Issue 78: A Conversation with Emily ST. John Mandel

“IT’S DIFFICULT IN TIMES LIKE THESE,” Anne Frank wrote. “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Frank’s words, delivered in the face of what she called “grim reality,” reflect the same innate sense of hope woven throughout Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven. The book begins in the hours before a deadly pandemic sweeps across the globe, with the opening scenes set onstage during a production of King Lear. The story jumps ahead to twenty years later, as a troupe of actors and symphony musicians— survivors of what they call The Collapse—travel around Lake Michigan performing music and Shakespeare for other survivors. Weaving together multiple points of view, Mandel moves back and forth across time to slowly reveal connecting threads between the characters’ lives, while examining what was lost and what might be gained as her characters look toward rebuilding civilization. Station Eleven, Joshua Rothman wrote in The New Yorker, “asks how culture gets put together again. It imagines a future in which art, shorn of the distractions of celebrity, pedigree, and class, might find a new equilibrium.”

Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the novel won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. One of Mandel’s three previous novels, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystère de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013 and Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. She is a staff writer for The Millions, and lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

In the spring 2016 issue of Humanities magazine, Mandel reflected on her time on the road with Station Eleven, a tour initially planned for five cities that grew into well over one hundred events in seven countries, during which time Mandel and her husband learned they were expecting their first child. She recalled photographing each hotel room door so as not to forget the room number, and joked about flight attendants looking nervous that she’d go into labor midair. “The tour had begun to mirror the book; we traveled endlessly, my fictional characters and I, afraid of violence and sustained by our art, exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure, and the costs were not insignificant but we’d chosen this life.”

We spoke with Mandel during her visit for Spokane is Reading, a citywide common read program. Our conversation took place at the Davenport Hotel in a boardroom adorned with white marble, a gild- ed mirror over a fireplace, and an impressive chandelier. We discussed endangered elements of culture, the limiting nature of genre labels, and finding pleasure in privacy.

 

MELISSA HUGGINS

Author Dani Shapiro, in her craft book Still Writing, encourages writers to approach writing in the way that dancers approach their craft: “Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. . .she knows there is no difference between the practice and the art. The practice is the art.” As an artist who has pursued both dance and writing, does that resonate with you?

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

Absolutely. Dance was something I was set on doing from a very young age—I was one of those obsessive six-year-olds who only wanted to do ballet. I trained pretty intensively through my teens and went to school for contemporary dance in Toronto when I was eighteen. It was a great program, a great experience, but by the time I graduated, I felt done. That was all I’d wanted to do since six years old and I was twenty-one. It wasn’t fun anymore. I was living in Montreal and the auditions weren’t going well; they were in French, which was difficult, plus I had a hard time finding classes to take. I found myself drifting away from it. When I was very young it was part of my parents’ homeschooling curriculum that I had to write something every day, so I was in the habit of writing short stories and poems, which grew into a hobby. What’s funny in retrospect is that even during my late teens and early twenties, when I thought of dancing as my sole pursuit, I still found I had to take pen and paper with me when I went for a walk. I was a bit obsessive about writing. The transition between mediums was slow. I began gradually thinking of myself as a dancer who sometimes wrote, to a writer who sometimes danced, to just a writer. By the time I was twenty-two I wasn’t dancing anymore, only the occasional class, and I was at work on what eventually became my first novel, Last Night in Montreal.

HUGGINS

Have you written about dance or ballet, drawing on your experience?

MANDEL

Maybe it’s still too close. I may write about it at some point, but I haven’t yet.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

In addition to your novels and essays, you write book reviews regularly, which requires a different skill set than fiction writing. How has writing reviews influenced your other work?

MANDEL

Writing reviews has made me a better fiction writer. It forces you to deeply consider a work in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise, even as a careful reader. With a review you have to take a stance and defend it. Some people learn how to do that in their academic education, but that wasn’t part of my experience because of dance school, so I found reviewing to be helpful, forcing me to think about books in a more rigorous way.

