My uncle was a criminal defense lawyer for years.
attorney’s offices for years, specializing in gang prosecution. Marshal, and she herself worked in a U.S. One of my sisters is married to a former U.S. That part of the family is still rather connected with law enforcement. I come from a sort of classic Irish-American background on my father’s side. And that continued into Truman’s presidency. He and his partner, going way back, were Truman’s bodyguards, when Truman was a senator and would come to Chicago. When I heard that the new book was set in the 30s and 40s in the New York underworld, I had this idea or memory that your family was somehow involved with law enforcement, and then I thought that had to be wrong. and I knew I wanted to write about wartime New York and that just seemed like the obvious time to do the other. I wanted to tell a story about women and female strength at some point. Jennifer Egan: I feel like my stuff has always really skewed towards the male. That only “the underground nature of female strength allowed me to have a heroine-driven adventure story.” What do you mean? You’ve said that you couldn’t write a book like this set in contemporary society. Needless to say, the novel, like Jennifer Egan is full of surprises.Įlissa Schappell: I never expected that Manhattan Beach would be such a feminist book. Manhattan Beach set during World War II against the backdrop of New York’s sleazy waterfront follows the intrepid Anna Kerrigan, one of the military’s first female divers, as she explores the disappearance of her father, a former underworld bagman, and in the process becomes entangled with a charismatic gangster. It was just a matter of time before she found her way to the classic historical novel. Black Box was written in tweets and her last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel-in-stories could be called a concept album.
As her five previous novels attest, she’s equally comfortable moving between the gothic, speculative, and traditional forms. Like any writer Jennifer Egan has her obsessions, among hers: female identity, life-altering acts of violence, the persistence of time, and writing unconventional fractured narratives.
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