- 9 minutes ago
WIRED Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond speaks with author Emily St. John Mandel about writing about the end of the world in her new novel 'Exit Party', navigating political anxieties, and exploring what comes next after societal collapse.
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00:00The elevator pitch on this book has been so challenging.
00:02And like, in fairness...
00:03I can understand why.
00:04Okay, I think of this as a story about crime and resilience.
00:08It's about trying to be a decent person when things are falling apart.
00:11And it's about who you're going to be at the end of the world.
00:14And I don't mean to imply that the collapse of a country is the end of the world.
00:18But what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it.
00:20It is an ending.
00:21And I do see this as a hopeful book.
00:23So it's about what comes next and trying to be a new person, you know, in a rapidly changing and
00:31difficult landscape.
00:33There's a lot of darkness in the book.
00:34And I think reading it and coming into it in the year 2031, which is not that far off the
00:41year 2026, where we are now, in the United States, feels very resonant.
00:46It feels very timely in troubling ways.
00:48Because I'm curious, when you think about the book and you think about what's actually happening in the United States
00:54right now, in what ways is this United States the same as what's in the book?
01:01And in what ways are those two places different?
01:04The difference is that in the country that we live in, there's still time.
01:09You know, in the United States that opens this story, that country ran out of time.
01:15That country fractured.
01:15I wish that it felt more fictional.
01:17You know, I started writing this book in the spring of 2022.
01:21I was so curious about when you started writing a book.
01:23Yeah, that was the timeline.
01:23And look, like we could already kind of see the division that was coming because Trump was obviously so much
01:30on the horizon for a second term.
01:31But yeah, I wish it felt more speculative.
01:33You know, I'm about to go out and do a 42-city tour where I talk about this absolutely fantastical
01:40speculative leap of imagination in which the United States falls apart.
01:45Imagine if that happened.
01:47That would be crazy and terrible.
01:49Yeah, that would be wild.
01:49Yeah, no one would have been able to see that coming.
01:51Yeah, and I don't mean to be glib about it.
01:52It's a terrifying prospect.
01:54The beginning of this book for me was just kind of working through my political anxieties.
01:59In 2022.
01:59In 2022, I read the news.
02:01You know, I've always read the news.
02:02It doesn't actually take any particular clairvoyance to look ahead and see where the incredible division in this country could
02:10potentially lead.
02:11And of course, I hope it won't.
02:12But that was a way of thinking about that for me was to think about, well, what might come next?
02:19Suppose the worst were to happen.
02:21Suppose there were to be a second American Civil War.
02:24What might the aftermath be like?
02:26Which is not dissimilar to the project of Station 11.
02:29You know, imagining the aftermath of a very different kind of catastrophe and collapse.
02:33This sounds ridiculous, though, given everything I just said.
02:36It is actually a hopeful book.
02:38Like, the book opens, look, it's the end of the world, but we're going to a party.
02:42Yeah.
02:42That's kind of the spirit of it.
02:43And without giving too much away, it's a weird party.
02:46But I think a lot of people at the party had a good time.
02:48I think so.
02:49I think it was a great party for most people.
02:51I think it was a great party for most people.
02:53Yeah.
02:54Not for everyone who was at the party.
02:55But that is true of all parties.
02:57That's fair.
02:57In fiction and in life.
02:58That's fair.
02:59And I'm usually the one, like, having kind of a weird time.
03:01Other people are having a great time.
03:02I'm the one looking for a good conversation.
03:05There you go.
03:06Finding that one other person you can tolerate speaking to.
03:09Yeah, the one other mom in the Brooklyn playground.
03:11Speaking of the personal connection, I have a memory of, it was maybe about a year ago,
03:17we were having dinner with your wife, and I knew that you had this book coming out.
03:22I didn't know anything about it.
03:23And she was very stressed because she was like, book publishing is so slow.
03:28Look at everything happening in this country right now.
03:31This book that Emily has written is so timely right now.
03:35I can't believe it's not coming out for another year.
03:38Knowing that you started writing it in 2022 is so interesting to me because you have now watched Trump be
03:45reelected.
03:46You watched, you know, the ice crackdowns happening at the top of the year.
03:50This encroachment of surveillance into different aspects of our lives.
03:54The incredible and ongoing sort of fracturing of this country, the polarization.
04:00How has that felt in these last four years?
04:03And particularly once the book was finished and you knew what was in that book.
04:08How did that change your experience of reading the news every day?
04:11You know, it's funny.
04:12I remember that dinner.
04:13And I remember, I remember my wife, Laura, her concern that the country might collapse before the book came out.
04:20Like, that was really, you know, that, yeah.
04:22She's like, they're going to ruin the book.
04:24Right.
04:25That is a spoiler.
04:28No, God, we have to laugh because otherwise it's devastating.
04:31Well, Donald Trump is going to ruin Emily's book launch.
04:33Yeah.
04:34Yeah.
04:34Stakes.
04:35Yeah.
04:35Seriously.
04:37The book envisions two different visions of the United States.
04:41Yeah.
04:41There's the vision we begin with where there has been a civil war.
04:44The country is fractured into somewhat contentious city-states and small new republics and splinter groups held by militias.
