Pulitzer-Winner Jennifer Egan Almost Abandoned ‘Manhattan Beach’
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, was among 10 works of fiction long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award. Not too shabby, right? But Egan told Greta that an early draft of Manhattan Beach was so bad she almost scrapped the whole thing. “I probably came as close to abandoning this as I have to any project I’ve worked on,” she said. On this week's Nerdette, Egan explains why things got rough, how she powered through, and the evolutionary advantage of forgetting how hard things can be. Plus, we get some help from Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Historical Society, to break down Egan's nerd obsession: Out of place buildings.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events. |
| 0:05.0 | Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more. |
| 0:09.0 | Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org slash events. |
| 0:15.0 | From W beez Chicago this is Nurdette. I'm Tricia Bobita and I'm Greta Johnson and this week our guest is one of my favorite |
| 0:24.1 | authors Jennifer Egan. And Greta reads folks like all the books, all the |
| 0:29.6 | modern fiction, so she's a lot of data points to compare when it comes to favorite authors and |
| 0:34.4 | Jennifer Egan is one of your very favorite, Greta. |
| 0:37.0 | Yeah, she wrote a book in 2011 called The Visit from the Goon Squad, which actually won the Pulitzer |
| 0:41.1 | prize that year, no big deal. |
| 0:43.0 | And the last chapter of that book involves a PowerPoint presentation |
| 0:46.5 | from the point of view of a little girl, |
| 0:48.0 | and it is one of the most magical, beautiful, heartfelt |
| 0:52.0 | PowerPoint presentations that I have ever encountered. magical beautiful heartfelt powerpoint |
| 0:52.6 | presentations that I have ever encountered. |
| 0:54.7 | I'm a little offended that you think it's better than my |
| 0:58.0 | PowerPoint presentation. I make a lot of powerpoint |
| 1:01.0 | presentations for you and you don't appreciate them I guess is what I'm hearing and that's good I get up my game that's fine okay |
| 1:09.4 | I'm sorry buddy I didn't know this is no it's okay conversation was going but yeah I mean you know maybe just a little more heart in there all right fine |
| 1:16.9 | One of the things I love about this conversation with Jennifer Egan is that she is |
| 1:21.4 | Very honest about how hard creative work can be. |
| 1:24.6 | I love that she's going to be pretty frank with all of us |
| 1:28.2 | about how sometimes your first drafts are gonna suck. |
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