There are some downsides to reviewing. I strongly dislike writing negative reviews. If someone gives me a book which in my opinion has a lot of problems, I hate that position. It’s possible I’m a little too soft-hearted to be the best possible reviewer but I try to be honest. There’s usually something good about a book or it wouldn’t have been published in the first place, but if there isn’t, I contact my editor and say “I don’t want to trash a book in the New York Times,” and they’ve been cool about it.

ANTHONY PAYNE

In the acknowledgements for The Lola Quartet you thanked author and critic Gina Frangello for her review of your first two novels, and you’ve written for The Millions about the sting of a bad review. What effect do reviews of your own work have on shaping your writing?

MANDEL

In the case of Gina Frangello’s review, she observed that in Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun, the female characters tended to have an ice queen aspect to them, perfectly controlled and impeccable and focused. It stung, but I thought, You know what, she’s right. They need to be more human, more flawed, a little messier. That shaped the writing of The Lola Quartet, and I was grateful to her. But I try not to read too many reviews at this point. When you get tagged on Twitter with a hundred blog reviews and they all contradict each other, there’s not a clear lesson to draw. Generally speaking, I don’t find them helpful. The bad ones do sting, especially when you feel they’re based on a misreading of your work. Of course you can’t respond without seeming like a lunatic. But even good reviews are subjective, representing one person’s point of view, and if you open yourself to being affected by the praise you also have to consider the negativity, some of which can be intense. I try not to read my reviews at this point, and I find I’m happier for it. It’s good for your sanity.

PAYNE

You wrote a lovely review of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, which portrays life in France after the German army invaded. I saw some similarities between Station Eleven and Suite Française, in terms of traveling bands of people affected by cataclysmic events. Was that book an influence on your writing?

MANDEL

I want to say that it was. It’s hard to remember—you write a book and then four years later you try to remember what you were thinking at the time—but yes, I believe I had started Station Eleven at the time I reviewed Suite Française. There’s such a clarity, lucidity, and power about her prose, that I do find myself thinking about those qualities when I’m writing. I think her work’s extraordinary.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve worked with small presses and big publishers, as well as online and print venues. Could you talk about the editing process and your relationship with editors?

MANDEL

Editors have made my books so much better than they other- wise would have been. My first editor, Greg Michalson at Unbridled Books, worked with me on the first three novels. He had a great line for what happens when you’ve been working on a book for a long time: you get snow-blind. That’s absolutely true. You could have a typo in your opening sentence and you won’t notice because you’ve been staring at it for two and a half years.

For Station Eleven, I made the jump from Unbridled, which is quite small, to a larger publisher. I agonized over it because Unbridled was great, but where small presses are concerned, I think it’s fair to say there’s a problem with book discoverability in this country. It’s extremely difficult for a small press title to gain significant momentum, readership, and attention, so I felt like I had to jump to a bigger publisher to find more readers. We sold the book to Knopf in the US, after I’d spoken to probably seven American editors in the lead-up to the auction, but I knew when my editor was the one. She was great. But the next day we sold it in Canada and the Canadian editor said, “Well, we’ve made an investment here, we’d like to be involved in the editing process.” I spoke to that editor on the phone, and she and the American editor were in agreement about where they wanted to take the book, so my agent and I decided, Okay, we’ll have two editors. Then the next week we sold in the UK and they said the same thing: “We’ve made an investment, we’d like to be involved.” We drew the line at three editors. I was really nervous about it; I was afraid it would be an editing-by-committee nightmare. It turned out to be extraordinary. Having three talented editors give you slightly different but complementary takes on the same work made the book so much better.

KEOWN VAUX

Would you be willing to go through that same editing process in the future?

 

MANDEL

With those three? Yes.

PAYNE

You mentioned the problem of book discoverability. You wrote an essay a few years ago for The Millions about a book tour that you financed yourself. Could you talk about that experience compared to what touring looks like for you now?

MANDEL

There were certainly no interviews in marble rooms back then. Unbridled Books did send me out on tour but it was short because it’s a small press and limited budget. I wanted to be able to say I’d done everything I could for the book, so I decided to do another tour in the Midwest where I knew there were booksellers who were interested. They set up a five-city tour, which I paid for. I justified going into debt to pay for it because I was expecting a check from my Canadian publishers the next month (which ended up being delayed for a year). So I put myself in debt to send myself on a tour of sketchy airport hotels in the Midwest. Tours like that are difficult because you’re out on your own, and I don’t drive, so there were a lot of uncomfortable Greyhound experiences and creepy hotels. At a couple of stops, I slept on friends’ floors. Touring at that level is difficult, but it was worth it because it helped build goodwill with booksellers, who appreciate it when you make an effort to visit their stores.

