Jennifer Egan: One of the many things that struck me about. The Tiger's Wife was
the restraint of the book, the willingness to leave things unsaid, which I don't ...
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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TÉA OBREHT AND JENNIFER EGAN
Jennifer Egan is the recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was also awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn. Jennifer Egan: One of the many things that struck me about The Tiger’s Wife was the restraint of the book, the willingness to leave things unsaid, which I don’t remember having as a twentysomething writer. I think at that point my big problem was that I worried I wouldn’t be understood, that no one would know what I was talking about, so I had a tendency to really hammer my points and my themes home. I’m curious about that restraint, and the confidence it suggests. Téa Obreht: Well, thank you so much. That was something that I definitely struggled with, largely because I was terrified of overstating. As a reader, I like to engage with work in a very
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A Reader’s Guide active role. I don’t like things necessarily overexplained to me or 100 percent concrete. I like the idea of being free to answer the question myself. What ended up happening in the writing process, though, was a lot of false starts. JE: When you talk about “false starts,” I’m very curious about that because it seems that there’s often a doorway to a book that a writer needs to find, and it doesn’t always happen in the beginning. Can you give an example of what a false start was, and how you found the actual right start? TO: I actually have a very concrete example of that. I knew there had to be a strong relationship with Natalia and her grandfather as a doorway into the deathless man sections. The relationship between the two characters needed to earn that he would confide the secret story of the deathless man to her. In one of the first chapters I wrote, they were sitting at a table having lunch and Natalia’s grandfather just suddenly started telling her this story. And I was extremely frustrated by it, because I was very engaged with the first deathless man chapter, but the way we got there in the book I was not happy with at all. JE: Because there was sort of no occasion for it? It was just “Let me tell you the one about the deathless man”? TO: Right, exactly. It was unprompted and unwarranted, whereas it was supposed to be this very personal tale. I tried several ways to get them there and nothing worked. At the time I was compulsively going to the Syracuse zoo and sitting around like a crazy person trying to absorb the atmosphere so I would be in the right mode when writing the book.
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347 JE: But not wearing a giraffe costume like one of the characters in the novel, right? TO: No, I think that would have clinched it for them. I would have been writing the rest of the book from some padded room somewhere. But the zoo had an elephant petting. They had brought one of their old female elephants up to the fence so the kids could pet it. It was very much a eureka moment, and I drove home and wrote the scene where the grandfather and Natalia are walking through the street with the elephant and he decides to tell her about the deathless man. In my many false starts for that chapter, I never thought something like that would be “it.” I think you have to let it sit for awhile, and try as many doors as possible, while hoping one doesn’t have a wall behind it. JE: Animals play such an enormous role: the tiger, the dog, Sonia the elephant, Dariša, who seems to be part-human, part-bear. You write so movingly about animals that I found myself close to tears every time you wrote about the tiger from the tiger’s point of view. Do you have a strong connection to animals in your life? How is it that animals end up figuring so enormously in this story? TO: I’m definitely, it turns out, the kind of person who’s a total National Geographic nerd. I’m there for all the TV specials. As I’ve gotten older I think my awareness of the natural world and of the relationship between animals and people— both culturally and biologically—has grown. It was fun to write from the point of view of the tiger, and emotionally rewarding, but I think the animals also serve almost as markers around which the characters have to navigate. I don’t think
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A Reader’s Guide that was something I did consciously, it just sort of happened. There is something jarring about seeing an animal out of place: there’s a universal feeling of awe when you see an animal, particularly an impressive animal, out of place. JE: Animals also seem in the novel to somehow embody the painful relationships between humans and their surroundings: for example, the tiger who gnaws his legs at the zoo when the war begins, or the way other zoo animals are displaced the same way humans are. I felt there was a kind of emotional intensity that maybe would have been harder to pull off in human characters without melodrama. Were you aware of locating some of the pain of the story in the animals? TO: I don’t think I was aware of it, but I’m so glad if it turned out that