Time is No Goon for Jennifer Egan

Earlier today, Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with A Visit from the Goon Squad. Rather than categorizing this book as a collection of short stories, it more mimics a playlist of our favorite songs sung by different people but riding on the same theme.

When Egan was at Mason during the Fall for the Book festival, I sat in on her panel while she discussed her writing of Goon Squad.  She related balancing family life with research and hitting a minimum number count daily.  For aspiring writers, these are tasks hard to balance.  What it seemed like she was saying during her panel was that it is, indeed, hard to balance a writerly life and a personal life, but the ultimate outcome of these two projects can and should coincide.  To write is to reflect on the life lived and to learn and to keep living is to share stories and become witness to experience.

Coming from a book that is surrounded by the idea of living extremely, dying young or dying in pain, or making that final comeback into glory, time does seem like a hired thug either for your demise or protection.  Time can seem to single us out.  But as the sun sets, we realize everyone eventually goes to bed, but with our creative instincts burning inside us and our capacities to create subversive and expansive art makes every second of our lives meaningful.