04:53Yeah.
04:53It's a bit chaotic.
04:54There's another version of the country that is a totalitarian police state.
04:58And my experience of writing this book was that when I started writing it, I was just looking at the
05:05polarization.
05:05And I was thinking, well, obviously we're in that first universe, the one where the country fractures, you know, into
05:12these little incompatible small new republics.
05:16But by the time I finished the book, the ice raids were happening.
05:19And my totalitarian vision of a country where citizens are disappeared by masked secret police, that wasn't fictional anymore.
05:27Yeah.
05:27So, you know, there was this feeling of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle through the entire writing
05:31of this book.
05:32That is so bizarre.
05:33Yeah.
05:34It was very surreal.
05:35Now, your protagonists in the book, Ibari, they're the same person.
05:39Yeah.
05:40But they also aren't at all.
05:42Right.
05:42How did you think about the idea of identity in writing the book?
05:46What was top of mind for you?
05:48I've been fascinated for a really long time by the idea of the counter life.
05:51So that's the life you didn't live, where you didn't immigrate from Canada, or you went to a different school,
05:57or took a different job, or married a different person.
06:00These inflection points that would have made us over the passage of time into somewhat different people.
06:05And I think the reason I'm so interested in that idea is that the life I'm living feels a little
06:11bit improbable to me.
06:12Or like your life.
06:14Yeah.
06:14I'm from Canada, and I'm training a temporary dance.
06:17And I don't have a high school diploma.
06:19So, you know, I do have moments of thinking, this actually feels fairly implausible.
06:24You know, this is not a particularly plausible outcome if someone were to say, look at what my life looked
06:30like when I was 17 or 18 years old.
06:32Those counter lives that I could have lived feel so much more plausible to me.
06:37The life where I stayed in Canada and kept dancing or whatever it was.
06:41I was thinking of identity in terms of the people we could have been, you know, given different choices, certainly.
06:48But then in this book, it was also interesting to me to think about what is the counter life of
06:52the state?
06:53Because that's a really interesting idea.
06:56I was going to say in any democratic country, but honestly, in any country.
07:00Like, you can look at the history, I think, of any given nation and see the moments where it veered
07:05one way instead of another and became fairly rapidly an entirely different country than it would otherwise have been if
07:12it had gone the other way at that, you know, those crossroads.
07:15That's very easy to do in this country for reasons too obvious to even get into.
07:20I was thinking about, well, if we take that idea of the counter life of the individual, these different people
07:26we could have been, how is that affected by the counter life of the state?
07:30Because we are so influenced by the environment we live in, the people that surround us.
07:37I think that I'm a different person having lived for, God, 23 years in New York City than I would
07:43have been if I had stayed in, say, rural British Columbia where I grew up.
07:46Oh, for sure.
07:46For sure, yeah.
07:47I think about that too all the time.
07:48Yeah, yeah, you're from Canada too.
07:49Yes, we're both Canadians and it's like the version of me that stayed in Canada, there was a very formative
07:56fork in the road where that changed for me and I moved.
07:59Yeah, yeah.
07:59And I think a lot about what if I had just stayed in Calgary?
08:03Right.
08:03Like, what would that be like?
08:04Totally plausible life.
08:05And the context of Canada as a country to live in versus the United States.
08:10Yeah, it's a little more chill.
08:12I'm just going to say.
08:12It's a little more chill.
08:14Yeah.
08:14So, you know, here we are, both extremely unchill people in New York City.
08:18Yes, thriving.
08:20Thriving, yeah.
08:20Living our best lives.
08:21Living our best lives, extremely stressful lives, but here we are.
08:24Ari and Abari, they grow up in different versions of a country.
08:27And they are so profoundly shaped by that country.
08:30So who are you pushed into becoming by the environment you live in?
08:34What I was also thinking about is the way, you know, I think we all have our sort of natural
08:39interests and proclivities.
08:41We're obviously both drawn to writing and words and stories and different, you know, in different versions of that.
08:46I saw Ari as somebody who's, she's got this character flaw where she's fundamentally drawn toward crime.
08:54She is.
08:54And as I say that, maybe it's not even a flaw.
08:56Maybe it's just an interest because there's a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes
09:01a criminal.
09:02But there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police.
09:07And it was interesting to me to think about that.
09:09The way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we're raised in.
09:13I almost hate to ask this because both versions of the United States that you portray in the book are
09:20really frightening in their own respects.
09:23Did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another?
09:27Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?
09:30No, they're both really hard.
09:32They're both awful.
09:32Yeah, they're both awful.
09:33No, the version I want to live in is Canada, candidly.
09:35There you go.
09:36No, it's like, do you want to live in chaos or do you want to live in the totalitarian police
09:40state?
09:41Yeah, hard pass on both, honestly.
09:43Hard pass on both.
09:44Yeah.
09:44What I was trying to convey in this book is that no country lasts forever.
09:50That's an idea I've been thinking about a lot.
09:52And no version of a country lasts forever.
09:55And there's both terror and hope in that idea.
09:57So the totalitarian police state version is not going to last forever and neither is the period of total chaos.
