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Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—but she can’t exactly be counted as one of them. The opening of her novel
The Keep
lays out a whole Escherian architecture, replete with metafictional trapdoors, pitfalls, infinitely receding reflections, and trompe l’oeil effects, but what’s more immediately striking about this book is its unusually vivid and convincing realism.”
    But it’s not just the way Egan writes that makes her one of a kind; it’s
what
she writes. Journalism in the
New York Times Magazine
,among other venues. Short stories. Book reviews. Novels, each one dramatically different from the last—most notably
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, the book she refuses to classify. “It was scary, pouring time and energy into a project that didn’t have a clear genre identity and might therefore fall through the cracks,” Egan told me in a 2010 interview for
Salon
. “The economy had crashed since I’d published my last novel. I thought my publisher might say, ‘This isn’t the moment to publish an odd book.’ Or that even if I sold the novel, it might come and go without a whisper.”
    It was that brave, odd book that won Jennifer Egan the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
    T HE V ITALS
    Birthday: September 6, 1962
    Born and raised: Born in Chicago, Ilinois; raised in San Francisco, California
    Current home: Fort Greene, Brooklyn
    Love life: Married to director David Herskovits
    Family life: Two sons, ages 9 and 11
    Schooling: University of Pennsylvania; University of Cambridge, England
    Day job?: No
    Honors and awards (partial listing): National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Fellow at the New York Public Library; finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction; National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction; Pulitzer Prize for fiction; LA Times Book Prize
    Notable notes:
    • Jennifer Egan grew up in San Francisco, where she graduated from Lowell, the city’s most academically competitive public high school.
    • Explaining why she included a PowerPoint presentation as a chapter in
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, and why she doesn’t classify the book as either a novel or a short story collection, Egan said, “My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different…I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you should also break it!”
    Website: www.jenniferegan.com
    Facebook: www.facebook.com/jennifereganwriter?ref=sgm
    Twitter: @egangoonsquad
    T HE C OLLECTED W ORKS
    Novels
    The Invisible Circus
, 1995
    Look at Me
, 2001
    The Keep
, 2006
    A Visit from the Goon Squad
, 2010
    Film Adaptations
    The Invisible Circus
, 1999
    The Keep
(in production)
    Fiction Collection
    Emerald City
, short stories, 1996
    Jennifer Egan
    Why I write
    When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.
    When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about. I don’t think my husband can tell. It’s a double life I get to live without destroying my marriage. And it’s heaven.
    Especially when I’m writing a first draft, I feel as if I’ve been transported out of myself. That’s always a state I’m trying to achieve, even as a journalist—although when I’m working on nonfiction I’m almost never actually writing. I do months of research and then write the piece in a few days.
    When I’m writing fiction I forget who I am and what I come from. I slip into utter absorption mode. I love the sense that I’ve become so engaged with the other side, I’ve slightly lost my bearings here.