The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad" took a trip to Europe before she was due to leave for college. The trip, says Egan, was miserable, but while she was there she wrote in a diary and realized how much she enjoyed that simple act. "Writing in the journal made me happy – even when the experiences I described were frightening or desperate," she writes. "I'd stumbled on the sheer pleasure of writing, and it's been with me ever since." It was the moment, Egan says, that she realized that she wanted to be a writer.
