HBR: Tell us about your time as an undergraduate at Harvard.

AG: While at Harvard I concentrated in English and philosophy.  I was writing fiction the whole time, and publishing short stories in Commentary magazine. But I wanted very much to be a scholar as well, and hoped to go to graduate school and become a professor. My initial thought was to focus primarily on philosophy.  I enjoyed my courses in Plato and Kant, but I realized early on that English literature was my subject.   I remember great lectures—not just great—moving and inspiring! I spent a lot of my free time at Harvard Hillel and at the Advocate where I served on the poetry board.  

HBR: What were some of your favorite books at the time?  (And how about your current favorites?)

AG: My favorite poets in college: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Ben Jonson, Donne. My favorite novelists: Henry James and George Eliot.  The more recent writers I enjoyed included Eudora Welty and Cynthia Ozick. These days I try to keep up a little better with new fiction.  My favorite contemporary novelists are Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, and Ian McEwan.

HBR: What did you do after graduating? 

AG: After graduating, I got married and spent a year in England, where my husband studied at Cambridge and I wrote fiction. Then we went to Stanford where he got a Ph. D. in Computer Science, and I got one in English.  I wrote my dissertation on Keats' angry reaction to Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare. (Keats had a pocket edition that he carried around and underlined, and marked up with occasional furious outbursts at what he perceived as Johnson's tone-deaf scholarly notes.  Those little volumes are at Houghton Library).  

I wanted to be a scholar and a writer.  I loved research—still do, in fact—and I figured I should teach to support myself and keep myself sane.  I didn't believe creative writing could be taught and hoped to teach and explore an actual subject: literature, history of ideas, the nature of creativity.  By the end of graduate school, however, I realized that I was a fiction writer, and I needed time to write.  Writing fiction was completely absorbing—not only artistically, but intellectually.  I would say my Ph. D. did help me as a writer.  The reading I did, the seminars I attended, the papers I wrote, all educated me.  I am an American writer, a Jewish writer, a woman writer, but I also am a writer in English—and there is no better preparation for that than to study the tradition of English literature.

HBR: What attracts you to particular topics, and have the topics that interested you most changed in any way as you've continued writing?

AG: Intuition began with an impulse to write about a couple in which one of them begins cheating—but not in the ordinary sense.  I began thinking about different forms of cheating, and I became fascinated by the complex lies, half-truths, and over-reaching that lead to scientific fraud.  The life of a scientist, the dedication necessary, the close collaborations—sometimes profoundly satisfying, sometimes dysfunctional—the pressures on research, among them the need for funding, fascinate me.  My husband teaches at MIT, and I have many friends and family who are scientists, so I decided to explore that life.  The book was a challenge to research because I decided I wanted to observe scientists working in labs—but I didn't want to subject anyone I knew to my scrutiny.  I didn't want anyone to say to me, "Oh, I recognized your sister—or her work—in your book."  So I approached strangers and asked if I could watch them.  I had to say, "I'm an ignorant novelist with good intentions—may I please come and follow you around?"  This was rather scary and humbling!  After I did my initial research, I spent a couple of years writing the first draft, and a couple of years revising.  When I was twenty living in Dunster House I would have been shocked to know how hard I would end up working as a writer—or how long a novel might take.