The current tour has been sort of endless. Last night was my 115th event for Station Eleven. That’s a lot of events, and audiences often have the same questions. But I’m grateful for being in this position. A lot of writers would love to have that problem, of touring “too much.” One of the pleasant things about touring is that I saw my career change over the course of the Station Eleven tour. I went out upon publication in September 2014, and there was some momentum, but when the National Book Award long list was announced while I was on the road, and the shortlist while I was still on the road a month later. . .it was incredible to see that gradual build over the course of my tour.

HUGGINS

It’s refreshing to hear you talk about the realities of the DIY tour. It sounds so romantic: strike out on the road to promote your art, be independent, visit bookstores across the country, but the reality—

MANDEL

—is a 4 a.m. airport pickup the fourth day in a row and it’s too early to get breakfast so you’re eating almonds from your bag. It’s funny, though, because even at this level—my hotel in Spokane is beautiful and it’s been such a pleasure being here—but a few days ago I was in a small town in the Midwest for a few nights and that was a very different experience. Even when you’re lucky enough to sometimes stay in lovely places, you still stay in places where breakfast is inedible and the creamers in the restaurant are spoiled. You’re doing laundry in hotel room sinks and hanging it out to dry overnight, which is actually good because then you don’t wake in the morning with a sore throat from the dry air in hotel rooms. Sometimes I’ll steal the flowers from room service trays delivered in my hallway and by the time I leave, I’ll have a little garden.

As the tour goes on, I’ve found myself more and more interested in spending time alone in my room writing. At events, you’re constantly talking to people. It can be nice to spend time by yourself after all of those interactions and conversations, instead of being out in the city. You get some work done and remind yourself, I’m a writer, that’s why I’m here.

KEOWN VAUX

In her praise of Station Eleven, Emma Straub said, “It’s the kind of book that speaks to the dozens of readers in me—the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist.” The novel incorporates elements of multiple genres, and you’ve spoken about being surprised that it’s been categorized as speculative fiction. Can you talk about the experience of having genre labels applied to your book, and how those affect audience?

MANDEL

Genre is such a subjective, confounding thing and I’ve dealt with it with all four of my books. With my first novel I thought I was writing literary fiction. But then rejections started coming in from publishers, many of whom said, “We like the book but we’re not sure how we’d market a book that’s more than one genre.” Hearing that response, I thought, Wait, I put a detective in it so it’s automatically detective fiction? I suppose I should have anticipated that. With the two books that followed, The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet, I wanted to play with genre and take it further. Could I speed up a story into a fast literary novel with a strong narrative drive and flirt with crime fiction? Then, of course, it’s categorized as crime fiction.

Except when it’s not, in which case it’s categorized as literary fiction. In France I’m a thriller writer, based on the same books. You start to realize how incredibly subjective these labels are.

With Station Eleven, I set out to do something different from those first three books. As much as I respect crime fiction, I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a crime writer. I wanted to be free to write anything I wanted. But again, if you set a book partly in the future, apparently you’ve written speculative fiction.

As readers, we have an unfortunate tendency to limit ourselves in regard to genre. I hear from a lot of people who say, “I really liked your book, but ten people had to tell me to read it before I picked it up because I don’t read sci-fi.” Okay, but you are cutting yourself off from a massive, rich literary tradition by taking that stance. Do you not read Margaret Atwood?

