find a way to work without it. You must know that, too…

In Phil's [Phillip Schultz] class I started to find my way back to just a sense of what makes fiction worth reading. His big emphasis was getting at the emotional truth of what you were doing. No amount of cleverness or trickiness matters without that, and so I started to get that back in his class. And finally I was able to read a story the whole way through which was so meaningful that I think I started to cry when he told me I could keep going…

Having never been someone who expected or received that sort of anointment, it was a deeply shocking paradigm shift for me to think that that [the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad] could actually happen to me. I had sort of defined myself—not unhappily—as a person who didn't go that route but kept going, just trying to get a little better, and usually did get a little better each time too. So it just showed me what I already knew: there really are no rules about who does and doesn't get this stuff. It's luck and chance and things can line up in anyone's favor.