The author of A Visit from the Goon Squad talks winning awards, writing the future and why she would have gone on the road with the Who

You won a Pulitzer prize in April for your novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Has life changed much since you won?

The basics haven't changed. I've got my family and my two sons, and life with them in Brooklyn is the same. But perhaps I'm ignoring some big seismic change that I can't quite see myself. I can imagine a kind of psychological twist where I would feel like I have to earn the Pulitzer with my next book.

Goon Squad has won many other prizes and is being turned into a drama series by HBO. Did you anticipate its success while you were writing it?

I didn't think this book would attract a wider audience in the way that some of my others have. There were some big counts against it. It's hard to describe, and that's never good. I also knew that in terms of genre it was unclear and I sensed that that too would be a hindrance. I just hoped to hold my own with this one, and that my next book would have wider appeal.

It ranges backwards and forwards in time, between San Francisco in the 70s and a futuristic New York, and has a big cast tangentially connected to one another. Did it require meticulous planning?

No: the opposite, I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand – that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be. I've tried working on a word processor because I would love to be faster but it just doesn't seem to work. Goon Squad took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, Look at Me, took six years.

Most of the characters in the book are linked to the music industry. How much time have you spent in that world?

Not as much as you might think. People who read this book tend to think I'm a music geek – but I never really write about my own life. I did once get a journalistic assignment to write about a pair of identical-twin female rappers called Dyme, but it came to nothing – although there's a bit of their DNA in the Stop/Go sisters in the book: they also lived in Mount Vernon, and had an orange shag carpet in the recording studio that their dad built them, so I got something out of it.

But the rest came from your imagination?

I did do a fair amount of reading about the industry. Also, all of the punk rock stuff is drawn from memory because I was in San Francisco at that time. And what I couldn't remember I could easily recapture with YouTube. Bands that never recorded were on there, amazingly, and I found myself watching these muddy videos of heads bouncing around, thinking: one of those could be mine.

If you could have gone on the road with any band, who would it have been?

I was obsessed with the Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in LA. That was as close as I got to being a groupie. I also loved Iggy Pop, and he's sort of the patron saint of this book. "The Passenger" really captures the feeling I was after in Goon Squad: a sense of looking at a peripheral person and wondering what their life would be and then trying to plunge in and answer that question for the reader. The song also captures that sense of the outsider, the witness, the voyeur, and that's what I've always been and wished that I was otherwise. I wanted so much to be an actor, a prime mover, and I never felt that more keenly than as a teenager in that punk movement. People were doing pretty extreme stuff and all I could do was watch. In retrospect, I'm glad that's all I was doing, because a lot of people from that moment are not alive any more. This was San Francisco just before Aids was diagnosed; in retrospect it was an incredibly precarious moment that was about to come crashing down.

There's a perception, propagated recently by VS Naipaul, that women's writing can be unadventurous. Do you ever write to explode that perception?

I felt it strongly when I was working on Look at Me, which was when I feel I truly broke away from convention. I had internalised a contemptuous voice that said to me: "What makes you think you can do this?" There was a feeling that the world would not greet the book with delighted open-mindedness, but rather with a kind of sceptical dismissal. Naipaul's comments were laughable: I didn't feel threatened by them. He made himself look ridiculous, but the very fact that someone could say such a thing is troubling. I hope we can move into a realm where that kind of stereotype doesn't exist any more. If I can help explode it, that would feel hugely valuable to me.

For anyone who has come to your work through Goon Squad, which of your other books would you like them to read?

The book that is the closest genetically to Goon Squad is Look at Me. It has the futuristic element – although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasises about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11. However what I generally recommend is that people just read backwards, in the spirit of an alternate approach to chronology. The one before this couldn't be more different to it, which is usually my way.

Are you a disciplined writer?

I have a ferocious determination which I really am grateful for, but having children was a gigantic recalibration of my workaholic nature. They exert such a strong gravitational pull, and so does the work. Ever since the children were born it's been a challenge trying to give myself fully to all of them, without compromising any of them. On a large scale I've managed to do that, but day to day I usually feel I'm shirking something or someone.

Where are you going this summer and what will you be reading?

We're going to the Edinburgh festival and then to Ireland, where I've never been. I would like to reread The Age of Innocence – I haven't read it in years – and The House of Mirth is one of my all-time favourites. I've been in a 19th-century mode for the last couple of years. That stuff is crazy, it's really flexible and authoritative and swaggering and much looser and more innovative than we think of it as being.

I understand you are working on a big historical novel. What's it about?

I've done a lot of research on women who built and repaired ships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the second world war. Thousands of women worked there, riveting, soldering, plumbing. It was a shocking thing for women to do at the time. I'm also really interested in the moment post-war when America realised it had become a superpower. That becomes more interesting with things over here becoming increasingly precarious. Being downgraded by S&P was shocking for Americans. Allegedly it doesn't mean much in financial terms, but psychologically it's huge. It's going to shake us to our bones. One big question I have with the book is how to write a historical novel in a way that's more playful than just setting it in the past. That doesn't work for me. I'm going to have to mix it up a little more.