Invisible Circus
by Jennifer Egan
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 388
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312140908
Publisher: Picador
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and grew up in San Francisco. Upon
graduating from high school, she traveled around Europe by herself, creating the itinerary
for Phoebe in The Invisible Circus., After attending the University of
Pennsylvania, Egan began her first, unsuccessful draft of The Invisible Circus
while studying at St. John's College in Cambridge. Of the early 800 page draft Egan says,
"it was horrible -- unreadably bad -- I made every mistake you could make." In
1987 she moved to New York City, where, to support her writing, she took odd jobs such as catering at Port Authority, word-processing, and private investigation. For two years she was the private secretary of the Countess of Romanones, an ex-spy and memoirist. Egan got her first story published by The New Yorker when she was 26. Since then, her stories and journalism have appeared in many magazines, such as GQ, Ploughshares, and The New York Times Magazine.
Since publishing this novel, and also an acclaimed collection of stories called Emerald City, Egan has won both the NEA and Guggenheim grants. She writes and teaches in New York, where she lives with her husband, a theater director.
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How did you come to write The Invisible Circus?
"The Idea came to me in my senior year in college, after reading an article about missing the 60s. I felt something snap into place as I read, and that same afternoon I conceived of two sisters -- one destroyed by the brilliant excesses of that period; the other, who missed it, nearly destroyed by her obsessive nostalgia for that time."
Do you prefer to write about children and adolescents? Why did you choose a young girl for your heroine?
"There's a part of me I hope will always remain childlike: the ability to believe anything, and that everything is fascinating. I do feel there's this alternately terrified, rambunctious, very credulous part of me."
What role do religion and spirituality play in The Invisible Circus?
"It's central to the book -- it's no accident that Phoebe is searching for a person named Faith. We all crave -- and always have -- moments when we seem to rise above our lives, to become more than ourselves, to merge with something larger. The impulse towards faith is profoundly human and exists in every culture. As Western Civilization becomes more secular, this religious impulse -- this longing to believe -- has begun to express itself in more and more marginal ways: drug use, cult membership, and wacky spiritual pursuits."
The first draft of this book was 800 pages and you have described it as "horrible." What have you learned from it?
"I think one thing that this book has taught me, is you can write terrible stuff and have everyone hate it, and think that you're going nowhere, and actually be sure that you'll never publish a book, and it can still work out."
Excerpted from Invisible Circus © Copyright 2008 by Jennifer Egan. Reprinted with permission by Picador. All rights reserved.
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