Why We Write Read online

  Anticipation trumps reality

  This is an interesting moment to consider why I write, because I’m not writing now. When I’m where I am now, and I haven’t yet started the next book, boy, is that next book going to be great! It’s lots easier to think that than when you’re actually writing it. Fantasy provides its own satisfactions.

  I can’t begin a new novel while I’m working on anything else. I’m desperate for traction with fiction, and I can’t get it till I put pen to paper. Now I’ve got my sights set on the New Year. Before that it was September. Before that it was summer. It’s definitely time to get involved in a large project. I feel that keenly. All I ever have to begin with is the when and where of a novel. I have a good feeling about those elements of my next one, but in the end, when and where is not a book.

  The girl with the throwaway novel

  My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became The Invisible Circus.

  When I was twenty-nine I got an NEA grant, which gave me a year to work on Circus. I finished the first draft and sat down to read it, hoping I’d find it to be fantastic. Instead I read it and found it to be really weak. I didn’t get far in my reading; I went crazy before I could even get to the middle. How far it seemed from something you could sell or want to read was really scary.

  I went into this three-day panic attack that was quite extreme. This was before I’d ever had therapy. I was pushing thirty. I’d quit my job as a private secretary when I got the grant. And now the NEA money was running out. I had to find another job, and I had no professional track record except as a temp.

  All those worries flared into a mania when I read the draft. I really went haywire. I was walking around the East Village having the worst panic attack I’ve ever had. It was harrowing. I was calling people, apologizing for saying I’d ever be a writer. I felt very unstable, like my whole life had no point. It was a genuine existential crisis. I didn’t eat for four days. I was like a gaunt specter of terror lurking around the East Village in a trench coat. I’d just started living with the man who became my husband. He’d come home from rehearsal, and I’d pounce on him, needing to be resuscitated. I imagined him thinking, “Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into? This girl is out of her mind.”

  Somehow I managed to get out of this nutty behavior. In four days I was back at work on the novel. I tore the thing apart and put it back together. Amid all that hand-wringing, and moping and weeping, some other part of my brain was thinking about how I could improve the manuscript. It wasn’t long before I wanted to enact those improvements. And once I was back in it, making it better, I immediately calmed down. All that wheel-spinning, all that agony resulted in a clear logistical plan.

  That’s how it seems to work for me. I can be wigging out, but I’m also working.

  Look at me: cross-eyed

  Working on Look at Me was the most painful experience I’ve had as a writer. It was a huge struggle. I’m not quite sure why I suffered to the degree I did, working on that book, but I do know that my work up to that point had been fairly conventional, and I didn’t know if anyone would accept that kind of book from me. It was almost as if I thought I’d be punished for it. I felt afraid as I worked on it. I thought it was terrible, that I was reaching too far.

  At the same time, some of the most exciting moments I’ve had as a writer were during the writing of that book, even with all those worries and that feeling of doom. One day I read the first six chapters of the book in one sitting, and I tore out of the house and went running, and I had this sense that I’d never read anything quite like that before, that I’d done something really different. That was such a thrilling feeling.

  On the other hand, writing The Keep and Goon Squad were only difficult until I’d arrived at a voice for each of them. From then on, they were sheer fun. Once I got the voice I was in heaven. The Keep, especially, was a romp.

  It’s all about seeing what’s wrong

  One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m a good problem solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

  I want all the flights of fancy, and I can only get them in a thoughtless way. So I allow myself that. Which means that my next step has to be all about problem solving. My attitude cannot be, Gee, I wrote it, it’s good. I’d never get anywhere. It’s all about seeing what’s wrong from a very analytical place. It’s a dialectic.

  Once I have a draft I make the plans, edit on hard copy, and make an extensive outline for the revision. The revision notes I wrote for Look at Me were eighty pages long.

  Winning the Pulitzer: priceless

  The response to Goon Squad has definitely made me a happier person. There’s a deep joy and satisfaction in getting external acknowledgment of that magnitude. Winning the Pulitzer, specifically, feels like a thousand wishes being granted. All these years I’ve had a longing for some kind of massive approval—not thinking I deserved it, but just wanting it. I never thought it would happen.

  This is a big change. I don’t think it’s changing me, but it’s a change I feel on a daily, hourly basis in a very positive way. If you can’t enjoy this, my God, it’s really time to go back into therapy. It’s delicious!

  In one hundred years, if humans still exist, and if anyone remembers the name Jennifer Egan, they’ll decide whether I deserve the Pulitzer or not. The question doesn’t preoccupy me. I’ve judged a major prize and I know how it works. It all comes down to taste, and therefore, luck. If you happen to be in the final few, it’s because you’re lucky enough to have written something that appeals to those particular judges’ tastes.

