Emily St. John Mandel On Writing About The End of the World and What Comes Next

The elevator pitch on this book

has been so challenging.

And like, in fairness-

I can understand why.

Okay, I think of this as a story

about crime and resilience.

It's about trying to be a decent person

when things are falling apart,

and it's about who you're going to be

at the end of the world.

And I don't mean to imply that the collapse of a country

is the end of the world,

but what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it.

It is an ending.

And I do see this as a hopeful book.

So it's about what comes next

and trying to be a new person, you know,

in a rapidly changing and difficult landscape.

There's a lot of darkness in the book,

and I think reading it and coming into it in the year 2031,

which is not that far off the year 2026 where we are now,

in the United States, feels very resonant.

It feels very timely in troubling ways.

I'm curious when you think about the book

and you think about what's actually happening

in the United States right now,

in what ways is this United States

the same as what's in the book?

And in what ways are those two places different?

The difference is that in the country that we live in,

there's still time.

You know, in the United States that opens this story,

that country ran out of time, that country fractured.

I wish that it felt more fictional.

You know, I started writing this book in the spring of 2022.

[Katie] I was so curious about when you started

writing the book. Yeah, that was the timeline.

And look, like, we could already kind of see

the division that was coming because Trump was obviously

so much on the horizon for a second term.

But yeah, I wish it felt more speculative.

You know, I'm about to go out and do a 42 city tour

where I talk about this absolutely fantastical

speculative leap of imagination

in which the United States falls apart.

It's like.

Imagine if that happened. Yeah, imagine that.

That would be crazy and terrible.

That would be wild.

No one would've been able to see that coming.

Yeah, and I don't mean to be glib about it.

It's a terrifying prospect.

The beginning of this book for me

was just kind of working through my political anxieties.

In 2022? In 2022.

I read the news.

You know, I've always read the news.

It doesn't actually take any particular clairvoyance

to like look ahead and see where the incredible division

in this country could potentially lead.

And of course I hope it won't,

but that was, a way of thinking about that for me

was to think about, well, what might come next?

Suppose the worst were to happen,

suppose there were to be a second American Civil War,

what might the aftermath be like?

Which is not dissimilar to the project of Station Eleven,

you know imagining the aftermath

of a very different kind of catastrophe and collapse.

This sounds ridiculous though, given everything I just said.

It is actually a hopeful book.

Like, the book opens, look, it's the end of the world,

but we're going to a party.

That's kind of the spirit of it.

And without giving too much away, it's a weird party.

It's a weird party. But I think a lot of people

at the party had a good time.

I think so. Maybe the people who-

I think it was a great party for most people.

I think it was a great party for most people,

not for everyone who was at the party.

But that is true of all parties.

That's fair. In fiction and in life.

That's fair, and I'm usually the one

like having kind of a weird time.

Other people are having a great time.

Yeah, I'm the one looking for a good conversation.

There you go. [both laughing]

Finding that one other person

you can tolerate speaking to.

Yeah, the one other mom in the Brooklyn playground.

Speaking of the personal connection, I have a memory of,

it was maybe about a year ago.

We were having dinner with your wife

and I knew that you had this book coming out.

I didn't know anything about it.

And she was very stressed because she was like,

Book publishing is so slow.

Look at everything happening in this country right now.

This book that Emily has written is so timely right now.

I can't believe it's not coming out for another year.

Knowing that you started writing it in 2022

is so interesting to me

because you have now watched Trump be reelected.

You watched, you know, the ICE crackdowns

happening at the top of the year,

this encroachment of surveillance

into different aspects of our lives,

the incredible and ongoing

sort of fracturing of this country, the polarization.

How has that felt in these last four years

and particularly once the book was finished

and you knew what was in that book?

Yeah.

How did that change your experience

of reading the news every day?

You know, it's funny.

I remember that dinner and I remember my wife Laura,

her concern that the country might collapse

before the book came out.

Totally.

She's like, They're going to ruin the book.

Right, that is a spoiler.

[both laughing]

No God, we have to laugh

because otherwise it's devastating.

Well, Donald Trump is going to ruin Emily's book launch.

Yeah.

Yeah, stakes. Yeah.

Seriously.

The book envisions two different visions

of the United States. Yeah.

There's the vision we begin with

where there has been a civil war,

the country has fractured into a somewhat contentious

city states and small new republics

and splinter groups held by militias.

