Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel entitled A Visit From The Goon Squad. I have not read the book yet, because I’ve been on the waiting list for the e-book for approximately forever. I hear it’s good.
About a minute after winning the Pulitzer Prize, instead of saying something appropriate like, “thank you for the honor,” Egan, in a Wall Street Journal interview, took this as an opportunity to insult other female authors. Specifically authors of the “chick lit” genre. Egan has been a very outspoken critic of so-called “chick lit.” Because her fiction is high brow and important. And “chick lit” is not.
Egan then went on to discuss a literary scandal in which a young author had the audacity to plagiarize from “chick lit.” Now, keep in mind her issue was not that the author had plagiarized. No, her issue was that the author plagiarized from what is, in her view, an unworthy source:
“There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower. “
Shouldn’t the issue be that she plagiarized, not *what* she plagiarized? Aren’t we kind of missing the point here?
Ok Egan, I get it. You are big and important and you write very big and important novels. And I’ll read it… eventually. But I’ll also read Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult and Sophie Kinsella and all the authors you like to insult. Because I read a book a week. And in the age of reality TV and the Internet shouldn’t we - and especially you, as an author – be grateful people are reading at all?
Also, you sound like a pompous ass. I’m just saying.
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