hello everyone and welcome to conversations with tyler today we're here with emily st john mandel who has written two of my most favorite contemporary novels her new book out is the glass hotel which i think is her very best deepest most subtle novel uh her biggest selling book to date is station 11. now it so turns out that emily's two books are about a pandemic and in part a financial crisis believe it or not it is pure coincidence
that i am speaking to her today it is in fact uh that i enjoyed these novels so much and thus our reality is in some modest ways catching up to what she's been writing about emily thank you for being with us my pleasure thanks for interviewing
me let me start with an unusual question okay how bad would it be for you to be exiled to dubai for the rest of your life your family can come with you but you have to stay in dubai you can still write in published books
how would that be well here's a follow-up question do i have to stay in dubai or do i have to stay in a country or in a country with no extradition treaty with the united states because that's a broader range of locales
um yeah i my impression of dubai which i have to admit i haven't visited i've just read about it a lot is that like most places in the world um you know with enough money you can have a really pleasant life so i think it would depend on my
financial situation i could certainly imagine worse fades on the other hand i do sunburn quite easily so yeah it's probably not the ideal location for me if you were to pick a self-contained area country that has no extradition treaty with the
united states that you would be self-exiled to which one would it be could i invent the lack of an extradition treaty or just have to be one that actually has no extradition treatment let's do both versions okay
okay um that is a really tough call none of the countries without extradition treaties really called to me and uh you know full confession i finished writing this book some time ago and i don't actually remember what that list
was but i don't remember feeling a burning desire to uh to relocate any of those places um i do often wonder if canada might not have been a better idea um that's where i'm from originally i've lived in the u.s since i was 22.
so it's been a while um yeah canada's looking pretty good these days so in an imaginary alternate universe where canada had no extradition treaty that's that's probably where i go given that you think living in dubai
with family would not be so terrible for you why don't in fact more white-collar criminals flee to dubai or other places that is a great question that i i almost feel like you'd need to interview a psychologist not a novelist to figure
that one out a novelist is a psychologist somewhere right um yeah i wouldn't quite call myself qualified but um you know something that fascinated me about the bernie madoff story on which the crime in the glass hotel is based and just to backtrack a little bit none of the people in the glass hotel are real it's not a novel about madoff but the crime is the same so i did a lot of reading about it um what madoff says is that it never
occurred to him to flee which i find absolutely baffling you know imagine yourself in that position you have an extraordinary amount of money you realize that your ponzi scheme is falling apart what are you doing going home to your house in new york but you know go to the airport get out of town um and yeah it's honestly kind of baffling to me i don't know if it's a manifestation of guilt this sort of subconscious desire to be caught and to
face consequences but yeah it would not be difficult for these people to flee and yet they usually don't and i i don't i don't know that's about it yeah it is interesting maybe it's the bias of routine or with white-collar criminals you might
be selecting for people who think they're invulnerable right that's a good point yeah you know they've always gotten away with it so far so why would this moment be any different yeah there's probably some in there
how easy do you think it is for a well-educated person of means say in the top 1 but not a billionaire to fake his or her own death um i think it depends on what else is going on is going on so there's no pandemic normal okay
normal world um that's not easy you know i feel like we kind of live in an era where like you know you you kind of need a body for that to be convincing um on the other hand what if you'd been thinking about faking your own death
and some spectacularly unexpected event happens like to give an example i used to be obsessed with this website called post secret um i i read it like every day in my 20s and early 30s and the president i know the site it's great yeah it's a great site it's wonderful um i'm haunted by this one postcard on the site it's i don't remember what the image is but let's say it's the twin towers burning no that's the theme um the back of it says
everyone who knew me before september 11th thinks i'm dead imagine if that's true and of course there's no way of knowing if any of the post-secret secrets are real but imagine that position you you know come up the stairs from the subway into
lower manhattan you look up you see the towers falling and you think this is my opportunity and you disappear so you know i think if life presents some horrific moment like that then faking your own death would not be
difficult but but otherwise yeah i think um i think it's hard to pull off if i needed to fake my own death today i think i would go out on a cargo ship manned by people from a fairly corrupt country and i would offer the money to simply report i had fallen overboard that would do it and then walk off in some kind of semi disguise uh how would you fake your own death uh that's actually a pretty good method yeah um yeah as long as you have enough
money to pay off a couple of crew members there are there are cargo ships that will accept passengers um you know on a very small scale and there's nothing luxurious about it the point is that it's not a luxury cruise that you are on a cargo
ship uh but yeah you know you eat dinner with the officers you hang out on the ship and read all day so yeah your method is good um yeah pay off a couple of crew members and you're good the people in that industry are not
particularly well paid so you wouldn't even have to be terribly wealthy to pull that off they could take your money and then not report you dead or they could take your money intend to report you dead but tell the other people
and then you would be discovered so i'm not sure what the chance of success actually is although here's something working in your favor crews are small but people don't realize this but these massive cargo ships there are maybe 20
guys on board um so that's a lot of payoffs but you might be able to make it work they paid off the whole crew if you were trying to hide from a small team of professional assassins let's say there's three of them they're russian mobsters they're skilled but not geniuses uh and you ha you have enough money do you think you could do it yeah and putting aside your family yeah i think i could um i have dual citizenship with canada