Yeah, it's a bit chaotic.

There's another version of the country

that is a totalitarian police state.

And my experience of writing this book

was that when I started writing it,

I was just looking at the polarization

and I was thinking, well, obviously

we're in that first universe,

the one where the country fractures,

you know, into these little incompatible,

small new republics.

But by the time I finished the book,

the ICE raids were happening

and my totalitarian vision of a country

where citizens are disappeared by masked secret police,

that wasn't fictional anymore.

Yeah. So, you know,

there was this feeling of struggling

to stay ahead of the news cycle

through the entire writing of this book.

That is so bizarre. Yeah, it was very surreal.

Now your protagonists in the book,

Ibari, they're the same person.

Yeah. But they also aren't at all.

Right. How did you think about

the idea of identity in writing the book?

What was top of mind for you?

I've been fascinated for a really long time

by the idea of the counterlife.

So that's the life you didn't live

where you didn't immigrate from Canada

or you went to a different school or took a different job

or married a different person.

These inflection points

that would have made us over the passage of time

into somewhat different people.

And I think the reason I'm so interested in that idea

is that the life I'm living

feels a little bit improbable to me.

Your life? Yeah.

I'm from Canada and I'm training in contemporary dance

and I don't have a high school diploma.

I do have moments of thinking

this actually feels fairly implausible.

You know, this is not a particularly plausible outcome

if someone were to say,

look at what my life looked like

when I was 17 or 18 years old.

Those counter lives that I could have lived

feel so much more plausible to me.

The life where I stayed in Canada and kept dancing

or whatever it was.

I was thinking of identity

in terms of the people we could have been,

you know, given different choices certainly.

But then in this book, it was also interesting to me

to think about what is the counterlife of the state?

Because that's a really interesting idea.

I was going to say in any democratic country,

but honestly in any country.

Like, you can look at the history,

I think, of any given nation

and see the moments where it veered one way

instead of another and became fairly rapidly

an entirely different country

than it would otherwise have been

if it had gone the other way at those crossroads.

That's very easy to do in this country

for reasons too obvious to even get into.

I was thinking about, well, if we take that idea

of the counterlife of the individual,

these different people we could have been,

how is that affected by the counterlife of the state?

Because we are so influenced

by the environment we live in, the people that surround us.

I think that I'm a different person having lived for,

God, 23 years in New York City

than I would have been if I had stayed

in say rural British Columbia where I grew up.

Oh for sure. For sure, yeah.

I think about that too all the time.

Yeah, you're from Canada too.

Yes, we're both Canadians

and it's like the version of me that stayed in Canada,

there was a very formative fork in the road

where that changed for me and I moved.

And I think a lot about

what if I had just stayed in Calgary?

Right. Like what would

that be like? Totally plausible life.

And the context of Canada as a country to live in

versus the United States.

Yeah, it's a little more chill.

I'm just going to say.

It's a little more chill.

Yeah.

So now here we are, both extremely unchill people

in New York City.

Yes, thriving. Thriving.

Living our best lives. Yeah, living our best lives,

extremely stressful lives, but here we are.

Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions

of a country

and they are so profoundly shaped by that country.

So who are you pushed into becoming

by the environment you live in?

What I was also thinking about is the way-

You know, I think we all have our

sort of natural interests and proclivities.

We're obviously both drawn to writing and words and stories

and different versions of that.

I saw Ari as somebody who's, she's got this character flaw

where she's fundamentally drawn toward crime.

She is. And as I say that,

maybe it's not even a flaw, maybe it's just an interest

because there's a version of the world

where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal,

but there is another version of the world

where she channels that into becoming the police.

And it was interesting to me to think about that,

the way we might be drawn in one direction or another

depending on the environment we're raised in.

I almost hate to ask this

because both versions of the United States

that you portray in the book

are really frightening in their own respects.

Did you find yourself drawn towards

preferring one over another?

Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?

No, they're both really hard.

Yeah, they're both awful.

The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly.

There you go, yeah.

No, it's like, do you want to live in chaos

or do you want to live in the totalitarian police state?

Yeah.

Hard pass on both, honestly.

Hard pass on both. Yeah.

What I was trying to convey in this book

is that no country lasts forever.

That's an idea I've been thinking about a lot.

And no version of a country lasts forever.

And there's both terror and hope in that idea.

So the totalitarian police state version's

not going to last forever

and neither is the period of total chaos.