There was a great essay about genre in The New Yorker, and Joshua Rothman made what should be an obvious point: a book can be more than one genre. Look at Jane Eyre or Crime and Punishment. Both books are literary fiction and genre fiction. A novel can be science fiction and literary fiction, or literary fiction and a love story and a detective novel. I love that idea. It seems to me to be a more expansive way of looking at books.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a seminal book in this conversation, in terms of showing people that you can have a book that’s serious and literary but set in the post-apocalypse territory formerly reserved for pulp novels. The Road gave a generation of literary writers permission to write books that cross over, and it may have given readers a greater sense of acceptance for books that are more than one genre. A few years later there was a book called The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, which was very successful, won some of the top awards in Canada, and it’s essentially a Western. It’s also a spectacularly written literary novel. It makes for an exciting time to be a writer and a reader, that so many people are trying new experiments.

HUGGINS

With each successive book, it seems as if you’ve pushed a multi-point-of-view, non-linear structure further and further. How do you view that progression in your work thus far?

MANDEL

My first novel, Last Night in Montreal, had multiple points of view from the first draft, jumping back and forth between two characters, Eli and Lilia. My concept, in terms of the structure, was that it might be interesting to build toward the moments of greatest tension and perhaps in two plotlines simultaneously, rather than moving straight from linear time A to linear time B. That was an idea I tried to push further with each work. The structure lends itself to noir or crime fiction-influenced works because you can withhold information, flash back to the past, and sustain a lot of tension. With Station Eleven, I took it further, creating interview segments and sections about comic books, jumping back and forth from the interviews in year fifteen to Jeevan leaving Toronto. It created more of a collage effect, which I find to be effective in terms of character development. If you have a chapter from the point of view of character A, and the next chapter is character B looking at character A at a completely different time in her life, the reader gets a more complete vision of character A. I also found juxtaposition useful for contrasting the two worlds in the book. Rather than having a character say, “Oh, it was amazing when we used to have cell phones,” you can drop in a scene where they have cell phones and see the contrast in a visceral, immediate way.

HUGGINS

How do you decide a strategy for how much to divulge to the reader and when? With multiple time frames and multiple points of view, it seems challenging to decide how to parse out information while sustaining tension.

MANDEL

It’s a hard balance to strike. We’ve all read books where a writer withholds information in what’s ultimately an obnoxious and manipulative way. You think, “You could have just told me that and spared me twenty pages!” You try to put together a complex, interesting story and withhold enough information to sustain tension, but you don’t want to be a jerk about it. I read a book once where a chapter ended with a guy holding a knife to a woman’s throat and she was about to die. As a reader, you think, “Oh, my God, he just killed her” and then she comes back twenty pages later because, guess what, he decided not to at the last minute. You want to throw the book across the room. I try to avoid that.

PAYNE

Many of your characters are interested in freedom from their past: Anton and Elena in The Singer’s Gun, Gavin running from his disgrace in The Lola Quartet, and all of the characters in Station Eleven, particularly Miranda and Kirsten. What interests you about characters trying to escape their pasts?

MANDEL

I left home when I was eighteen, moved by myself from rural British Columbia to Toronto, roughly 3,000 miles. I found that to be a profound experience, how you can leave one life and at the other end of an airplane ride, a new life is waiting. I wasn’t escaping anything horrific, only the restlessness you feel as a teenager when you want to leave home and be independent and have your own life, but I think that’s why I seem to be obsessed with escape. Aren’t we all aspiring toward freedom, trying to be free within the constraints of our lives, our obligations and commitments? It’s something I struggled with in my own life, in terms of always needing a day job. How do you find a sense of freedom when you have to do a job you strongly dislike? It’s part of being a writer; you do a lot of unfortunate things to pay the rent. How do you find an internal sense of freedom when you’re forced to spend the finite hours of your life doing meaningless tasks? I’ve thought about it a lot and I keep returning to those questions in my work.

HUGGINS

Your characters have some great lines on that subject. In The Singer’s Gun, Elena says, “Work is always a little sordid.” For her, the difference between being a model for a somewhat pornographic photographer is not that different from her terrible office job.

MANDEL

It’s certainly not worse. I was really burnt out at my day jobs while I was writing The Singer’s Gun, so those questions of freedom and obligation were important to me. We’ve all been there. It’s a difficult, soul-crushing thing to navigate: how to make a living as a writer. I was particularly struggling with it when I wrote that novel.

HUGGINS

Because of the success of Station Eleven, you were able to transition from your part-time job to writing full time, though you’ve been occupied speaking practically full time. What did that shift mean to you?

