Jennifer Egan does not like to go backwards in time. She likes to go forward and she has been gracious enough to go backwards 10 years to A Visit From the Goon Squad, which was her amazing, visceral, beautiful book. She’s written a ton.

In fact, she just released a new one, The Candy House, which Obama said was one of his favorite reads of the summer. Watch the full conversation above, or read the condensed transcript below, which highlights some of our favorite moments.

Chief Content Officer, Troy Johnson (TJ):

I wouldn’t say that [Goon Squad] is a rage against the machine, but you show a little trepidation about the machine. And social media…

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Jennifer Egan (JE):

I’m kind of an incompetent machine. I think about a new device and I think how long will it take me to be able to use it and how much will I screw it up? But I have nothing inherently against any of it.

TJ:

I was reading about your process of writing, which is fascinating and a bit luddite too.You write everything out by hand?

JE:

I write by hand for fiction [because] fiction requires a connection with my unconscious, with the part of me that is not thinking and not critiquing the part of me that in some ways can surprise myself and handwriting. And by that I really mean cursive because printing doesn’t do it. But cursive seems to activate that part of my brain, and it has some additional advantages. I can’t really read it very well because my writing is appalling. And so again, I don’t have that urge that I think we all have when we look at a screen to like back up and make it better, I can’t do that. And it seems that I get into a less thought driven state of mind in which I can enact a kind of improvisation on the page. And that’s what leads to my best material.

TJ: 

Athletes get that way… performers get that way … they talk about it being a flow. Where you’re so engrossed and you don’t have the backspace button, the only way through it is forward, right?

JE:

Absolutely. And what you said about the only way forward is actually really important because I don’t do much editing at all as I write. Most importantly, I don’t read over what I’ve written until the next day, and I do that basically just to reenter that flow.

TJ: 

In [the first couple pages of] Goon Squad, Sasha is staring at a purse, which is sitting on the floor in a bathroom… and she’s listening to somebody pee. It’s so imperfectly human… How do you come up with those first [scenes] and how do you know when you found them?

JE:

For me, starting with a physical environment is a crucial part of the process because I want to sort of be in a sensory environment [or] space where someone is observing sensory details of a physical environment. Then the question is, who is making these observations? Who is perceiving the woman peeing or anything else that is the beginning of a character? And then what does that person do or who else is there? And now we have the beginning of more characters and action.

In that particular case… there was a corollary from my own life, which is that I was in a hotel bathroom; I did see a wallet. And what it evoked for me was one of too many memories of having actually been robbed. I saw that wallet and I thought, Oh my God, someone’s gonna take it. And then I thought, Well, I’m the only one here. I’m obviously not gonna take it. But in general, I don’t write about my own life. And what I’m most curious about is a point of view opposed to mine. So if I’ve been robbed… what’s it like to be the one who steals the wallet and my curiosity was provoked.

TJ:

It seems to me you love imperfection [and] fallibility of humanity. Every character lives with myriad flaws in Goon Squad yet they’re not unlovable… you have so much compassion for them.

JE: 

We are contradictory characters full of big dreams [living in an] imperfect reality. Anyone who looks perfect is a person you’re seeing from a distance…And there’s such a chasm between that knowledge that we have of ourselves and the self that we have to present to the world around us. To me, the job of fiction is to actually get inside that imperfection. I think there’s a part in all of us that wants to be perceived as better than we are, but in a way, the whole idea of better or worse is sort of a misnomer because we are complicated creatures.

TJ:

How much time did you spend in punk clubs? What role did music play in your life?

JE:

I spent a fair amount of time in punk clubs. I was not a real punk rocker by any means. I did what I had to do to look the parts so that I didn’t stand out as the wallflower observer that I always have basically been. But I saw a lot. It was such a vibrant, crazy scene and in a way most crazy because it was following right on the heels of 1960s San Francisco, which was still really visible when I was growing up in the seventies.

TJ: 

You once described Goon Squad as a concept album from the seventies. Can you explain that?

JE:

A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House [are in the] same world; these are ensemble books that have a kind of kaleidoscopic quality.It’s different people’s stories put together to tell one big story, and so, the question for me is…what is the genre that I’m participating in here? It seemed clear that in the case of Goon Squad, it was the concept album, which of course still exists, but we listen to music differently now.

[With] vinyl… you had to play it in order…unless you wanted to keep moving the needle around. And [these concept albums] usually opened up into what was basically a book.There were pages. There were lyrics on the pages, there were graphics, so it had a kind of literary quality unto itself at the time. And there were some absolutely fantastic concept albums there in that decade…amazing albums that told a big story in small pieces that sounded very different from each other, and that felt like a pretty perfect description of what I was trying to do in Goon Squad. 

TJ:

[Goon Squad] is about what time does to us. Everybody’s trying to reclaim [the] past; everybody’s trying to accelerate in life and ending up on different paths. And you [also discuss] nostalgia. What are your big takeaways on time?

JE:

I don’t know if I have a big takeaway. For me, novels are a place to raise questions, not so much to answer them, but here’s one thing I will say. Time is the essential ingredient of fiction. On some level, fiction is always about time passing, even if that unit of time. A minute or an hour or a day time is what brings change.

[It] was fun to write a book that was specifically about the thing that in some ways every book is about. Time is what makes human life possible in a way. It’s what allows for change. And change is really kind of what we’re made of.

TJ:

I want to know how you collect your details. [For example,] the fact that Bennie Salazar puts gold flakes in his coffee to resuscitate his sexuality, and then also he sprays insecticide into his armpits. Those crazy details—[are they] coming from the unconscious…or do you collect them when you see them?

JE:

I don’t collect anything. I’m really glad you brought up that example, because that really is a good illustration of how my writing process works.

When I was writing that first chapter about Sasha [and the wallet], I briefly mentioned in a totally unplanned surprise in the writing process that her ex-boss, a record producer, put gold flakes in his coffee and sprayed pesticide in his armpits. I was not expecting those details, and in the moment, all they meant to me was a kind of funny description of an eccentric record producer, and of course, not knowing any record producers myself, I thought, Oh yes, they’re sort of decadent. That kind of makes sense. And he didn’t even have a name.

But after I finished that chapter, which at the time I just thought was a short story, I thought, Why does he do those things? So I started writing from his point of view [to find out.]

TJ:

So let’s move into Candy House. Some people called it a sequel. Some people have called it the prequel. Some people call it an expansion of that universe that you built in Goon Squad.