way. Writing about war, I was really afraid of melodrama, so maybe the sections about animals dealing with war felt natural in a way other things I tried didn’t. I also think there’s a tendency with human characters to rationalize certain feelings or suppress reactions to trauma or joy. But with animals there’s a real biological honesty in their reaction. JE: One of the central powerful relationships in the book is between Natalia and her grandfather: it’s not the type of relationship we usually see as the primary relationship in a novel. Could you talk a little about that grandparent-grandchild relationship, your feelings about it in your own life, and how it became central in this novel? TO: I grew up with my grandparents on my mother’s side, and they essentially raised me. As a kid, you resist the idea of your
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349 own parents having had lives and pasts of their own. Snuff me out if I’m wrong here, but I see that as something prevalent in your novel A Visit from the Goon Squad: a sense of the parentchild relationship being very tense and of children not wanting to live in their parents’ shadows. When you’re growing up, the lives of your parents aren’t that fascinating, but there is this fascination with grandparents. Because of that great amount of time that has passed between their youth and yours, and the fact that they lived entire lives before you even got there, you can’t really deny their identity as individuals prior to your existence the way perhaps you can with your parents. There’s also an awareness that the world was very different when they were living their lives. JE: Did you talk to your grandparents about their childhoods? TO: I did. My grandfather grew up very poor and had quarried stone as a child—he was basically a beast of burden—and he raised himself up and became a director of the aviation program in the former Yugoslavia. He had traveled very extensively and had amazing stories of all the places he’d been, which were probably embellished. I think that’s also something that happens: by the time you are old enough to listen, grandparents have become nostalgic about their youths in a way that is extremely appealing to kids. JE: I think that’s an interesting point, that kind of perfect dovetailing of an older person longing to revisit the past and a young person eager for information that predates their own life. Did you have a sense talking to them that there was a kind of beauty or cohesion to their world that had since broken up?
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A Reader’s Guide TO: Yes, I think so. I know there were certain things they talked about as being better in their youth. There was a sense of a shared future for Yugoslavia when they were young. Their own marriage was something of an anomaly by the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia because my grandfather was Roman Catholic and my grandmother was Muslim. During the war this became one of the things that split whole families apart; people sometimes chose sides. That was a harsh reality of the time that my grandparents were devastated by. JE: I love the moment when the grandfather says he’s from “all sides and no sides.” Was that an idea you were thinking about as you worked on the book? TO: I think it was something I thought about in a more practical sense because of my extreme, compulsive desire to not use any real places or names and to instead capture the war in essence. I was conscious of the fact that there had to be sides, but the sides had to be ambiguous. JE: It’s interesting too that the question of borders and geographical sides seems almost echoed in the question of crossing over from life to death and how that will happen. In fact, the two converge in the grandfather’s last deathless man encounter when the grandfather is basically told if he stays he will be killed, and he’s instead able to leave and live. Death is such a huge topic. How did you begin to think about it as one of your themes? TO: My willingness to engage with it was a very slow progression. Whenever you’re writing, you’re infused with your own preoccupations, and then they take over in a way you don’t
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351 expect. I began writing the novel shortly after my own grandfather had died. In a way, it was very therapeutic for me to be given room to think about death in this fictional way and to use fable to discuss it. Obviously, it’s something that people are terrified of, and if you talk openly about the fear, there’s this idea that you’re dark in some way, that you’re being morbid. When in fact it’s reality, and the more I wrote the book the more I began to realize that it was a way to cope with the reality of it. It’s already happened to a loved one, it’s going to happen to more loved ones, and eventually to me as well. JE: There are really two worlds in the book that mingle and sometimes intersect: there’s the present-day political, medical, scientific situation in which Natalia operates, and then there’s this more mystical, folkloric world of the grandfather’s past. How did these define themselves in your mind? Was it hard to move between them? TO: Pretty early on in the writing I realized that mythmaking and storytelling are a way in which people deal with reality. They’re a coping mechanism. In Balkan culture, there’s almost a knowledge that reality will eventually become myth. In ten or twenty years you will be able to recount what happened today with more and more embellishments until you’ve completely altered that reality and funneled it into the world of myth. JE: You mean that people in the Balkans have a more conscious awareness of the mythmaking process? TO: I don’t know if it’s conscious. When I went back after many years away, I know it was something I saw happening
