Don’t worry, fiction fans — Jonathan Safran Foer says his journey into journalism is over.
The author of the outstanding novels “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” said that he found the process of non-fiction writing and researching his new book so daunting that he doesn’t want to do it again.
“I’m going back to novels,” said the 32-year-old Park Slope resident.
Foer said he worked on his investigation of factory farming for about three years, visiting slaughterhouses, pastures, ranches and, in one harrowing scene, a chicken farm where the birds were literally packed in cheek by jowl.
That, it turned out, was the easy part.
“I found the process of writing [“Eating Animals”] so difficult,” he said last week. “When I write novels, no matter how difficult they get, I feel like I’m in my element. In here, I did not feel that.”
So what’s next? He wouldn’t say. Perhaps he can’t.
“I’m working on a few things right now,” he said. “I always wait to see which dies. Sometimes they become one or one will become three. It’s ugly, and very inefficient, but I feel like myself — with all that entails, which is not all good.”