MANDEL

It’s a transition I never thought I would be able to make. It never occurred to me that I’d be able to quit my day job. I was a part-time administrative assistant to the Cancer Research Lab at the Rockefeller University until August 2015, almost a year after Station Eleven came out. It was an interesting environment, working with scientists doing breast cancer research—my colleagues were brilliant, my boss was great—but it was getting a little ridiculous trying to be an administrative assistant remotely during my book tour. I realized I had to quit when I found myself in a hotel room in London at midnight on a Sunday, booking plane tickets for my boss.

The reality is that it’s hard to quit your job when you grew up without much money I know what it’s like to be poor. Plus, having grown up in Canada, I’m slightly traumatized by the American health care system. It felt like a leap to quit my day job because I’m acutely aware that while people are paying me to do events this year, that doesn’t mean they will two years from now. So much is out of my control. It’s not like a traditional workplace where if you do a good job, you’ll have some guarantee of future employment. What does “a good job” mean in literary fiction from one year to the next? Fashions change; maybe a jury will pick your book for an award or maybe they won’t. It was a little terrifying to make that decision, and because of that fear, I held on to my job for much longer than made sense. But it has made a huge difference. It’s great not trying to deal with scheduling meetings in New York while I’m six time zones away overseas. I’m looking forward to seeing what my life is like when the travel slows down.

KEOWN VAUX

I was struck, after reading Station Eleven and your other novels, by the way that you handle dead or dying elements of culture. The character Eli in Last Night in Montreal studies dead languages; in Station Eleven, Kirsten searches for additional issues of Miranda’s comics, Clarke curates the Museum of Civilization, and so on. What compels you to write about elements of culture that are fading, endangered, or lost?

MANDEL

It never occurred to me to draw a parallel there. It does fascinate me, the way we hold on to things. It seems as if the instinct that drives a person to create the Museum of Civilization in an airport is similar to the linguist recording the last speaker of an endangered language. I suppose I have that instinct for preservation, too.

Often, it’s a matter of my interests adhering to specific characters. With Last Night in Montreal, I read a fascinating article about dead and endangered languages, so I wrote about a character obsessed with it. I was fascinated by how there are 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, but half will be gone in the next hundred years and one disappears every ten days. The profound loneliness of the concept of last speakers, that it always comes down to one last speaker who looks around at the age of eighty-five and they’re the only one left who knows the language they grew up with. . .that’s haunting. With The Singer’s Gun, I was interested in illegal immigration. It was interesting to have a character who’s engaged in that field in a somewhat criminal way—he sells fake passports—and made research difficult. If you Google “how to fake a US passport,” those are not links you really want to click on, so ultimately, I had to make it up. In The Lola Quartet, Gavin is obsessed with the past, he loves mechanical cameras and fedoras and jazz—things that I love. You can attach your obsessions to particular characters; I find I’ve done it a lot.

HUGGINS

In The Singer’s Gun, you wrote a scene where one character tells another about a geology student who chopped down the oldest living tree on earth without realizing it. The character hearing the story says, “Gosh, that’s awful,” but the character telling the story is horrified that the first person doesn’t comprehend how truly upsetting the loss of that tree is.

MANDEL

That was an article I read in The New York Review of Books that just broke my heart. The reaction of the person telling the story was me; I was like, Oh, my God. Basically, in 1964, a grad student was doing climate change research in what later became Great Basin National Park in Nevada, and he was using a corer, this little device you drill to take a sample to study the rings. His corer got stuck in the tree, and it’s kind of an expensive tool, so he got permission from a park ranger to cut it down. After they cut it down and started counting the rings, they realized it was the oldest living thing on earth. Doesn’t that just make you despair of humanity? Apparently there’s a slice of that trunk on display in a bar in Nevada.

HUGGINS

In a previous interview you called Station Eleven “A love letter to this extraordinary world in which we live. . .a love letter in the form of a requiem.” Within the novel, so many characters are engaged in fundamentally hopeful activities—Clarke curating the Museum of Civilization, the symphony continuing to travel and perform, and Jeevan becoming a doctor—while at the same time grappling with whether there’s a reason to have any hope for the future. Could you talk about the push and pull between hope and hopelessness?