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A Reader’s Guide daily. Maybe I’m enough of an outsider now to see it, but it’s definitely engrained: you just embellish, you just do, and by the time it’s fifth hand it’s a sweeping epic. JE: Do you still have family there? How much a part of that region do you feel now? TO: My grandmother still lives in Belgrade, and I try to go back to see her as often as possible. It was very strange to leave as a child and then spend time in all these other places: I lived in Cyprus and Egypt and then became American. When I first went back I realized I remembered more than I thought I would, I felt more connected than I thought I would. And then I went back in 2009 to write a magazine piece on vampires for Harper’s and I went to a large number of villages that were very isolated and had their own myths. And that connected me to a different aspect of life in the Balkans that I might not have connected to even if I was still living there. I became aware of just how prevalent history is in everyday life. And because the trip required me to go to both Serbia and Croatia, I realized how similar their myths are. Despite these surface-level conflicts that have torn the Balkans to shreds, there’s a great shared pagan sensibility that all goes back to these common stories. It was very moving to me, and it changed the way I was able to write about myth. JE: You’ve been here now for some years and in some sense grown up here—and yet you’ve said that when you went back to the former Yugoslavia you felt very connected to that place. How do you see these different nationalities cohering in you? How do you experience that as a writer?
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353 TO: First and foremost, I’m very grateful for it, for the opportunity to grow up in the way that I did. I think it was very useful for me as a writer to connect to these different places and to their stories. But I very much feel American. I’ve done the bulk of my growing up here, the most important growing up. At the same time there are still these American idioms and expressions that I’m not familiar with and that I sort of stumble into and it’s horribly awkward, so I’m still not done connecting yet. But I think that it’s been a very interesting and rewarding journey for me growing up. And it largely manifests in my appreciation of story, of the universal existence and function of story. That’s its biggest influence on me as a writer. As a person I’m just confused! JE: I guess the obvious question is, what’s next? How do you move out of this world into another, or is this a world that you want to explore more fully? TO: I’m trying to force myself to think of the book as a closed universe. You tie the end of the balloon off and you let it go. At the same time it’s been very strange and very difficult to move away from this thing that’s been part of my life for so long. It’s been this secretive thing that I did late at night when nobody else was around. I felt very connected to this world that is now gone. I think the questions that I asked in The Tiger’s Wife and the preoccupations that I had have sort of moved on. You change as a person and I’ve gone beyond those particular questions for now. But the world of Balkan narrative—I don’t think I’m necessarily done with that yet. JE: What is your writing routine? What are the brass-tacks logistics that I’m always interested in?
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A Reader’s Guide TO: By chance or circumstance, I always end up writing at night. When I was in the thick of The Tiger’s Wife, I’d get up at five or six in the afternoon, have my dinner/breakfast, then start writing. I’d write until two a.m., drive around in the countryside, then come back and write till about six in the morning. When I was teaching, I used to tell my students: just do whatever works to force yourself to write. And for me it was this sort of horrifying, antisocial, don’t-call-me-I’mnot-at-home, don’t-distract-me-in-any-way, I-don’t-existfor-anybody kind of state of being. There’s a real solitude at night that worked for me. In the day there’s always something to distract yourself with. I’m my own worst enemy in that way. JE: That is a wacky schedule! TO: I take it you write during the day. JE: Well, I have two little kids. I do like to wake up in the morning and go directly from a dream state into writing. I’ve always had kind of funny jobs that start in the afternoon, and I would sort of roll from sleep directly to my desk and start working, and often wouldn’t shower or anything. Then I’d shower to transition into the rest of my day. One of the things with having kids is that my mornings have been very cacophonous. TO: That’s comforting to hear that change is possible.
