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February 9, 2008
Borough of Writers: Q&A: Jennifer Egan
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Brad Lockwood
“Reading Lucy” — your contribution to the compilation “Brooklyn Was Mine” — is about a woman working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, a story told through her letters to her husband. Talk about how that story came to you.
The truth is, I wrote that to support Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn [www.developdontdestroy.org] which profits from all of the book sales. I don’t know if I have to go into what that is.Basically to spare Atlantic Yards and Boerum Hill from Bruce Ratner.
Yes, the group opposing the Ratner development. I don’t really like writing personal essays; it’s an area that I’m very weak in. I don’t tend to write about myself — My books have very little overlap with my life. So when I was asked to write some kind of personal essay about Brooklyn I immediately said, ‘Do I really have to do that?’ But I did really want to support this group and I’ve been pretty active in supporting them.Actually the “Reading Lucy” research was already done for a novel I’m about to start working on, hopefully a year from now — I’m working on something else right now. I was thrilled by that research, I loved it and got very caught up in it. Although it was very interesting in terms of preparing me to make up characters that worked at the Navy Yard, it was nice to have occasion to talk about Lucy in a nonfiction format. I guess I used the necessity of writing this essay as an excuse to write about someone I wouldn’t have written about otherwise. Unexpectedly, her writing voice was so alive and so exciting, and I felt so swept-up in her letters, transported by them.
Posted by amy at February 9, 2008 10:21 AM