But I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut,

like for people who've read a lot of my work,

but in Sea of Tranquility, there is a futuristic section

where an author is on a book tour in the year 2300.

And she's traveling between the Republic of California,

the Atlantic Republic, the Kingdom of Deseret

on a book tour.

And it's chill enough to support a book tour.

Yes, yes, yes. But yeah,

I kind of wanted to suggest

that this is the founding story of that space.

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

I wanted to ask you actually about your multiverse.

Okay. You have a history

that is sort of among your fans,

something that they really glom onto,

which is you pull from previous works

and you bring people and worlds into your new work.

And that continues with the Exit Party.

You've talked about it as a multiverse,

a cinematic universe.

The New Yorker called it, quote,

The Mandel Cinematic Universe,

which I think is pretty incredible

to have the New Yorker coin a term

for what you're doing with your books.

Is there a master plan here or is it just ad hoc

as inspiration strikes that you think,

Oh, that person from that book.

Or are you imagining this entire world

in your head as you're writing a new book?

I wish I could say I had that kind of brain,

that I just like hold an entire multiverse.

I don't know, it's very possible that you do.

I should just say yes, but no, there is no plan.

That's the baseline for individual books when I start them.

But also for the Mandelverse.

The Mandelverse. Some people

have also called it a nickname, I guess.

I just like the opportunities for connection.

I think that, I guess I have some abstract

longing for order in a chaotic universe.

You know, I like finding the moments

when books can be drawn together

or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character

and I want to spend more time with that person.

Like, you know, Miranda in Station Eleven,

I really liked her.

And then it was really interesting

to get to see a completely different facet of her life

in the Glass Hotel,

to see her as a shipping executive as opposed to an artist.

And then I guess with Exit Party,

I did lay the groundwork in Sea of Tranquility

for a world where the United States no longer exists.

So I guess you could make that argument

that that implies the origin story.

That implies there maybe is a secret master plan.

Yeah. It implies it.

I wish it existed, it doesn't.

It would make your life a lot easier.

It would be, yeah.

It would make my life easier.

And one of the things I love about your books,

I mean, several of them at least,

is that they're set in the future,

but they don't foreground the technology.

Like, I'm not reading the book for crazy nanotech

and this and that and sort of like the whiz bang, G-wiz,

Jetsons kind of future.

They foreground the people and the human stories

and the lived experience.

Although the technology and the science

is often very present,

it's certainly present in Exit Party.

How do you think about introducing technology

and science into your work?

I mean, how much research goes into that

and how much commitment to factual accuracy

as opposed to just letting your imagination run?

Right, what I'm aiming for is plausibility

in the context of a literary novel.

Okay. Which is going to be

a disappointingly low bar

for like your average WIRED podcast interviewee.

Well, it is fiction.

It is fiction. Yeah.

You know, I think that you've touched upon

a really interesting choice

that writers of speculative fiction need to make

every time we embark on a new project,

which is really just how deep into the weeds you want to go

on your science fictional technology.

And there are writers who go pretty deep.

I love Sixen Leo's work, The Three-Body Problem

and the rest of that series.

And he will go so deep

into these science fictional technologies,

which to my totally untrained eye,

it feels totally plausible.

I'll be like, Yeah, okay, that rings true to me.

Like, sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I believe that.

I did flirt with that a little bit

when I was starting out on Sea of Tranquility,

which has a time traveling detective

because we were all deranged during the pandemic.

But yeah, I was thinking about that.

Like, well, how would this actually work?

I was reading about the quantum blockchain

and like trying to understand what the mechanics could be.

But then at a certain point I realized, you know what?

It's just transport.

Like if I'm not explaining

how your car works in the 2020 segment of the novel,

then why do I care about the mechanics of the time machine?

And what I find is that I'm just much more interested

in the people and in how, you know, these extreme situations

and these science fictional setups, I suppose,

how those impact the characters in the book.

And I find myself much less interested in the mechanics.

So that's just to say

there's no right or wrong way to do it,

but I definitely lean more on the side of the characters.

Is there a, for lack of a better term, sci-fi concept

that you would love to write about,

but you just haven't had the right opportunity?

You've covered a lot of bases.

Yeah, I mean, I've got time travel.

I've got parallel universes.

You sure do? I sure do, yeah.

Not off the top of my head.

I guess we'll have to see what comes next.

I'll have to see what comes next.

Yeah. Yeah.

