Jennifer Egan

Novelist explores where journalism meets fiction.

In Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel “Look at Me,” an academic poses as a journalist in order to interview a fashion model. Working for a private eye, the fake journalist is seeking information on the whereabouts of a foreign-born terrorist, whom the model had befriended in a New York nightclub. As the plot develops, the model persuades the academic to engage in a bit of actual journalism, enlisting her to write about her life for a website called Extra/Ordinary.com. Although the phony reporter turned novice reporter interviews the model at length, she proceeds to embellish her subject’s story.

Sixteen years later, the relationship between journalism and fiction continues to fascinate Egan, who based parts of “Look at Me” (though, to be clear, not the unethical subterfuge) on her own experiences reporting on the fashion industry. She’ll discuss that relationship when she presents a speech titled “Novelist As Journalist/Journalist As Novelist” during opening night of Festival of Arts Boca. Egan, whose six books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad” and the forthcoming “Manhattan Beach,” began working in journalism after the publication of her first novel, “The Invisible Circus,” in 1995.

“My first piece of journalism was about fashion models,” Egan says during a phone call from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y., “and the reason I agreed to do it was that I knew I was going to be working on ‘Look at Me,’ which required a pretty thoroughgoing knowledge of the modeling world in New York. And I was having a very hard time getting access. In the world of fashion, it felt like they didn’t really care about talking to a writer about what they did.”

But when an editor friend at the New York Times asked if she’d be interested in writing about teenage models for the paper’s magazine, Egan recalls, she had an epiphany.

“I thought, aha, if I write about them, and I’m writing for the New York Times, even if the story never sees the light of day, I’ll have gotten my research done,” she says. “I had no idea what I was doing, and it took awhile for that story to take shape. But ultimately, I was kind of hooked.”

Egan says she got a rush from distilling months of reporting and “comprehensive knowledge of a world that I had acquired” into a story whose readership would be much broader than that of her books. “It felt different,” she says. “It felt like another important thing that I could do.”

Every year or so for the next 15 years, Egan burrowed into the kinds of articles that are called “long reads” but were once simply known as “stories.” She studied seminarians in Maryland as they prepared for the priesthood. She investigated the phenomenon of cutting, or “selfinjury,” among girls and young women, and dug into a reported rise in bipolar disorders among children and adolescents. She published her most recent investigative piece, a profile on Lori Berenson, an American imprisoned in Peru for abetting terrorists, in 2011.

“I’m most interested in working on pieces that involve a world that I don’t understand,” Egan says. “This would be a common element to my feeling about fiction and nonfiction. The closer something is to my life, the less interested I am.”

COURTESY Jennifer Egan wrote “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”