  I think my book is strong, and I know I did a good job. I also know it could have been better. There are plenty of books out there that are also good, and those writers could also have had the luck I had. Deserving only gets you so far. Winning a prize like that has a lot to do with cultural forces; with appetites at work in the culture.

  Honestly, I prefer Look at Me. Maybe I’m just being stubborn because Goon Squad gets so much love, but Look at Me is the one that’s stayed with me imaginatively. Goon Squad may have ended up being more ambitious than I thought it would be, but for whatever reason, Look at Me dug into me. That doesn’t mean it’s better. It probably has more flaws than Goon Squad. But Look at Me is my favorite child.

  Winning the Pulitzer: dangerous

  The attention and approval I’ve been getting for Goon Squad—the very public moments of winning the Pulitzer and the other prizes—is exactly the opposite of the very private pleasure of writing. And it’s dangerous. Thinking that I’ll get this kind of love again, that getting it should be my goal, would lead me to creative decisions that would undermine me and my work. I’ve never sought that approval, which is all the more reason that I don’t want to start now.

  I’m curious to find out what influence this will have on my writing. I won’t know until I start another book. A scenario I could easily envision is the following: I start the book, feel it’s not going well, and start to freak. My rational side says, “Let’s get one thing straight. You’re going to hate the next one. The whole world’s going to hate the next one.” I have no idea why this one got so much love.

  But part of me thinks, They liked my last book. Hurray. Now we move on. That moving on will undoubtedly involve massive disappointment on the part of others. It never happens this way twice. In a way, I find that sort of freeing. My whole creative endeavor is the repudiation of my last work with the new one. If I start craving approval, trying to replicate what I did with Goon Squad, it’s never going to lead to anything good. I know that. Stop getting better? There’s no excuse for that.

  I hope I can just start the next novel, engage in that alternate world, enjoy myself, and accept and internalize the expectation that the book will not be perceived as being as good as Goon Squad, and who cares. It’s lucky to have a book the wo
rld loves this much. Most people never have that experience.

  We all have such a tendency to think the present moment will last forever. Maybe when I’m not the flavor of the month anymore I’ll be devastated and shocked, and I’ll forget everything I’m saying this minute. But my hope is that I have the tools to handle it.

  Jennifer Egan’s Wisdom for Writers

  Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do. If what you really love to read is y, it might be hard for you to write x.

  Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you’re not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you’re used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.

  You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  James Frey

  First time I saw him he was coming down the hallway. There was an apartment across the hall from where I lived that’d been empty for a year. Usually apartments in our project go quick. Government supports them so they’re cheap, for people who ain’t got shit in this world and, even though they always telling us different, know we ain’t ever gonna have shit.

  —Opening lines, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, 2011

  In January 2006, the world—or at least, Oprah Winfrey’s world—watched as Oprah chastised James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces, her famous book club’s most recent pick. Oprah accused Frey of having misrepresented himself and several events in the book.

  “Did you cling to that image because that’s how you wanted to see yourself?” Oprah asked Frey. “Or did you cling to that image because that would make a better book?”

  “Probably both,” Frey replied.

  “I feel really duped,” Oprah concluded. “I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”

  The Frey debacle hit the pause button on the memoir genre, putting many memoirists out of work. Those lucky enough to find publishers were obliged to write what became known as “a Frey disclaimer,” in hopes of avoiding the lawsuits that Frey’s book spawned—one of which forced his publisher to offer a refund to those who had bought a copy.

  The investigation continued; new facts emerged. It turned out that Frey had initially shopped his book as a work of fiction. His publisher, seeking greater sales, had positioned it as a true story. Frey had proposed a disclaimer explaining the difference; his request was denied. But 2006 was an American moment rife with deception and outrage. Think Iraq War. Think “weapons of mass destruction.” Think Stephen Colbert’s new noun, “truthiness.” As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, following Frey’s 2006 Oprah appearance, “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into swiftboating and swift bucks, into W’s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying.”

  Five years later, during Oprah’s final season, she invited James Frey onto her show again—twice. “Most writers of memoirs do what I did,” Frey said. “I apologize for my lack of compassion,” Oprah replied. And then the two of them hugged and made up.

  Meet James Frey. Judge for yourself. Or better yet, learn from his experience what you can, and don’t judge him at all.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: September 12, 1969

  Born and raised: Cleveland, Ohio

  Current home: New York, New York

  Love life: Married, with three children

  Schooling: Denison University; Art Institute of Chicago

  Day job?: Founder of Full Fathom Five, 2010

  Notable notes:

  • James Frey lists among his previous occupations: playing Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in a department store, stock boy, doorman, janitor, screenwriter, director, and producer.

