Last night I heard Jennifer Egan read from her novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” I’ve long admired her gorgeous fiction, as well as her compassionate journalism for the NY Times Magazine. In person, she is a warm, thoughtful, and self-deprecating woman. I’m trying desperately to figure out how we can be friends.
Goon Squad came out right after I had my second kid and I devoured it like a pint of artisanal salty caramel ice cream. We were in the country that summer, in a house we had rented with my family, and I was sleep starved and overwhelmed, but somehow managed to finish the book in a day and a half. I was so captivated by the magic of Egan’s prose and the vulnerability of her characters that I was moved to tears many times while reading it. I was convinced at the time that Egan’s experience as a mother must deeply inform her work. Now, reading the book for a second time and hearing her talk about crafting it, I’m convinced of the parallels.
Egan spoke about her intuitive writing process, how she writes first drafts long hand on yellow legal pads so the good stuff from her unconscious can just tumble out, and so her flow isn’t constricted by the constant editing a computer encourages. I love this image and liken it to letting parenting also be intuitive. I certainly aspire to trust my instincts and allow my children to reveal themselves to me just as I imagine Egan wants her characters to come to life. It’s the being present in the process that appeals to me both about writing and about parenting – both when things are working and not!
Egan seems to love and nurture her characters as if she birthed them – flawed and all, and with the honesty and the compromise it takes to raise them. She infuses the children in Goon Squad with such tenderness and little people wisdom – this is likely what I responded to with my tears and fears about bringing yet another baby into this fucked up world that summer when I read voraciously in the middle of the night.
The early chapter when music producer Lou takes his kids on safari to Africa and the flashing forward technique Egan uses to capture where his daughter Charlie, son Rolph, and an African warrior’s spear will be in 20 years is absolutely breathtaking, as is the chapter where the middle aged punk kids Rhea and Jocelyn go to visit a bed-ridden older Lou to say goodbye. Implications of motherhood (and the lack of fatherhood) abound in this chapter particularly. Jocelyn rails internally against Lou for stealing her childhood, leaving her unable to cope with living an adult life, and marvels that her best friend and former nobody Rhea has 3 children of her own. Egan even gives Rhea the opportunity to admonish Jocelyn using her sharp “Mom Voice,” and imagines what it must be like for Jocelyn’s mother to take care of her adult daughter as she struggles with sobriety and starting over after repeated failures.
“Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, she’ll …. fix up virgin Bloody Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, we’ll play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look up at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.”
The smearing of boundaries between adults and children here and throughout this novel is painfully beautiful.
In an interview I found online, a journalist asked Egan:
“Are you a disciplined writer?”
And she answered, which is SO momlike:
“I have a ferocious determination, which I really am grateful for, but having children was a gigantic recalibration of my workaholic nature. They exert such a strong gravitational pull, and so does the work. Ever since the children were born it’s been a challenge trying to give myself fully to all of them, without compromising any of them. On a large scale I’ve managed to do that, but day to day I usually feel I’m shirking something or someone.”
I also found this short piece that Egan wrote, which captures more of the dark and mischevious side of being a parent, and less of the sentimentally poignant stuff.
Using a to-do list to express a secret murderous mania is a black way of looking at the multi-tasking aspect of being a mom. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t true.
Jenny Egan – call me?