Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

A lot of people first heard the name Jennifer Egan when her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011.

But Egan was not an overnight success. This was her fourth novel,

and she published her first story in The New Yorker nearly 30 years ago. But she's kept innovating

since then, including a short story written entirely in tweets called Black Box. Compared to that,

Jennifer Egan's new novel, Manhattan Beach, is a kind of departure.

It starts during the Depression, and it's about a girl who goes to work in a shipbuilding

yard in Brooklyn during the Second World War. It involves false identities, a possible murder,

and the mob. It's kind of an old-fashioned page turner, but apparently that didn't make it any easier to

write. Jenny, I have to begin because Alex Schwartz's wonderful profile of you and the New Yorker

begins, with you talking about a subject that seems to be so dear to the heart of so many writers,

which is how horrible it is to write, how hard

it is to write, how, if you could be doing anything else in this world, including running

up a mountain barefoot, you'd rather be doing that than write.

What is it about writing that's so hard if you're talking to people who are non-writers?

It's such a good question. One of the strange things about it is that I find that the horrors that I

experience with each book, and they're usually temporary. There's one phase in each book that's usually

really bad. And when I'm in it, I think it will never end. And then after it does end, I kind of start to forget it. So it's always a little hard, but I'm close enough to this that I do remember. The really bad phase with this one was when I had spent a year and a half on a first draft. Well, that's also, that's a very long time to spend on a handwritten first draft, typed it up and read it.

And I just, I felt like what I needed to know and do to possibly make this book even passable,

not to speak of something that might actually please anyone much, but just to make it anything better than an embarrassment felt

like more than I was capable of. So I think that there's a feeling of impossibility, a kind of

no exit sense that the way back is just as long as the way forward, but you can't find your

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