Jennifer Egan: "I wouldn't probably qualify as an actual crazy cat lady."

Last night I went to Jennifer Egan's paperback release party for her recent NBCC-winning novel A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. The difference between an ordinary reading and a public release party is that sometimes at release parties there is free wine that will mostly be gone when the reading is over.

Egan lives near to Bookcourt, the Brooklyn bookstore that hosted the event, and even described herself pacing up and down Court Street trying to figure out a particularly thorny issue in GOON SQUAD and listening to her then-favorite song, which she can no longer bear to hear. The crowd was friendly and seemed largely familiar with GOON SQUAD's cast and plot twists (in a way your humble recapper is not -- alas --). After Egan read a section dealing with teenagers in a punk band called The Flaming Dildos, someone asked what happens to the band in the book. "Well, they aren't real," she said with a laugh. "And unfortunately, they aren't any good."

Even if they had heard it before, no one minded hearing again how GOON SQUAD was born; how Egan had written a few stories that seemed to hold something more, and began writing a story about a man before realizing it was really his crazy ex-wife she wanted to follow, and an encounter with a stranger's wallet, and so on. She described it to her agent expecting to be shot down, and was instead encouraged toward a piece that isn't a collection of short stories, nor really a novel. (Her agent was in the audience.) Egan said she loves the new paperback cover, describing it as "like candy," but what she loves more are the end-of-year lists that bumped her book back into great sales figures. (I've never heard an author opine as frankly on how much those help; it was prompted by an audience member, though, who originally asked more about the fiction award.)

As to the cats, Emma Straub (also a local, and a Bookcourt employee, who introduced Egan) mentioned them first; the first question led her to divulge she has two, Diamond and Cuddles ("named by my children"), and one of them fried her laptop knocking a glass of water into it sometime during GOON SQUAD's writing. While discussing one unconventional (no spoilers!) chapter of GOON SQUAD she even half-suggested that it was the cat that forced her into a new direction, because her new laptop allowed her to work on it in a different way.

As to the old stock photo, Egan looks almost exactly like that, just slightly more pink than pale, which is really not important anyway. No one asked her about her competitors for the NBCC award, nor her recent Tournament of Books match. As it should be.