10:04But I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut, like for people who have read a
10:07lot of my work, but in Sea of Tranquility, there is a futuristic section where an author is on a
10:12book tour in the year 2300.
10:15And she's traveling between the Republic of California, the Atlantic Republic, the Kingdom of Deseret on a book tour.
10:21And it's chill enough to support a book tour.
10:24Yes, yes, yes.
10:25But yeah, I kind of wanted to suggest that this is the founding story of that space.
10:30Oh, interesting.
10:32I wanted to ask you actually about your multiverse.
10:36Okay.
10:36You have a history that is sort of among your fans, something that they really glom onto, which is you
10:44pull from previous works and you bring people and worlds into your new work.
10:50And that continues with Exit Party.
10:52You've talked about it as a multiverse, a cinematic universe.
10:55The New Yorker called it, quote, the Mandel cinematic universe, which I think is pretty incredible to have the New
11:01Yorker coin a term for what you're doing with your books.
11:04Is there a master plan here or is it just ad hoc as inspiration strikes that you think, oh, that
11:10person from that book?
11:12Or are you imagining this entire world in your head as you're writing a new book?
11:16I wish I could say I had that kind of brain that I just like hold an entire multiverse.
11:20It's very possible that you do.
11:22I should just say yes.
11:23But no, there is no plan.
11:25That's the baseline for individual books when I start them.
11:29But also for the Mandelverse.
11:32As some people have also called it, it's a nickname, I guess.
11:35I just like the opportunities for connection.
11:38I think that, I guess I have some abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe.
11:42You know, I like finding the moments when books can be drawn together.
11:47Or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character and I want to spend more time with that
11:51person.
11:52Like, you know, Miranda in Station Eleven.
11:54I really liked her.
11:55And then it was really interesting to get to see a completely different facet of her life in the Glass
12:01Hotel.
12:01To see her as a shipping executive as opposed to an artist.
12:05And then I guess with Exit Party, I did lay the groundwork and sea of tranquility for a world where
12:13the United States no longer exists.
12:15So I guess you could make that argument that that implies the origin story.
12:18That implies there maybe is a secret master plan.
12:20It implies it.
12:21I wish it existed.
12:22It doesn't.
12:24It would make your life a lot easier.
12:25It would be.
12:26Yeah, it would make my life easier.
12:27One of the things I love about your books, I mean several of them at least, is that they're set
12:32in the future.
12:34But they don't foreground the technology.
12:36Like I'm not reading the book for crazy nanotech and this and that.
12:41And sort of like the whiz bang, gee whiz, Jetsons kind of future.
12:45They foreground the people and the human stories and the lived experience.
12:50Although the technology and the science is often very present, it's certainly present in Exit Party.
12:55How do you think about introducing technology and science into your work?
12:59I mean how much research goes into that and how much commitment to factual accuracy as opposed to just letting
13:06your imagination run?
13:08Right.
13:09What I'm aiming for is plausibility in the context of a literary novel, which is going to be a disappointingly
13:15low bar for like your average wired podcast interview.
13:18Well, it is fiction.
13:20It is fiction.
13:20Yeah.
13:21You know, I think that you've touched upon a really interesting choice that writers of speculative fiction need to make
13:28every time we embark on a new project, which is really just how deep into the weeds you want to
13:34go on your science fictional technology.
13:36Mm-hmm.
13:37And there are writers who go pretty deep.
13:39Like I love Tsesheen Liu's work, The Three Body Problem and the rest of that series.
13:44And he will go so deep into these science fictional technologies, which to my totally untrained eye, like it feels
13:51totally plausible.
13:52I'll be like, yeah, OK, like that rings true to me.
13:54Like, sure.
13:55Yeah.
13:55Yeah, I believe that.
13:56I did flirt with that a little bit when I was starting out on Sea of Tranquility, which has a
14:01time traveling detective because we were all deranged during the pandemic.
14:06But yeah, I was thinking about that.
14:08Like, well, how would this actually work?
14:10I was reading about the quantum blockchain and like trying to understand what the mechanics could be.
14:16But then at a certain point, I realized, you know what?
14:19It's just transport.
14:21Like if I'm not explaining how your car works in the 2020 segment of the novel, then why do I
14:27care about the mechanics of the time machine?
14:28And what I find is that I'm just much more interested in the people and in how, you know, these
14:35extreme situations and these science fictional setups, I suppose, how those impact the characters in the book.
14:43And I find myself much less interested in the mechanics.
14:45So that's just to say there's no right or wrong way to do it.
14:48But I definitely lean more on the side of the characters.
14:52Is there a, for lack of a better term, sci-fi concept that you would love to write about, but
14:59you just haven't had the right opportunity?
15:00You've covered a lot of bases.
15:02Yeah.
15:02I mean, I've got time travel.
15:03I've got parallel universes.
15:05You sure do.
15:05I sure do.
15:06Yeah.
15:07Not off the top of my head.
15:08I guess we'll have to see what comes next.
15:10I'll have to see what comes next.
15:11Yeah.
15:11Yeah.
15:12Now, there is a part in your book from Ibarri's perspective.
15:16She's working as a detective in the secret police in one of these United States.