Now, there is a part in your book,

from Ibari's perspective,

she's working as a detective in the secret police

in one of these United States.

She has this though, and I'll quote it,

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of life

in a surveillance state,

which is perhaps obvious given my work,

but there are observations I've made

that I share with no one.

And one of them has to do

with the way a place like this reality splits into two.

That line, Reality splits into two is great.

Thank you. What does it mean?

What does it mean to you?

So in the context of that passage,

she's a secret agent with a cover story, basically.

Yeah, yeah. But the cover story

is that she's a professor and she actually is

teaching real classes.

So it's not false that she's a professor.

It's just that she's also secret police.

I guess she has the most obvious kind of surface experience

of that idea of kind of living a double life.

But then I guess she could argue that a lot of people

in that kind of society, you know,

I don't want to say it's exactly modeled on East Germany,

but the Stasi apparatus where, you know, civilians

were constantly reporting on each other,

which everybody thought was overstated

until the country collapsed

and it turned out to have been even bigger than anyone,

which is amazing.

Everybody really was reporting on each other.

That does create this awful kind of doubleness,

you know, there's the part of you that's a friend,

but then there's a part of you

that's reporting on the friend to your handler.

And both of those ideas are true.

But I think that also living that kind of doubleness

would do a lot of damage to a person, you know,

just in terms of,

it sounds so literary and pretentious

to say damage to your soul,

but I think that might be the situation.

I think so much of that too, when I think about the book,

there's so much in the book about the idea of trust, right?

In that surveillance state,

there are some very stressful passages,

at least for me in the book where you realize

that none of these people

can really fundamentally trust each other, right?

Yeah. Because they're all

wondering who is also involved in surveillance.

And then in the other universe,

there is this very sort of baseline notion of trust eroding

because everybody is just looking out for themselves

in this chaos.

I'm thinking now about the United States that we live in

where trust is in shorter and shorter supply.

Yeah. How were you thinking

about that as you were writing the book?

I mean, did you have any revelations about trust

in this country that we could all learn from?

It's not specific to this country,

but this actually leads us into AI for me.

Oh great. Where-

That's a fun topic. Let's do it.

We got to talk about it. Yeah.

You know much more about it than I do.

Do you remember when we were kids

and a video was proof of anything?

Yeah. It was like, Oh,

there is video evidence, case closed.

How terrifying and damaging and ridiculous

that our children are being raised in a world

where a video means absolutely nothing.

Yeah. You know,

it's incredibly hard to authenticate.

And that's what I find myself thinking about

when I think about trust.

But then also I sometimes lurk on Threads

just recreationally because it's-

On Threads, the Meta-owned platform.

Yes, exactly. Okay.

I don't post, but it is such a kind of trash fire.

It's like Twitter in, I don't know, 2012 or something.

I think I gave up on threads after like a couple months.

I can't handle it.

Yeah, it's a constant flame wars.

And it's like, you know, that's the equivalent,

my equivalent of like reading, I don't know, tabloid gossip.

It's just like, Wow, what are we wilding out about today?

Something real that's really struck me

is the degree of betrayal that people feel

when it emerges that an author has been using AI.

And I share that sense of betrayal.

It offends me in some incredibly deep way.

And when I try to parse why that is,

I think trust might be the answer.

You know, that feeling of,

I though this work of art was created by a human.

I thought that I was accessing something real.

And it turns out, nope,

they just fed it into a Claude or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I though you made this.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. I was going

to ask you about AI.

I'm curious about your thoughts on it in many respects.

I mean, your creativity and your voice is yours

and it's how you make a living.

I mean, it is very sort of like fundamental to you.

Yeah. And you write novels,

you also work in Hollywood,

and so you have exposure

to sort of what's happening in book worlds around AI

and also what is happening in the entertainment industry.

Yeah. Do you use it at all?

I don't.

I don't use it.

Maybe this makes me an outlier at this point.

I haven't found it reliable in search,

and so that made me distrust it completely.

Every now and again, I like to do a search

and make sure that my daughter's

not on the internet, basically.

So I searched Emily St. John Mandel daughter,

I think about a year ago.

And AI is so confidently wrong.

It's like it's the guy at the bar who you just like-

Did it confidently introduce you to your daughter?

No, it confidently introduced me to my son Leo,

born in 2016 and said,

Emily St. John Mandel does not have a daughter.

