Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel "A Go to From the Goon Squad" earned her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Now, she's written a sequel, "The Sweet Home," during which a tech big develops the means for customers to externalize and share each reminiscence they're ever had. (Feels like hassle.)
Learn an excerpt under.
If something will be mentioned in protection of the particular person I used to be in 2008, the yr Sasha made amends and Polly was born—the yr I turned thirty—it may be solely that I used to be least forgiving of myself. Each transfer I made was aimed toward harrying myself towards better excellence. However sure issues, like sleep, resist inflexible management. In highschool, my insomnia had made it doable to excel academically whereas additionally taking part in three varsity sports activities, working for a tree pruning firm, and pleasing a finicky girlfriend. I bridged the gaps with peanut butter, which I ate by the jar, and teenage vitality. However Polly was colicky, and by then I used to be the youngest companion in my legislation agency's historical past, and the workload was crushing. I began taking sleeping capsules at night time and Adderall within the morning to get me going—and finally all through the day to maintain me sharp. When the Adderall made me jangly, I would settle down with Xanax or Percocet within the afternoon earlier than knocking myself out with extra sleeping capsules at bedtime. I noticed this metabolic tinkering as nothing greater than taking good care of enterprise, and the convenience with which I chemically managed my deficits, coupled with a slight drug nausea I usually felt, made me doubly impatient with everybody else. I turned, as they are saying, "irritable"—laborious to work for and tougher to reside with. My excessive requirements intensified the stress I felt personally, which meant that I wasn't residence with our youngsters sufficient (three in 5 years, in step with our plan) or a lot of a companion for Trudy—who had suspended her legislation profession to allow our childrearing—sexually or in another means. All of which made me extra irritable, as a result of I sensed that I used to be failing when all I would ever performed, my entire life, was attempt to succeed.
To the bare eye, issues nonetheless appeared fantastic at that time. I used to be bringing in enterprise and seeing it by means of, albeit at the price of some recognition at my agency. At residence, everybody appeared glad, as I reminded myself each day by checking Trudy's Fb—later, her Instagram feed. She was a genius at capturing offhand moments and making them look iconic. Scrolling by means of her journeys to the seashore, the park, the zoo (usually with our neighbor Janna and her 4 children)—ice cream dribbling from chins; a video of crayoned pinwheels twirling within the breeze—I may really really feel my heartbeat gradual, my blood calm. Any fragment of time I would managed to wrest from work and spend with them was at all times entrance and heart, and I gorged on Trudy's pictures of Polly hugging me; of Michael, our older son, throwing me a ball; of me spooning mashed bananas into the mouth of Timothy, our child. All the things was fantastic, I advised myself, drawing deep breaths at my cherrywood desk in my towering, glassy workplace. They have been nonetheless there, nonetheless glad—we have been glad, all 5 of us in our lovely residence by the lake, precisely as Trudy and I had fantasized after making love between legislation faculty lessons—simply ready for me to return again.
Excerpted from "The Sweet Home" by Jennifer Egan. Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer Egan. Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For more information:
- "The Sweet Home" by Jennifer Egan (Scribner), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio codecs, accessible by way of Amazon and Indiebound
- jenniferegan.com