“I Trust Almost Anyone More Than Myself” | Better in Person

In 2010, when Jennifer Egan published A Visit from the Goon Squad, readers were struck by how accurately she had imagined a world of smartphones, status updates, and digital obsession. As Egan explains to Steven Dubner on Better in Person, she wasn’t trying to be prescient. She simply needed to follow a character named Sasha into her future—and to keep punk rock in the timeline, she had to set those later chapters in a near future that, at the time, seemed satirical. “I thought I was being satirical,” she says. By 2026, the satire has become documentation. That tension—between what a writer intends and what a reader finds—runs through the entire conversation.

The craft of working against yourself

Egan describes her aesthetic principle as a kind of self-resistance: “Once I’ve done something, I want to work against it.” After the fragmented, laterally moving structure of Goon Squad, she assumed her next novel, Manhattan Beach, would also use tricky narrative strategies. But the story—a historical novel about a shipwreck, a gangland murder, and survival at sea—rejected those attempts. “Irony and fragmentation had nothing to offer me,” she says. “Just tell the story.”