15:19She has this thought, and I'll quote it.
15:22I've spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious
15:26given my work.
15:27But there are observations I've made that I share with no one.
15:30And one of them has to do with the way a place like this reality splits into two.
15:35That line, reality splits into two, is great.
15:37What does it mean?
15:39What does it mean to you?
15:40So in the context of that passage, she's a secret agent with a cover story, basically.
15:46Yeah.
15:46Yeah.
15:46But the cover story is that she's a professor, and she actually is teaching real classes.
15:52So it's not false that she's a professor.
15:55It's just that she's also secret police.
15:57I guess she has the most obvious kind of surface experience of that idea of kind of living a double
16:03life.
16:03But then I guess you could argue that a lot of people in that kind of society, you know, it's
16:09– I don't want to say it's exactly modeled on East Germany, but the Stasi operatus where, you know, civilians
16:16were constantly reporting on each other, which everybody thought was overstated until the country collapsed.
16:21And it turned out to have been even bigger than anyone knew, which is amazing.
16:24And everybody really was reporting on each other.
16:27That does create this awful kind of doubleness where, you know, there's the part of you that's a friend, but
16:32then there's a part of you that's reporting on the friend to your handler.
16:35And both of those ideas are true.
16:38But I think that also living that kind of doubleness would do a lot of damage to a person, you
16:44know, just in terms of – it sounds so literary and pretentious to say damage to your soul, but I
16:49think that might be the situation.
16:51I think so much of that, too, when I think about the book, there's so much in the book about
16:56the idea of trust, right?
16:57In that surveillance state, there are some very stressful passages, at least for me, in the book where you realize
17:02that none of these people can really fundamentally trust each other, right?
17:06Because they're all wondering who is also involved in surveillance.
17:11And then in the other universe, there is this very sort of baseline notion of trust eroding because everybody is
17:18just looking out for themselves in this chaos.
17:20I'm thinking now about the United States that we live in, where trust is in shorter and shorter supply.
17:27Yeah.
17:28How were you thinking about that as you were writing the book?
17:30I mean, did you have any revelations about trust in this country that we could all learn from?
17:36It's not specific to this country, but this actually leads us into AI for me.
17:40Oh, great.
17:41Where, you know, that's a fun topic.
17:42Let's do it.
17:42We've got to talk about it.
17:43Yeah.
17:43You know much more about it than I do.
17:44Do you remember when we were kids and a video was proof?
17:49Oh, yeah.
17:49Of anything.
17:50Yeah.
17:50It was like, oh, there is video evidence, case closed.
17:54How terrifying and damaging and ridiculous that our children are being raised in a world where a video means absolutely
18:01nothing.
18:02Yeah.
18:02You know, it's incredibly hard to authenticate.
18:04And that's what I find myself thinking about when I think about trust.
18:09But then also, I sometimes lurk on threads just like recreationally.
18:13On threads, the meta-owned platform.
18:15Yes, exactly.
18:16I don't post, but it is such a kind of trash fire.
18:20It's like Twitter in, I don't know, 2012 or something.
18:22I think I gave up on threads after like a couple months.
18:25I can't handle it.
18:26It's a constant flame war.
18:27Yeah.
18:27And it's like, you know, that's the equivalent, my equivalent of like reading, I don't know, tabloid gossip.
18:32Yeah.
18:32It's just like, wow.
18:33Like, what are we wilding out about today?
18:35Something real that's really struck me is the degree of betrayal that people feel when it emerges that an author
18:41has been using AI.
18:42And I share that sense of betrayal.
18:44It offends me in some incredibly deep way.
18:49And when I try to parse why that is, I think trust might be the answer.
18:54You know, that feeling of, I thought this work of art was created by a human.
18:59I thought that I was accessing something real.
19:02And it turns out, nope, they just fed it into a clod or whatever, you know?
19:05Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:05Like, I thought you made this.
19:07Yes, exactly.
19:08Yeah.
19:08I was going to ask you about AI.
19:10I'm curious about your thoughts on it in many respects.
19:14I mean, your creativity and your voice is yours.
19:18And it's how you make a living.
19:19I mean, it is very sort of like fundamental to you.
19:23Yeah.
19:23And you write novels.
19:25You also work in Hollywood.
19:27And so you have exposure to sort of what's happening in book world around AI and also what is happening
19:33in the entertainment industry.
19:34Yeah.
19:35Do you use it at all?
19:36I don't.
19:37I don't use it.
19:38Maybe this makes me an outlier at this point.
19:40I haven't found it reliable in search.
19:43And so that made me distrust it completely.
19:46Every now and again, I like to do a search and make sure that my daughter is not on the
19:51internet, basically.
19:52So I searched Emily St. John Mandel's daughter, I think, about a year ago.
19:57And AI is so confidently wrong.
19:59It's like it's the guy at the bar who you just like knows that.
20:02Did it confidently introduce you to your daughter?
20:04No, it confidently introduced me to my son, Leo, born in 2016 and said, Emily St. John Mandel does not
20:10have a daughter.
20:11And it's so confident that you have a moment of just like, wait, do I have a son?
20:16What universe am I living in?
20:17Yeah, exactly.
