Pulitzer-Winner Jennifer Egan Almost Abandoned ‘Manhattan Beach’
Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal
WBEZ
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2017
⏱️ 29 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.
Transcript
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| 0:06.1 | watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you, |
| 0:12.7 | soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making, |
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| 0:34.9 | From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette. |
| 0:36.0 | I'm Tricia Bobita. |
| 0:37.1 | And I'm Greta Johnson. |
| 0:37.9 | And this week, our guest is one of my favorite'm Trisha Bobita. And I'm Greta Johnson. And this week, |
| 0:44.5 | our guest is one of my favorite authors, Jennifer Egan. And Greta reads folks like all the books, |
| 0:49.3 | all the modern fiction. So she's a lot of data points to compare when it comes to favorite authors. And Jennifer Egan is one of your very favorites, Greta. Yeah, she wrote a book in 2011 called A Visit from the Goon Squad, which actually won the Pulitzer Prize that year, no big deal. |
| 0:58.5 | And the last chapter of that book involves a PowerPoint presentation from the point of view of a little girl. |
| 1:03.6 | And it is one of the most magical, beautiful, heartfelt PowerPoint presentations that I have ever encountered. |
| 1:10.2 | I'm a little offended that you think it's better than my PowerPoint presentations. |
| 1:15.3 | I make a lot of PowerPoint presentations for you, and you don't appreciate them, I guess, is what I'm hearing. |
| 1:22.2 | And that's good. I got to up my game. That's fine. Okay. |
| 1:24.9 | I'm sorry, buddy. I didn't know this is where this conversation was going. But yeah, I mean, you know, maybe just a little more heart in there. |
| 1:30.6 | All right, fine. One of the things I love about this conversation with Jennifer Egan is that she is very honest about how hard creative work can be. |
| 1:40.2 | I love that she's going to be pretty frank with all of us about how sometimes your first drafts are going to suck. |
| 1:47.2 | Yeah, she's super honest about the fact that her newest book, Manhattan Beach, started out as just a complete disaster to the point where she even thought she was going to have to abandon it for a while because she was just like, this is trash. |
| 1:57.0 | But turns out, it all came together in the end. |
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