MANDEL

I think a cataclysmic event needs to be handled with the lightest possible touch. It can get melodramatic so quickly. It was important to give it a light touch without trivializing it, which is why I wrote the chapters set during the collapse in Toronto between Jeevan and his brother. I thought it’d be a little bit dishonest to completely glide over what happened, so the book touches on it briefly. But I was interested in avoiding the nihilism of most post-apocalyptic works. Post-apocalyptic is often shorthand for horror, and I was interested in going a different direction, moving from “look at this horror and mayhem and chaos” to thinking about what comes after horror, chaos, and mayhem. I loved The Road, but it functioned as a kind of negative example when I was writing Station Eleven. I kept thinking, This can’t be The Road, that’s been done. I was interested in what comes next: the new culture that begins to emerge, which does imply evolution and hopefulness, and made for a more hopeful book. It wasn’t really about the end of the world; it was about what happens as people try to reconstruct a new world.

KEOWN VAUX

The idea of consciously writing the inverse of a particular story is fascinating. When you’re reading fiction, is that always percolating?

MANDEL

As a reader, it’s always interesting to consider. There’s a book I really liked, After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. The author is German and it’s about the German experience in the late 1930s, when the vise was tightening and Germany was becoming a police state. It was revelatory to me because as much as you know, intellectually, that the German people suffered terribly, most World War II fiction we’re exposed to centers on the suffering Germans inflicted on other people. It’s fascinating to see the flipside of that story.

HUGGINS

It seems that each of your books is concerned with memory, with what we want to remember, what we can’t remember, what we want to forget. In Station Eleven, Kirsten says, “The more you remember, the more you’ve lost.” How does memory function in your work?

MANDEL

I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon where three different people were witness to the same event and tell three different accounts of it and nobody’s lying. I used that in The Lola Quartet, where everybody remembers the last concert in a different way. Memory was also one of the most interesting aspects of writing a post-apocalyptic book. How would we remember this world when it was gone? For people who didn’t remember it at all—who were either small children when it disappeared or were born afterward—all of this that we take for granted would seem like science fiction. I love that idea. In terms of character development, the younger people in the post-apocalyptic world are generally doing better, because the more you remember, the more you’ve lost. It’s the older people who can’t stop thinking about when sixty wasn’t old and when diabetes wasn’t a death sentence and when we had antibiotics. For them, they’ve lost so much. But for younger people, it’s abstract.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve said that you love linear narratives as a reader but that you haven’t found a way to write them—which isn’t to say that you have to. Is that something you’d like to try?

MANDEL

I admire linear storytelling, but I don’t know if I could sustain it for a novel; I might write a straightforward linear novella instead. As a reader, I am drawn to those books. I love Stoner by John Williams, which is such a beautiful example. The story moves forward from the beginning to the end and that takes real skill to sustain, particularly over the course of a character’s lifetime.

HUGGINS

You’ve mentioned Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto as two of your favorite books. Reading Station Eleven evoked both of those books for me: the innate sense of hopefulness in Bel Canto, and Tartt’s ability to move readers back and forth in time while still keeping us grounded, which is something Station Eleven does so well. It seems like it would be challenging to balance a large cast of characters in the way that all three of those books do, to establish each of them as complex individuals. Did you begin with a particular character in Station Eleven?

MANDEL

Both of those books achieve brilliantly, in my opinion, something I’m always striving for: they are of the highest literary quality but also have narrative drive and are exciting to read. I love those books. Patchett takes such care with her characters. They are never allowed to be two dimensional; everybody is human.

With Station Eleven I knew I wanted to write about the lives of actors, which was more concrete than the beginnings of my other books. The first three, I began with a wisp of a premise. With Last Night in Montreal, I had the image of a car driving across the desert. That image raised questions like, Why is it driving across the desert? An answer to one of those questions formed the plot. Same for The Singer’s Gun: the starting point for that book was the question, What if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? Why would he do that, you ask, and the plot comes out of that exploration. With The Lola Quartet, I wanted to write about disgraced journalists and the economic collapse.

