I read Jennifer Egan’s, “Look at Me “ about two or three years ago and fell in love with it; not only was the plot line engaging, her subtext and observations about physical beauty and the differences between what people portray on the outside and what is on their insides is amazing. Because of my appreciation for “Look at Me”, I am excited about her new project, which is a novel in the form of a power point presentation. (Link to video of her discussing her new project HERE)

Interestingly enough, Jennifer Egan was not an accomplished Power Point presenter when she first had the idea to create a novel in the form of a Power Point presentation. I imagine that her decision came before the Ipad, which might revolutionize ebooks (and the entire publishing industry itself) as we know it. She had the idea to write about a 12-year-old girl from the girl’s perspective in a diary format. The diary format has obviously been done before (Adrian Mole and Nick Twisp), but the use of Microsoft’s Office Power Point is more than slightly unusual- I can’t be certain, but she may in fact have created her own genre.

I found the interview with Jennifer Egan in Mother Jones interesting, but was particularly liked her essay on the Random House website about her experiences writing. When Jennifer Egan wrote about both “Look at Me” and “The Invisible Circus”, she had amazing coincidences surrounding her- as she wrote each novel, she would find parallels in the news at the time she was writing. In her novel, “Look at Me”, a company starts “The Ordinaries” in which people offer their lives up for sale on the net. She apparently thought of the idea in 96 as a satire, which was just before people started installing 24-hour web cams in their houses and found it more than a little creepy that people were actually living like this. (It should be noted of course that her idea didn’t precede reality TV shows such as “The Real World” and the German version of “Big Brother”, so these shows might have had more to do with the idea than any actual large or small coincidences.)

The other parallel that Jennifer Egan mentions in her essay is scarier to me; less than a year after she wrote her first novel in which the father dies of leukemia, the Dad who raised her died of leukemia.