And it's so confident that you have a moment of just like,

Wait. Do I have a son?

What universe am I living in?

Yeah, exactly. That is wild.

Yeah, so you know, I do not have a son named Leo.

I have no idea where that came from.

I searched again a month later and it had revised that.

And my daughter remained unnamed,

which is what I wanted to confirm.

Which is great. Yeah.

But it made me distrust it fundamentally

from a search perspective.

I know that it can be used

to streamline administrative tasks.

I haven't used it as such.

I can write my own emails.

Yeah, I was going to say,

you're still writing your own emails over here?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, so am I, for the record.

Yeah, and it was interesting.

I've read your interview with,

was it Matthew Bellanti who was talking about-

Matthew Belloni, yeah. Belloni, thank you.

Yeah, talking about use of AI.

And it was interesting to me

because without refuting anything he's saying,

I've just had a different experience.

And I haven't heard of people using it-

In? In writer's rooms.

In the fiction world or in Hollywood.

In Hollywood. In Hollywood.

Yeah, in both.

I don't know, I suppose AI is an argument

for the in-person writer's room.

You really can't use it

if you're sitting around a table and there's a chalkboard.

But yeah, probably people are using it without my knowledge,

but I haven't personally encountered it.

When you look at the effect it's having on

book publishing, I mean, we have covered some of this,

but it is chaos out there in book world.

It's chaos, it's crazy. I was talking

to an agent the other day and he was saying, like,

There are no rules of the road here.

Yeah. Like, he will have

someone submit a book proposal and he's like,

Great, da, da, da, da, da.

And then it will ultimately turn out to have been generated

with artificial intelligence,

but there is no like policy for publishers.

Yeah, yeah. How does that all look

from where you sit?

I mean, do you worry about AI slop books

becoming a mainstream commodity,

taking up sort of like a bigger share of the fiction market?

Or do you think people just don't have the taste for that?

I'd like to think they don't have the taste for it,

but I think the slop

will get less sloppish with time is the risk.

What I really worry about actually is less the work

and I worry more about writers.

I started publishing in 2009

and I have a consistent voice across books.

Yeah.

My process is such that it'll be very easy for me

to produce iterative drafts

of what I've been doing if I were ever forced to prove

that it's not AI, which it absolutely is not.

But not all writers have that process.

Some are just changing a word doc over a period of time.

Not all of us keep written notes.

And something that's emerging, I think,

that alarms me is that it's very hard to prove sometimes

that your work wasn't AI.

Or like to prove a negative.

Yeah, to prove a negative.

Exactly. Like the reputational risk.

The reputational risk is enormous.

Like that's the end of a career,

at the very least the end of a book deal.

I had a weird experience a while ago

where I was just curious.

So I found some free AI detection thing online,

which probably stole my work.

And I pasted the first chapter of Exit Party in,

and what it came back with was there's a 20% chance

that AI was used on this.

And at first I was completely beside myself.

I was like, How does it think that?

And then I realized, Oh, because Anthropic

and other companies stole five of my novels

to train their LLMs.

So it's- So it's like,

I know this voice. Yeah.

AI is like, this seems oddly familiar.

Oh, that is so bizarre. That's annoying.

But to your point, I mean, the idea

of being a writer for a living right now,

and you're doing the work yourself,

you're doing it with integrity,

you are painstaking in your process,

and one accusation or one result like that

that maybe says like 60% chance this is AI.

And these tools are extremely flawed.

Yeah, they're very inaccurate.

But that can end a career. Yeah.

I mean, the stakes of this are very, very high.

I actually did the same thing.

I think anyone who writes for a living right now

has this paranoia.

I fed some of my articles into one of these tools

because I was like,

I just want to know like what it's going to say.

Yeah, like do I sound like AI?

And I got back 0%. Congratulations.

Thank you. That's amazing.

But it was such a relief

because you just, there is this sense,

this cloud of someone can point a finger

and the people who are using AI,

I would argue in creative pursuits

are kind of ruining it for everybody else.

I would agree with that.

I don't have any respect for them.

If you can't write, then maybe do something different.

Maybe do something else.

There are a lot of better jobs.

Let me back up a little bit.

I wanted to spend a bit of time

talking about you and your career.

Okay.

You talked a little bit at the top about

you grew up in Canada.

Yeah. You were in Toronto.

And you're right, I mean, objectively speaking,

where you are now is improbable

relative to where you were then.