and the u.s so i would think about the canadian location to which people would least expect me to go um you know you might expect a new yorker to flee to toronto that's kind of the closest equivalent in canada um so i wouldn't go to toronto i would go to some province that i'd never visited like manitoba um yeah changed my appearance and slept into life in i guess the biggest city i could find you know in a relatively low population place so
yeah i think i think that would be my method i would be worried about credit card tracing for one thing you can't use your credit cards that's uh yeah then you have to store your money or your bank account can be traced
so how you would protect yourself on the financial side seems to me to be the hard part definitely the russian mobsters could bribe someone to trace either your bank or credit card information it's a risk yeah i mean like obviously
the moral of the story is try to stay on the right side of the russian mob but if you uh yeah if you are in that position you know i don't know i might it might be something that i'd want to think through a little bit more than in the context of a podcast interview there's got to be a way people do it i think i'd be more inclined to pick a country with a lot of highly informal financial institutions sorry to say would rule out manitoba
yeah yeah manitoba is not informal somewhere like mexico or brazil yeah but then you have to protect your money from other kinds of thieves so yeah it's always tricky yeah if you want to have a weird event or character in one of your stories and you want to put it in a weird state or province what to you is the weirdest place to put it so often in american fiction florida is the weird state what in canada is the weird province um you can make an
argument for newfoundland which i feel like i feel like newfoundlanders newfeys of my acquaintance might actually agree with that statement um they are offset by a half hour in the time zones from any other part of the country uh it's
already weird right that's already weird yeah like what is that half time zone thing um yeah all of the new fees i've met they just have these amazing slightly warped senses of humor that i love um it's a place that lived in a state of
economic collapse for really a very long time you know the fisheries collapsed and it was devastating um economically there so there's a kind of dark sense of humor and um way of getting by happily in difficult circumstances that's um i think offsets offsets it a little bit from the rest of canada um on the other hand british columbia where i'm from that's where all of the hippies and draft dodgers went you know in the 60s and 70s
so you know that that's a coast that attracts some weirdness but there's just there's no clear canadian florida like you know there's no like florida man meme equivalent in canada um and you don't have the animals for it
or do you no like there's just nothing that deadly you know you can talk about polar bears but very few people deal with those they're way up north um yeah you know the thing with canada is that it's not as weird as the united states
because we don't really have the population base is really the situation there are 10 americans for every one canadian basically and you know you get weirdness in a big population that you just don't see where there's a smaller pool to draw
from um yeah yeah there really is no canadian florida the bay islands you grew up in right near in british columbia they have quite a significant off-the-grid culture don't they they do yeah yeah it's interesting
uh only semi-weird like it depends on how weird you find it for people to like bake their own bread and grow pot you know like it was it was pretty mild to tell you the truth um yeah there was never that edge of anarchy that you
get in the you know the florida man stories um is that a good place is that a good place to hide from the russian mafia not for you because you're from there they might look there but say for me no because there are so few people uh
the russian mafia would show up at the one cafe in town and say who's that new guy from the us they'd be like oh he lives down that street they'd find you in 20 minutes how quickly would the locals know i'm from the us two seconds uh yeah two seconds accent um yeah accent there's you know i feel like i can say this because i have dual citizenship there is a real uh strain of anti-americanism that i frankly find a little bit embarrassing
but i grew up with that it's uh it's pervasive um yeah so it's like they're on the lookout for americans and when i say they i i should say like you know i was one of them i grew up there um yeah it's uh there's not a lot of acceptance of americans put it that way why does alberta seem at least superficially to be less anti-american than say british columbia um it's generally it's generally more right-wing politically and you know the
reason the sort of stated reason why so many british colombians i grew up with were anti-american like it had to do with u.s foreign policy like it wasn't really personal um i think i think in alberta because it is a little bit more right-wing there's very broadly speaking less of an issue with um certain aspects of u.s foreign policy also oil you know that's that's a huge thing in alberta so you know i think you know you have texas
oil executives flying up into alberta all the time so you know maybe just encountering more americans helps let's say a fantasy can come true you can go back and visit any era in world history you're protected from disease so no pandemic risk
and you're given the native language and you spend three months there where would you visit what fall of the roman empire ancient greece what would it be ancient greece and then much more recently the fall of the berlin wall
that i think that just would have been an incredible thing to see like you wouldn't even need three months there just like you know give me a half hour that was uh yeah that would be that would be amazing i did actually go right after the fall
oh did you okay it was incredible i saw a performance of fidelio in berlin oh wow people were just sobbing when the opera ended because of course it's about liberty right now to get to your book the glass house
which again is fantastically subtle and interesting but also engaging and entertaining uh scott and rave reviews overall how good or bad do you think are the lives of trophy wives uh it depends on the trophy wife it depends on the husband you know massive people if you put them in the happiness in percentile terms right what are they doing you know i would say probably pretty well like if you can reconcile yourself to that trade-off
which it would not be crazy to call that an offshoot of prostitution you know there's a very uh there's a pretty clear mercenary trade happening there if you're okay with that um then you could live a pretty great life you have what you need you have a lot of down time you could develop some deep friendships uh you have time to read i think that i i think that the risk would be the kind of emptiness that comes from not having a fulfilling career
