Jennifer Egan

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.

I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.

I try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I've done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.

I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.

There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.

My mom used to say that if someone woke her up in the middle of the night and asked how old she was, she'd answer 27. Hearing her, I'd think, 'That's ridiculous; your job as my mom is to be old.'

Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain.

I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it's a very New York dream, but I think it's about writing - the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door.