Tell us about like those early years.

I'm going to digress for a second back to the book.

So much of this book is about the condition

of living one life after another.

And this is so many lives ago

that it's like looking back at a stranger.

Yeah, so I grew up in rural British Columbia,

Vancouver Island, and then Denman Island,

which is just for context,

about the same size and shape as Manhattan,

but with a thousand people.

It's just, it's forest and deer and a general store.

Yes, I grew up there.

I was homeschooled.

I did a couple semesters of community college

without ever getting my GED because I could.

And then I auditioned successfully

for a conservatory program

and contemporary dance in Toronto.

And I was a professional dancer after that

for like five minutes.

Like I just, that had been the dream

since I was six years old.

Was it because you realized the dream

and then found that it wasn't what you wanted?

I didn't quite realize the dream.

I went pretty far, but I never really joined a company.

I just danced for a few- I don't know

what the necessary steps are.

Yeah.

No, I didn't go all the way.

I danced for a couple of independent choreographers.

I loved that experience,

but I never got into like one of the big companies.

I think in part because I'd realized by then

that I no longer loved it.

There's this phenomenon I think

where if you've been dead set on one thing your entire life,

like since you were six,

then, you know, you can fall out of love with it.

People change.

So in my early 20s, I realized

that dance was feeling like more of a chore

than anything else.

And I kind of resented it and I didn't love it anymore.

This is kind of spectacularly poor planning on my part.

I'd taken out student loans

to go to the School of Toronto Dance Theater,

not a degree granting program.

Oh dear. Yeah.

Mountain of student loan debt,

no degree, no high school diploma.

Like, it's hard to, it would feel overwrought

if you wrote that in a novel.

My editor would probably do like question marks

in the margins like, Plausible?

But yeah, worst case scenario.

This many poor choices. Exactly.

That many poor choices, yeah.

So yeah, the string of multiple poor choices.

I had a totally destroyed credit rating in Canada.

[Katie] Oh my God.

Student loan debt.

So I moved to the United States.

Perfect. Yeah.

That solution to that problem.

No, in all seriousness, I was living in Canada.

I no longer love dance.

I'd always written just as a hobby.

It was just something I loved

and something I did a little bit compulsively.

Like if I went for a long walk, I'd bring a notebook

because otherwise I might start writing stories

on Starbucks napkins.

I was starting to write in Toronto.

I met a guy who lived in New York and we were dating

and I moved to New York to be with him.

Moved back to Montreal, broke up.

And then I was kind of stranded in Montreal.

You know, Montreal in winter working retail,

trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

It is a cold city. It is a very cold city,

which actually played into my writing process.

Fair. It was so cold.

My roommates and I were dead broke,

so we kept the heat turned down pretty low.

So I would go to bed at like 7:00 PM

just because I was so cold.

Easier to be asleep. It was easier to be asleep.

So I would sleep until about one in the morning

and then naturally wake up because again,

I'd gone to bed at 7:00.

Yeah. I'd get up

in the middle of the night.

I would dress to write.

Like, I had this feeling that I was doing something

formal and important.

I would put on like a sweater and a tie

and like my warmest coat

and go out with my laptop

to the 24 hour cafe two blocks away.

And I would write and write until morning.

And that was the book that ultimately

became Last Night in Montreal.

Wow. I was able to find a way

to move back to New York with,

yeah, with, I don't know, $400

and like a 10-day sublet in the West Village

when I was 22 or so.

I've been here ever since.

So I started writing Last Night in Montreal in Montreal.

I finished it in New York.

And then I just started cold querying agents

and the 13th or 14th one found me

in her slash pile and took me on.

So crazy. Yeah, it was a lot of luck

and also an incredible amount of hard work

and literally cold nights in Montreal.

And you had a day job until like a bizarre juncture.

I did, I did, yes.

So I'm from a very working class background.

Yeah. And what that came with

for me was an absolute terror

of quitting the day job because there is no safety net.

I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal.

I became an assistant in New York.

I had a really great job

for a long time at the Rockefeller University.

I was an admin in a cancer research lab, and I loved that.

It was such a pleasure to be surrounded

by such smart people doing interesting work.

And the health insurance was incredible.

Yeah. So I kept that job

until a year after Station Eleven came out.

That's so wild to me. It got so surreal, Katie.

I can't tell you.