20:18That is wild.
20:19Yeah, so, you know, I do not have a son named Leo.
20:21I have no idea where that came from.
20:23I searched again a month later and it had revised that.
20:26And, you know, my daughter remained unnamed, which is what I wanted to confirm.
20:29Yeah.
20:31But it made me distrust it fundamentally from a search perspective.
20:35I know that it can be used to streamline administrative tasks.
20:38I haven't used it as such.
20:39I can write my own emails.
20:41Yeah, I was going to say, you're still writing your own emails over here?
20:43Yeah, yeah, exactly.
20:43I mean, so am I, for the record.
20:45And, you know, it was interesting.
20:46I've read your interview with, was it Matthew Belonti who was talking about?
20:49Matthew Bologna, yeah.
20:50Bologna, thank you.
20:51Yeah, I'm talking about use of AI.
20:53And it was interesting to me because without refuting anything he's saying, I've just had
20:56a different experience.
20:57And I haven't heard of people using it.
21:01In fiction world or in Hollywood?
21:03In Hollywood.
21:04In Hollywood.
21:04Yeah, in both.
21:05I don't know.
21:05I suppose AI is an argument for the in-person writer's room.
21:09You really can't use it if you're sitting around a table and there's a chalkboard.
21:13But, yeah, probably people are using it without my knowledge, but I haven't personally encountered
21:18it.
21:18When you look at the effect it's having on book publishing, I mean, we have covered some
21:24of this, but it is chaos out there in book world.
21:27It's chaos.
21:28It's crazy.
21:28I was talking to an agent the other day and he was saying, like, there are no rules of
21:32the road here.
21:33Yeah.
21:34Like, he will have someone submit a book proposal and he's like, great, da-da-da-da-da.
21:39And then it will ultimately turn out to have been generated with artificial intelligence.
21:43But there is no, like, policy for publishers.
21:47How does that all look from where you sit?
21:49I mean, do you worry about AI slop books becoming a mainstream commodity, taking up sort of like
21:56a bigger share of the fiction market?
21:57Or do you think people just don't have the taste for that?
22:00I'd like to think they don't have the taste for it.
22:02But I think the slop will get less sloppish with time is the risk.
22:06What I really worry about, actually, is less the work and I worry more about writers.
22:11I started publishing in 2009 and I have a consistent voice across books.
22:17My process is such that it would be very easy for me to produce iterative drafts of what
22:22I've been doing if I were ever forced to prove that it's not AI, which it absolutely
22:27is not.
22:27But not all writers have that process.
22:29Some are just, you know, changing a word doc over a period of time.
22:34Not all of us keep written notes.
22:36And something that's emerging, I think, that alarms me is that it's very hard to prove
22:40sometimes that your work wasn't AI.
22:42Or like to prove a negative.
22:44Yeah, to prove a negative.
22:44Like the reputational risk.
22:46The reputational risk is enormous.
22:47Like that's the end of a career, at the very least the end of a book deal.
22:51I had a weird experience a while ago where I was just curious.
22:54So I found some free AI detection thing online, which like probably stole my work.
22:59And I pasted the first chapter of Exit Party in.
23:03And what it came back with was there's a 20% chance that AI was used on this.
23:08And at first I was completely beside myself.
23:10I was like, how does it think that?
23:12And then I realized, oh, because Anthropic and other companies stole five of my novels to
23:16train their hell.
23:18So it's like, I know this voice.
23:21Yeah, AI is like, this seems oddly familiar.
23:23Oh, that is so bizarre.
23:24So that's annoying.
23:25But to your point, I mean, the idea of being a writer for a living right now, and you're
23:31doing the work yourself, you're doing it with integrity, you are painstaking in your
23:36process, and one accusation or one result like that that maybe says like 60% chance this
23:43is AI, right?
23:43And these tools are extremely flawed.
23:45Yeah, they're very inaccurate.
23:47But that can end a career.
23:49I mean, the stakes of this are very, very high.
23:51I actually did the same thing.
23:53I think anyone who writes for a living right now has this paranoia.
23:56I fed some of my articles into one of these tools because I was like, I just want to
24:01know what it's going to say.
24:02Yeah, like, do I sound like AI?
24:03And I got back 0%.
24:05Congratulations.
24:06That's amazing.
24:07But it was such a relief because there is this sense, this cloud of someone can point
24:13a finger.
24:13And the people who are using AI, I would argue, in creative pursuits are kind of ruining it
24:18for everybody else.
24:18I would agree with that.
24:20I don't have any respect for them.
24:21It's like, if you can't write, then maybe do something different.
24:24Do something else.
24:24There are a lot of better jobs.
24:26Let me back up a little bit.
24:28I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about you and your career.
24:32Okay.
24:33You talked a little bit at the top about you grew up in Canada.
24:37Yeah.
24:37You were in Toronto.
24:38And you're right.
24:40I mean, objectively speaking, where you are now is improbable relative to where you were
24:44then.
24:44Tell us about, like, those early years.
24:46I'm going to digress for a second back to the book.
24:49So much of this book is about the condition of living one life after another.
24:52And this is so many lives ago that it's like looking back at a stranger.
