The idea of place is important to her, and her stories, she says.
“Everyone's portal into a fictional world is different but for me I know where before I know who or what. The where gives me the rest of it, without that I have nothing in a way.”
Manhattan Beach, a novel by Jennifer Egan.
On the eve of her Australian tour, which takes in the Sydney Writers Festival and events in Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane, Egan says she loves travelling because it “opens up new literary landscapes”.
“I draw really directly on my travels all the time,” she says. “I don't write while I'm travelling, I don't find the inspiration to do that immediately, but I feel like when I encounter a new place and experience it fully it gives me so many ideas.”
She found the place for the critically acclaimed Manhattan Beach close to home, in the naval yards of Brooklyn not far from where she lives.
“Its a book very directly inspired by the city where I live. Mind you, I had never been on Manhattan Beach itself before I started working on the book but Brooklyn I know well.
“Those places are very rich for me.”
In a way, perhaps the book centred her a little. Her Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad was a whirlwind of a novel, knitted together from 13 stories across different time planes.
For Manhattan Beach, she has said, “verisimilitude was the only approach that worked''.
When shes not working on a novel, shes writing for publications such as TheNew York Times Magazine, enjoying non-fictional worlds just as much, and enjoying the process of writing.
"I love the editing phase, that's where a lot of my writing happens. I write in such a blind unconscious way, what I write is always very rough. Going over it and shaping it into something meaningful is a pleasure."
She says shes a curious person by nature.
“Maybe curious is a nice way of putting it, nosy would be a less polite way,” she says. “Ive always wanted to know everything about everyone. Its heaven to be able to walk into peoples homes, into their lives.
“For a curious person journalism is great, its always new, its good for the brain.
"It frees me from the myopic state of self-absorption that I think writers who are alone so much tend to fall into.
"Journalism gets me out and reminds me of what else is happening in the real world.”
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Egan has thought a lot about the United States place in that real world. Donald Trump was elected president two months before the final draft of Manhattan Beach was due and she was “paralysed with fear and disgust”.
Almost two years on, his win still plays on her mind and she wonders how it will shape her future writing.
“The challenge of Trump for a writer is, I think, similar to the challenge he poses for everyone else in America and beyond: he sucks the air out of every room and every conversation he enters.
“The fatal combination of his colossal narcissism coupled with his wild unpredictability results in an ongoing and endless preoccupation with him.
“And yet there is something so deeply dead and dull at the centre of that preoccupation: a small, man without a glimmer of insight or greatness about him.
“How to do interesting work in a culture saturated with such riveting, frightening and deadening noise is the question for all of us, writers and otherwise.”
Jennifer Egan will be at the Sydney Writers Festival from May 3-6, 2018.
And in conversation with Myles Maguire at Riverbend Books, Brisbane, on May 7.
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Karen Hardy is a reporter at The Canberra Times.
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