One of my jobs in that position,

or one of my tasks rather,

was I had to book plane tickets for my boss,

but I wasn't booking my own plane tickets for the tour.

I had three publicists doing that.

Right. Or like there was a day

when I had to leave work early

because I had a photo shoot at Time Magazine.

Yes. Yeah, I stayed until-

Did someone tell you like, Emily, it's time?

You need to quit your job.

You know what it was?

I did a podcast where the other guest was this comedian,

Josh Gondelman.

Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, who's lovely.

And at the time, I guess it was a few months

after Station Eleven had come out,

and I was really grappling with the day job question.

Like, does it make sense to leave?

Is leaving crazy?

What if I never have another successful book?

And he told me that a fellow comedian had once told him,

keep your day job until you can't afford to anymore.

And I found that to be a really helpful way of framing it.

So I kept that job until I found out

I was three months pregnant,

and then that was too many things.

Yeah. Yeah.

Adding a baby onto that would be-

Adding a baby would've been a bit much.

A little much. Yeah.

Station Eleven was

successful right out of the gate.

And then it had this second life during the pandemic.

It did, that was surreal.

And you became this

almost like online magnet,

this like pandemic prophet magnet for people.

That was so weird.

Who were asking you, like, on Twitter,

like help, what do we do in the pandemic?

And you've talked a little bit about this.

I mean, you did some interviews around then and afterwards.

Looking back on it now, right?

It's been five, six years.

What stands out to you from that experience?

Which like, COVID was weird for everybody,

weird and scary and sad.

For you, it was weird in a very singular way.

There weren't many people being consulted

as like a prophet of pandemics.

What was it like to write a fictional book

and then be asked for guidance in a real world pandemic?

It was so surreal and the requests were so misplaced.

Like, If you're going to look to a writer for guidance,

like, I went to be like,

go talk to Ed Yong at The Atlantic.

Yeah, I was just thinking Ed Yong.

Yeah, yeah.

There were so many people who were more qualified than I was

to say what to do in a pandemic.

Yeah, I was fascinated by that.

It was very strange being,

accused sounds too dramatic,

but like, being accused of being a prophet in a weird way.

Yeah. And-

And what a dark thing to be.

Yeah, it's really dark.

But it's also the thing that I was never able

to quite convey at the time

was that there was always going to be another pandemic.

So I didn't see myself as having foretold anything.

The way I thought of it at the time was,

Well, if I'd written a novel with a fictional war,

does that mean that I predicted

whatever war came next after that in the real world?

But the pandemic just felt so singular to us.

And when I say us, you know what?

Let's acknowledge our privilege here.

We're people who had not lived through a previous pandemic,

Which is obviously not the case in other parts of the world.

It was so shocking to us in North America that

I think people did kind of glom onto that book

in a way that they wouldn't have

you know, if the thing that had ended the world

in Station Eleven had been say a war.

It was so novel and shocking.

And what's funny is,

I was exactly as unprepared as everybody else.

And the reason why this is embarrassing

is, you know, I've had this sideline for years

of doing on stage conversations and lectures.

And I was doing that right up until March 2020.

So I had this long lecture that I developed

about post-apocalyptic literature,

about pandemics and Shakespeare

and all themes that dovetailed with Station Eleven.

So I was literally traveling the country

delivering a lecture that contained the phrase,

there will always be another pandemic.

It is so embarrassing how shocked I was

that there was in fact another pandemic

and I was scrambling for toilet paper like everybody else.

Yeah, you're like, Guys, I don't know

if you should put Clorox all over your groceries.

I'm just trying to figure this out.

I did, I was like, yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I definitely did that. Yeah.

For probably longer than I should have.

Same, yeah.

I'm curious about how you deal with celebrity.

Just thinking about that sort of social media onslaught

during COVID, you don't strike me

as someone who's particularly eager to post.

You know what I mean?

No, you've discovered my secret.

How do you deal with that part of the job

of like being famous on the internet?

I think for some people they would go, you know,

full throttle into like posting Instagram stories,

whatever it is they're going to do.

How do you handle it?

And do you feel pressure

to do it differently than what you're inclined to do?

Yeah, I think that if I were on Instagram

just to be on Instagram,

I don't know if you'd ever see my face.

Right, totally. Because I love posting

like weird, beautiful little videos.

Like, I just posted one that's spiderwebs on a hiking trail

in the Adirondacks last week.

I have to admit, I saw that

because I was curious about your Instagram profile

and I was like, Yep, she definitely is not someone

who's dying to post.