The first character I had for Station Eleven was Arthur. I had the idea of an actor dying of a heart attack on stage during the fourth act of King Lear as the opening scene of the novel. I knew I wanted to borrow a particular staging of Lear that I’d seen—James Lapine’s direction at the Public Theater in New York in 2007. I mention this in the acknowledgments, but he had three little girls on stage in nonspeaking roles as Lear’s daughters, and that gave me my next character: one of the little girls, imagining what happens to her. Those were the first two characters to emerge. I also liked the idea of having a guy in the audience trying to save him, so I thought, Okay, there’s character number three; I can follow him. I thought about Miranda from fairly early on, and other characters came along later.

HUGGINS

In Station Eleven, you employ many devices: letters, lists, interviews for a newsletter, and so on. Was that fun for you as a writer, playing with multiple conventions?

MANDEL

It was. I loved writing the interview segments, particularly. Writing only dialogue in that way is what I imagine playwriting would be like. I enjoyed writing the list you mention, in chapter six. It was probably twenty pages long before I shortened it. The letters created an opportunity for me to see a clearer image of who Arthur was, by giving him a first person voice.

KEOWN VAUX

You talked about your personal interests finding homes in your fiction. Do you see yourself as someone who would explore personal interests in memoir or creative nonfiction?

MANDEL

Probably not. I’ve been on social media for a really long time—I was on BBSes when I was fourteen, not quite pre-internet but close—and I always felt comfortable in that milieu, sharing a lot of my life online. What I find lately is that I’m less and less interested in revealing much of myself online. I’ve come to find immense pleasure in privacy. It’s an interesting dynamic because there is a certain pressure, particularly on women writers, to write personal essays in the service of a book. You go to the New York Times website and you’ll read the most harrowing, excruciatingly personal essay—the loss of a parent, the death of a spouse, the most wrenching subjects—and then the byline will be “and Lucy Smith has a novel coming out next year” and you’re like, Of course she does. That’s how we’re promoting our books these days, mining our lives for material. I prefer to do that in fiction. So many of my personal interests and even autobiographical aspects of my life work their way into my fiction. For example, Miranda’s background in Station Eleven. She grows up on the same island as me; she has an identical experience with moving to Toronto and finding that the anonymity of living in the city feels like freedom; she’s an administrative assistant. . .there are many parallels. I find it more interesting to explore my interests and write about certain parts of my life through fiction than doing it through memoir or personal essay. I love reading essays, and I sometimes enjoy reading memoirs, but presently I don’t have that instinct to share my life.

KEOWN VAUX

Another reason to preserve your privacy are the trolls on social media.

MANDEL

Absolutely. You find yourself thinking, Life is so short, why do I care what anybody is saying on Twitter? I’ve been ignoring my Twitter account for months and it’s opened up this space in my life. It’s so nice. I don’t know if I’ll go back. Same with Facebook. But you also see writers like Margaret Atwood or Neil Gaiman who are highly prolific and all over Twitter. How can they pull it off? Somehow I find it too distracting, but Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood are publishing multiple books a year.

KEOWN VAUX

Is community something that plays a significant role in your writing life?

MANDEL

No. Which is kind of strange, I realize, since I live in Brooklyn and there are so many writers there. People come to Brooklyn because they want that sense of community, which can be hard to find outside of an MFA program. To tell you the truth, when I first started writing seriously in my early twenties, what most attracted me was the solitude. I loved the contrast with dance, which is such a group activity. You’re always in classes and auditions and all the rest, but writing could be done alone in a room or alone in a café. I’ve accumulated a few friends over the years who happen to be writers but I mostly avoid the Brooklyn literary scene. It’s distracting and somewhat incestuous; you see the same twelve people at every event. It can get a little gossipy and small in the way that any scene can, in the way the world of academia can or any pod of people who spend a lot of time in close proximity and are engaged in the same pursuit. I go to readings if it’s a friend or an author I really admire, but for the most part I don’t go out of my way to attend events and mingle.

KEOWN VAUX

Do you feel any pressure after the success of a book like Station Eleven?

MANDEL

There is a certain pressure. There’s also a certain confidence, I have to say. For me, those two things have balanced each other out. I hope it stays that way.