"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I mean, fiction is about going inside other people's minds and consciousnesses and looking through their eyes and living their lives in a way and that's all about emotions." Jennifer Egan challenged the way many of us thought about how (but not why) we tell stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad—which went on to win the Pulitzer. She joins us on our 100th episode of the show to talk about her latest, The Candy House, which she describes as a "sibling novel" to Goon Squad, along with truth and time and space and memory and nostalgia, the interplay between tech and story (including finding poetry in elliptical, 140-character tweets), finding inspiration in slightly unexpected places like baseball and Dungeons + Dragons, returning to characters she never really left (including the peripheral ones), and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer.
Featured Books:
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Three Pigs by David Weisner
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, introduction by Jennifer Egan
Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
A complete transcript of this episode is available here.