[2] After graduating, she spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge, supported by a Thouron Award, where she earned an M.A.

[3][4] She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of jobs, including catering at the World Trade Center, while learning to write.

[5] Egan has published short fiction in the New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares,[6] among other periodicals, and her journalism appears in the New York Times Magazine.

Egan has been hesitant to classify A Visit from the Goon Squad as either a novel or a short story collection, saying, "I wanted to avoid centrality.

[9] Her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

David Cowart has read Egan's project in A Visit from the Goon Squad as indebted to modernist writing but as possessing a closer affinity to postmodernism, in which "she meets the parental postmoderns on their own ground; by the same token, she venerates the grandparental moderns even as she places their mythography under erasure and dismantles their supreme fictions," [clarification needed] an aspect also touched upon by Adam Kelly.

[16][17] Baoyu Nie has focused, alternatively, on the ways in which "Egan draws the reader into the addressee role" through the use of second-person narrative technique in her Twitter fiction.