24:56Yeah, so I grew up in rural British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and then Denman Island, which
25:02is, just for context, about the same size and shape as Manhattan, but with a thousand
25:06people.
25:07It's just, it's forest and deer and a general store.
25:10Yes, I grew up there.
25:11I was homeschooled.
25:12I did a couple semesters of community college without ever getting my GED because I could.
25:19And then I auditioned successfully for a conservatory program and contemporary dance in Toronto.
25:24And I was a professional dancer after that for like five minutes.
25:27Like, I just, you know, that had been the dream since I was six years old.
25:31Was it because you realized the dream and then found that it wasn't what you wanted?
25:36I didn't quite realize the dream.
25:38Like, I went pretty far, but I never really joined a company.
25:41I just danced for a few.
25:42I don't know what the necessary steps are.
25:44Yeah, yeah.
25:44No, I didn't go all the way.
25:45I danced for a couple of independent choreographers.
25:47I loved that experience.
25:49But I never got into, like, one of the big companies.
25:52I think in part because I'd realized by then that I no longer loved it.
25:56There's this phenomenon, I think, where if you've been dead set on one thing your entire life, like since you
26:02were six, then, you know, you can fall out of love with it.
26:05People change.
26:06So in my early 20s, I realized that dance was feeling like more of a chore than anything else.
26:12And I kind of resented it and I didn't love it anymore.
26:15This is kind of spectacularly poor planning on my part.
26:18I'd taken out student loans to go to the School of Toronto Dance Theater.
26:22Not a degree-granting program.
26:24Oh, dear.
26:24So I had, yeah, mountain of student loan debt, no degree, no high school diploma.
26:29Like, it's hard to feel overwrought if you wrote that in a novel.
26:33My editor would probably do, like, question marks in the margin.
26:35Yes, yes, yes.
26:35Like, plausible.
26:37But, yeah, worst case scenario.
26:39This many poor choices.
26:40Exactly.
26:40That many poor choices.
26:41Yeah.
26:42So, yeah, the string of multiple poor choices.
26:45I had a totally destroyed credit rating in Canada.
26:48Oh, my God.
26:50Student loan debt.
26:51So I moved to the United States.
26:52Perfect.
26:53Yeah, that was the solution to that problem.
26:55No, in all seriousness, I was living in Canada.
26:59I no longer love dance.
27:01I'd always written just as a hobby.
27:03It was just something I loved and something I did a little bit compulsively.
27:07Like, if I went for a long walk, I'd bring a notebook, because otherwise I might start
27:12writing stories on Starbucks napkins.
27:14I was starting to write in Toronto.
27:16I met a guy who lived in New York, and we were dating, and I moved to New York to
27:20be with
27:21him.
27:21Moved back to Montreal, broke up, and then I was kind of stranded in Montreal.
27:26You know, Montreal in winter, working retail, trying to figure out what to do with the rest
27:30of my life.
27:31It is a cold city.
27:32It is a very cold city, which actually played into my writing process.
27:36Fair.
27:36It was so cold.
27:37My roommates and I were dead broke, so we kept the heat turned down pretty low.
27:42So I would go to bed at, like, 7 p.m., just because I was so cold.
27:46Easier to be asleep.
27:47It was easier to be asleep.
27:48So I would sleep until about 1 in the morning, and then naturally wake up, because, again,
27:54I'd gone to bed at 7.
27:55Yeah.
27:55I'd get up in the middle of the night.
27:56I would dress to write.
27:59Like, I had this feeling that I was doing something formal and important.
28:02I would put on, like, a sweater and a tie and, like, my warmest coat and go out with
28:08my laptop to the 24-hour cafe two blocks away, and I would write right until morning.
28:14And that was the book that ultimately became Last Night in Montreal.
28:18Wow.
28:18I was able to find a way to move back to New York with, yeah, with, I don't know, $400
28:24and, like, a 10-day sublet in the West Village when I was 22 or so.
28:30I've been here ever since.
28:31So I started writing Last Night in Montreal in Montreal.
28:34I finished it in New York.
28:35And then I just started cold-quarying agents, and the 13th or 14th one found me in her slush
28:43pile and took me on.
28:44So crazy.
28:45Yeah.
28:45It was a lot of luck and also an incredible amount of hard work and literally cold nights
28:50in Montreal.
28:51And you had a day job until, like, a bizarre juncture, I have to say.
28:56I did.
28:56I did.
28:57Yeah.
28:57So, you know, I'm from a very working-class background.
28:59And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job because there
29:05is no safety net.
29:06I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal.
29:09I became an assistant in New York.
29:11I had a really great job for a long time at the Rockefeller University.
29:15I was an admin in a cancer research lab.
29:18And I loved that.
29:19It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work.
29:23And the health insurance was incredible.
29:25So I kept that job until a year after Station 11 came out.
29:31That's so wild to me.
29:32It got so surreal, Katie.
29:33I can't tell you.
29:34One of my jobs in that position, or one of my tasks, rather, was I had to book plane tickets
29:42for my boss.
29:42But I wasn't booking my own plane tickets for the tour.
29:45I had three publicists doing that.
29:47Right.