  • A Million Little Pieces was rejected by 17 publishers before Doubleday agreed to publish it. The book has since sold more than 7 million copies worldwide, in 35 languages.

  • The sequel, My Friend Leonard, was also a New York Times bestseller.

  • The book that influenced Frey most is Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

  Website: www.bigjimindustries.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=547390762

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Memoirs

  A Million Little Pieces, 2003

  My Friend Leonard, 2005

  Novels

  Bright Shiny Morning, 2008

  The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, 2011

  Essays and Illustrated Books

  American Pitbull, 2008

  Wives, Wheels, Weapons (photo-illustrated by Terry Richardson), 2008

  Screenplays

  Kissing a Fool, 1998

  Sugar, 1998

  I Am Number Four, 2011

  James Frey

  Why I write

  I’m really not qualified to do anything else. At this point it’s so much a part of my life that I can’t not do it. If I don’t work I go crazy. And frankly, I have a family, and I need the money.

  When I was a little boy I loved to get lost in books. I never thought about becoming a writer until I was twenty-one and I read Tropic of Cancer. Very few things in my life have spoken to me the way that book did. I had never encountered something that spoke to me so purely and so directly and so profoundly. Half of it was rage and half of it was joy, and it was exactly how I felt about the world.

  The only other place I’d seen an articulation so beautiful and so bold was in a Jackson Pollock painting. Those paintings speak to me the same way because they’re made by an artist who said, “I don’t give a fuck, this is what I do, this is how I’m going to do it, this is what it is. You can love it or hate it. This is not about you.”

  I was like, That’s what I’m going to do. And six months later I moved to Paris because Tropic of Cancer was about Henry Miller living there. Moving to Paris was about searching and looking and living and trying to become a writer and trying to figure out what that meant, if it was even possible. To live boldly, recklessly, stupidly, and beautifully.

  The historical impulse

  I try to write books I wish other people had written, books I wish I’d read. People always say I’m arrogant when I talk about this, but I think I’m one of the few people who’s honest about what Orwell called “the historical impulse.” I want to write historically important books, books that matter, books that change the world, that change writing and change publishing.

  I look over the course of literary history, and I think, yeah, I can place myself—I have the potential to place myself—among these people: the writers I love, the writers who have made history. I want to place myself within the canon.

  Certainly a lot of it is ego. To say it’s not is bullshit. I’m competitive about it. I’m sitting at my desk right now, and the only picture on my wall, other than drawings made by my children, is a Sports Illustrated cover of Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who was the middleweight boxing champ through the 1980s. The headline is “The Best and the Baddest.” That speaks to me. I want to be the best and the baddest.

  Earlier in my career it was about making the mark. Now it’s about trying to deepen the mark and make it permanent. I said it in the first interview I ever gave years ago. I want to be the most widely read, most controversial, most influential writer of my time.

  Getting lost

  The thing I love most about the act of writing is that I disappear. I get lost in trying to make every word the right word, in trying to tell the story.

  When I’m writing I have total control. Nothing’s going on the page unless I put it there. It’s not going to stay there unless I want it to stay there. When you sit down at the machine, you create that world, you live
in that world, you control that world, it’s only whatever you want it to be. There’s no time when I’m more content, more at ease, than when it’s just me alone in a room for eight hours.

  It took me years to get to that place where I sit down and I know I’m going to write the way I want to write, and it’s going to be good. I don’t write normally. I don’t use standard grammar or punctuation. I don’t do anything right. That’s all deliberate, but it took me a long time to find the confidence to violate every rule that exists.

  A lot of the games writers play with themselves, especially young writers, are games of confidence. “Can I do this? Oh, it’s so hard, it’s not coming out the way I want it to come out.” A lot of writers get lost trying to find their way. A lot of writers never find it.

  When I sit down at the machine there’s no doubt for me. When I’m away from it, thinking about it, I have great fears. But when I’m at the computer I always believe I can do what I want to do. It might take me a long time, it might be hard, it might be lonely. But I always believe the book I’m starting is going to be what I want it to be. Why? Because I fucking control it. Once you have that in your life you can’t let it go, ever.

  I work a lot in the movies and in TV, and that’s one of the frustrations. You have to have a totally different mind-set, because you’re not in control anymore.

  Getting found

  After I read Tropic of Cancer I kept trying to find a way to write that made sense to me. I couldn’t do it. I kept writing all kinds of crap. Garbage.

  Then I sat down and I wrote the first thirty pages of A Million Little Pieces in one sitting. It took me about four hours. I’ve never written that fast before or since. After I had that short burst I sat back and looked at what I’d written and I was like, yup, yup.