I'm not dying to post.

I'm really not. Yeah.

But if I see something- You're doing your thing.

I'm doing my thing.

If I see something cool and beautiful and I think,

Oh, that's kind of amazing in just a tiny little moment

and could I set it to music?

Like, that would be cool.

I really like reels.

That's how I probably naturally would use it.

I do feel a certain pressure to, yeah, to post,

I guess to post my face for the algorithms

or I do feel like I need to promote my books

because it is literally how I pay my rent.

So it just kind of feels like part of the job.

But then I don't want to get too negative here

because I do genuinely love interacting with readers.

So I guess I kind of want it both ways.

Yeah, no, I know what you mean.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

There is pressure in there.

I find social media generally terrifying.

I've had a lot of very negative interactions over the years.

And what's funny is just the way the human brain is wired,

positive interactions outweigh the negative interactions

a thousand to one.

But like, of course I also remember the negative ones.

The negative ones stand out.

Yeah. What is it like

to promote a book in the year 2026?

It feels a bit chaotic,

but I think that's because the country feels

more chaotic than it did in past years.

I think that I have a very atypical experience

of book promotion because I had these three novels published

by a really small press

and then I jumped to Knopf in the US, HarperCollins Canada,

and Pan Macmillan in the UK for Station Eleven.

And I've been with those three publishers ever since.

And because Station Eleven was so successful,

that meant that a lot of marketing resources

have been poured into the subsequent books.

So I think that that gives me a really unusual experience

and I think that it's not normal at all.

So it makes me hesitant to draw any generalizations

because for me it's fine.

I think that that's certainly not the case

for the vast majority of novelists.

I think there's so much distraction and chatter

and such short attention spans

that I think it's incredibly difficult to start out

as a novelist now.

And you know, it was never actually easy,

but my sense is that it might be harder now just in this,

the more fractured and the more kind of,

I keep using the word chaotic,

but the more chaotic the media landscape becomes,

I think the harder it is for a novelist to break through.

Do you have any advice for those people?

Stay off Threads for real. Stay off Threads.

Okay, like I don't really post, but I do read.

I see the most deranged publishing advice on Threads.

Like I can't- Like what?

Like, I don't even know.

I just like every time I read it, I'm like,

No, that makes no sense.

Don't do that. Don't do that.

No, like I have very concrete advice for writers

who you know, are trying to get an agent, for example.

There's just a lot of bad advice

floating around social media.

Yeah, and there's a lot of noise.

Yeah. And I have to imagine

for anyone trying to break through now,

they would feel like so much of that success is contingent

on social media and TikTok and Instagram

and sort of how they show up on those platforms.

Yeah.

And I would say you miss that by a few years.

I think so. You're very lucky.

Thank you. I want to end

by coming back to Exit Party.

Okay. And I hate to ask

some of this, but I'm going to anyways.

Okay, go for it. You were accused,

for lack of a better word,

of being a prophet when Station Eleven

did not cause the pandemic,

but happens to be about a pandemic.

You've now written a book that is uncomfortably close

to what we are going through in the United States.

Are you bracing yourself for a similar reaction?

Yeah.

But look, if the country collapses, it's not my fault.

That's my- She said it here first.

That what I said first.

She didn't do it. Yeah, I didn't do it.

I just read the news

and got freaked out like everybody else.

Is there anything in the world you've created

in the book that you hope turns out to be prophetic?

Absolutely.

I don't want to take credit for the parties after this.

But you know what?

It's hope itself.

There is a lot of hope in this book.

It opens at a moment when the country has collapsed,

but something new is taking its place.

And it's a kind of chaotic in between period,

but I never meant to imply that would last forever.

I think that settles down into something more stable

and potentially better.

And then on the side of the book that deals

with the totalitarian state,

that totalitarianism is already crumbling toward the end.

So yeah, you know, I think, I think there is hope

and I think that we see that even now,

you know, in our current incredibly dark political moment.

On the one hand, you have the ICE raids.

On the other hand, look at Minneapolis.

Like I get choked up thinking about

the way people responded to that.

It's incredible and it's incredibly brave and extraordinary.

I mean, maybe what you'll get credit for predicting is

the dawn of an even better version of this country.

That would be lovely. We can hope.

We can hope. Emily, thank you so much

for being here. It's been such a pleasure.

This is great. Thank you.

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