29:47Or, like, there was a day when I had to leave work early because I had a photo shoot at
29:51Time
29:52Magazine.
29:53Yes.
29:53Yeah, I stayed until, um...
29:56Did someone tell you, like, Emily, it's time.
30:00You need to quit your job.
30:01You know what it was?
30:02I did a podcast where the other guest was this comedian, Josh Gondelman.
30:08Oh, yeah.
30:08Yeah, who's lovely.
30:10And at the time, I guess it was a few months after Station 11 had come out.
30:14And I was really grappling with the day job question.
30:17Like, does it make sense to leave?
30:18Is leaving crazy?
30:20What if I never have another successful book?
30:21And he told me that a comedian had...
30:23A fellow comedian had once told him, keep your day job until you can't afford to anymore.
30:28Hmm.
30:29And I found that to be a really helpful way of framing it.
30:33So I kept that job until I found out I was three months pregnant.
30:36And then that was too many things.
30:37Yeah.
30:38Yeah.
30:38Yeah.
30:39Adding a baby onto that would be...
30:40Adding a baby would have been a bit much.
30:41A little much.
30:41Yeah.
30:42Station 11 was successful right out of the gate.
30:45And then it had this second life during the pandemic.
30:49It did.
30:49And you became this almost like online magnet, this like pandemic profit magnet for people.
31:00That was so weird.
31:01Who were asking you like on Twitter, like help, like what do we do in the pandemic?
31:08And you've talked a little bit about this.
31:10I mean, you did some interviews around then and afterwards.
31:13Looking back on it now, right?
31:15It's been five, six years.
31:16What stands out to you from that experience?
31:18Which like COVID was weird for everybody.
31:21Weird and scary and sad.
31:22For you, it was weird in a very singular way.
31:26There weren't many people being consulted as like a prophet of pandemics.
31:32What was it like to write a fictional book and then be asked for guidance in a real world pandemic?
31:36It was so surreal and the requests were so misplaced.
31:40Like if you're going to look to a writer for guidance, like I want to be like, go talk to
31:44Ed Young.
31:44Yeah, I was just thinking Ed Young.
31:46Yeah.
31:46There were so many people who are more qualified than I was to say what to do in a pandemic.
31:51Yeah, I was fascinated by that.
31:53It was very strange being accused sounds too dramatic, but like being accused of being a prophet in a weird
32:01way.
32:01And what a dark thing to be.
32:04Yeah, it's really dark.
32:05But it's also the thing that I was never able to quite convey at the time was that there was
32:11always going to be another pandemic.
32:13So I didn't see myself as having foretold anything.
32:16The way I thought of it at the time was, well, if I'd written a novel with a fictional war,
32:20does that mean that I predicted whatever war came next after that in the real world?
32:26But the pandemic just felt so singular to us.
32:29I want to say us. You know what? Let's acknowledge our privilege here.
32:33Like we're people who had not lived through a previous pandemic, which is obviously not the case in other parts
32:38of the world.
32:38It was so shocking to us in North America that I think people did kind of glom onto that book
32:45in a way that they wouldn't have, you know, if the thing that had ended the world in Station 11
32:50had been, say, a war.
32:51It just it was so novel and shocking.
32:53And I was what's funny is I was exactly as unprepared as everybody else.
32:59And the reason why this is embarrassing is, you know, I've had this this sideline for years of doing onstage
33:07conversations and lectures.
33:09And I was doing that right up until March 2020.
33:13So so I had this long lecture that I developed about post-apocalyptic literature, about pandemics and Shakespeare and like,
33:21you know, all themes that dovetailed with Station 11.
33:23And so I was literally traveling the country, delivering a lecture that contained the phrase, there will always be another
33:31pandemic.
33:33It is so embarrassing how shocked I was that there was, in fact, another pandemic.
33:37And I was scrambling for toilet paper like everybody else.
33:41Yeah. You're like, guys, I don't know if you should put Clorox all over your groceries.
33:44I'm just trying to figure this out.
33:45I was like, yeah.
33:46Yeah. Oh, I definitely did that.
33:48Yeah.
33:48For probably longer than I should have.
33:50The same. Yeah.
33:51I'm curious about how you deal with celebrity.
33:54Just thinking about that sort of social media onslaught during COVID.
34:00You don't strike me as someone who's particularly eager to post.
34:03You know what I mean?
34:04No, you've discovered my secret.
34:06How do you deal with that part of the job of like being famous on the Internet?
34:11I think for some people they would go, you know, full throttle into like posting Instagram stories, whatever it is
34:18they're going to do.
34:19How do you handle it?
34:20And do you feel pressure to do it differently than what you're inclined to do?
34:25Yeah.
34:25I think that if I were doing – if I were on Instagram just to be on Instagram, I don't
34:32know if you'd ever see my face.
34:33Right.
34:33Totally.
34:33Because I love posting the weird, beautiful little videos.
34:37Like I just posted one that's spiderwebs on a hiking trail in the Adirondacks last week.
34:43I have to admit I saw that because I was curious about your Instagram profile.
34:48And I was like, yep, she definitely is not someone who's like dying to post.
34:52I'm not dying to post.
34:53I'm really not.
34:53But if I see something –
34:55You're doing your thing.
34:55I'm doing my thing.
34:55If I see something cool and beautiful and I think, oh, that's kind of amazing in just a tiny little
35:00moment.
35:01And could I set it to music?
35:03Like that would be cool.
35:03I really like reels.
35:05That's how I probably naturally would use it.
35:07I do feel a certain pressure to – yeah, to post – I guess to post my face for the
35:13algorithms or – I do need to – I do feel like I need to promote my books because it
35:20is literally how I pay my rent.
35:22So it's like it just kind of feels like part of the job.
35:24But then I don't want – I don't want to get too negative here because I do genuinely love interacting
35:30with readers.
35:31So I guess I kind of want it both ways.
35:32Yeah.
35:33No, I know what you mean.
35:34Yeah.
35:34Yeah.
35:35It's – there is pressure in there.
35:37I find social media generally terrifying.
35:40I've had a lot of very negative interactions over the years.
35:43And what's funny is just the way the human brain is wired.
35:47Positive interactions outweigh the negative interactions a thousand to one.
35:51But like of course I also remember the negative ones.
35:53The negative ones stand out.
35:54Yeah.
35:55What is it like to promote a book in the year 2026?
35:59It feels a bit chaotic.
36:00But I think that's because the country feels more chaotic than it did in past years.
36:05I think that I have a very atypical experience of book promotion because I had these three novels published by
36:13a really small press.
36:14And then I jumped to Knopf in the U.S., HarperCollins Canada, and Pan Macmillan in the U.K. for
36:20Station Eleven.
36:21And I've been with those three publishers ever since.
36:23And because Station Eleven was so successful, that meant that a lot of marketing resources have been poured into the
36:30subsequent books.
36:31So I think that that gives me a really unusual experience.
36:35And I think that it's not normal at all.
36:38So it makes me hesitant to draw any generalizations because for me it's fine.
36:44But I think that that's certainly not the case for the vast majority of novelists.
36:49I think there's so much distraction and chatter and such short attention spans that I think it's incredibly difficult to
36:57start out as a novelist now.
37:00And, you know, it was never actually easy.
37:02But my sense is that it might be harder now.
37:04Just in this, the more fractured and the more kind of, I keep using the word chaotic, but the more
37:09chaotic the media landscape becomes, I think the harder it is for a novelist to break through.
37:14Do you have any advice for those people?
37:17Stay off threads, for real.
37:19Stay off threads.
37:20Okay.
37:20Like, I don't really post, but I do read.
37:22I see the most deranged publishing advice on threads.
37:26Like, I can't.
37:27Like what?
37:28Like, I don't even know.
37:29I just, like, every time I read it, I'm like, no, that makes no sense.
37:32Don't do that.
37:33Don't do that.
37:34No, like, I have very concrete advice for writers who, you know, are trying to get an agent, for example.
37:40There's just a lot of bad advice floating around social media.
37:43Yeah.
37:44And there's a lot of noise.
37:45And I have to imagine for anyone trying to break through now, they would feel like so much of that
37:50success is contingent on social media and TikTok and Instagram and sort of how they show up on those platforms.
37:57Yeah.
37:58And I would say you miss that by a few years.
38:01I think so.
38:01You're very lucky.
38:02I want to end by coming back to Exit Party.
38:07Okay.
38:07And I hate to ask some of this, but I'm going to anyways.
38:10Okay.
38:10Go for it.
38:10You were accused, for lack of a better word, of being a prophet when Station Eleven did not cause the
38:17pandemic, but happened to be about a pandemic.
38:21You've now written a book that is uncomfortably close to what we are going through in the United States.
38:27Are you bracing yourself for a similar reaction?
38:32Yeah.
38:32But look, if the country collapses, it's not my fault.
38:36That's my...
38:37She said it here first.
38:38That's what I said first.
38:39She didn't do it.
38:40Yeah.
38:40I didn't do it.
38:41I just read the news and got freaked out like everybody else.
38:45Is there anything in the world you've created in the book that you hope turns out to be prophetic?
38:51Absolutely.
38:52I don't want to take credit for the parties after this, but you know what?
38:57It's hope itself.
38:59There is a lot of hope in this book.
39:01It opens at a moment when the country has collapsed, but something new is taking its place.
39:07And it's a kind of chaotic in-between period, but I never meant to imply that would last forever.
39:12I think that settles down into something more stable and potentially better.
39:17And then on the side of the book that deals with a totalitarian state, that totalitarianism is already crumbling toward
39:25the end.
39:26So, yeah, you know, I think there is hope.
39:30And I think that we see that even now, you know, in our current incredibly dark political moment.
39:38On the one hand, you have the ice raids.
39:42On the other hand, look at Minneapolis.
39:44Like, I get choked up thinking about the way people responded to that.
39:47Yeah, it's incredible, and it's incredibly brave and extraordinary.
39:52I mean, maybe what you'll get credit for predicting is the dawn of an even better version of this country.
40:00That would be lovely.
40:01We can hope.
40:02We can hope.
40:03Emily, thank you so much for being here.
40:04It's been such a pleasure.
40:05It was great.
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