but there's no reason why you couldn't be a trophy wife and have some kind of thing you were passionate about on the side so yeah i'd say as jobs go you could do a lot worse do you think it's harder for trophy wives to have fulfilling friendships i don't know i think you'd have to have it with other trophy wives yeah which is definitely the case in the glass hotel um vincent's closest friend is marella who's who's basically a trophy wife although
you could argue that her relationship is a little more real right he's in love yeah yeah this factor of what you call not having to think about money how big a happiness benefit is that that is huge um if you grow up without money which i did and then you have really no money in early adulthood so much of your brain is taken over through all of every day with these endless tedious calculations you know if i buy a metro card this week
can i afford groceries what if i just get like half the amount of groceries in a five dollar metro card what if i didn't get the metric card and walk home over the brooklyn bridge and i'll get paid on friday you know just uh it wears you down it's exhausting um so not having to have that constant calculation running in the back of your head can kind of feel like freedom um yeah so i would say i would say it's a huge impact
and you know of course we're all human so we find other things to worry and obsess about but yeah not having to worry about that is incredible how much do you think earning money makes people happier compared to either inheriting it or
marrying into it i don't know you know something that i think about a lot is just the element of luck involved evening and earning money um you know any money that i have comes from the wild success of station 11 my previous book
and that is which is also going to be a mini series right yeah yeah and when will that happen 2021 i think great we'll get to that book but please continue um and you know that book like this is not to denigrate the book i you know i believe in my work um but i've always been aware that there are any number of books in the world that were at least as good as station 11 if not better that didn't earn that didn't sell nearly as many copies
you know so there's just an incredible level of luck even in quote-unquote earned money um so yeah it did always feel like a sort of lottery ticket to me um and then by the same token like you know i've i see kids who are raised in these uh upper middle
class families um that allows for say sat tutoring and they get into a really good college they you know go from there into the internship from there into a really well-paying job um you know they're earning their money
but they kind of had lottery tickets too so yeah it's not clear to me that it feels very different you know to earn your money versus inheriting it either way there's just such an element of luck involved
do you think the very wealthy now feel a bit lost during coronavirus time because they're used to having these large household staffs around and now perhaps they're afraid to keep those people in the house and everything's suddenly very empty and
quiet that's a great question i don't know i don't know enough incredibly wealthy people um yeah i these households have gone quiet um i do know a lot of people who have nannies which is pretty common in new york city because you know none of us live in the same city as our parents pretty much so you know any child care you have to pay for um and that's just been a different uh a different challenge you know all of a sudden we're all
homeschooling because nobody has child cares so yeah that does make your house a bit quieter you know when your kids nanny stops coming there's an idea you mentioned in glass house that if your time lift and freedom is limited
perceived as limited that you might seek to do things to make time slow down what would you do for you to make time slow down um i would travel you know it's interesting during periods when i'm traveling a lot i've done a lot of lectures over the
past few years for station 11. the months when i'm out on the road like every every week for a couple of days or every 10 days those months are so unbelievably long and you know i'll have these moments of not quite panic but thinking oh my god my friend emailed me like two weeks ago and never got back to her and then i'll go back to the email and the email came in four days ago it's just that time has been incredibly extended so my feeling is
that the way to slow down time is to have a lot of experiences you know to see different places to meet new people that makes every day feel longer um and it's interesting i got a glimpse of the flip side of this a few years ago
i i was in a festival with kay ryan an american poet and we were talking about this phenomenon and she's done some work in the prison system uh teaching inmates how to write or running writing workshops and she talked about women in prison
practicing this opposite strategy of trying to make every day as similar as possible in order for time to speed up you know it's just the days just kind of run together in that rhythm so yeah i think the way to slow down time is to have a lot of experiences you mentioned prison in the glass house you mentioned the idea that perhaps everyone in prison is depressed but of course that third person reporting do you agree do you think
everyone in prison is depressed no i think that's i think that's a simplification um but god that's a depressing environment so yeah i would expect there to be a much higher uh baseline level of depression in the population in prison
some general questions about books and writing sure now i'm going to read you a franz kafka quotation and you tell me what you think of it quote i think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us if the book we're
reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head what are we reading for end quote what do you think you've written a book about a pandemic right yeah yeah uh i'm going to disagree with kafka in this one um why does reading have to be something that stabs you in the heart every time you pick up a book like isn't it nice in a moment when the country is reeling under a historical pandemic um to just read something that makes you they just
transport you transports you to a different world for a minute um i would maybe flip that around and say that if you're a fiction writer and you know maybe just any writer of books um you know maybe you should i need to think this through but maybe you shouldn't write books that don't knock you over and stab you in the heart and gut you and push you to the furthest remotest edge of your talent but yeah as a reader i don't really agree with that
i think it's important to read those books but but so many more people are reading your books exactly now right especially station 11 because we're in some kind of pandemic admittedly a much milder one so don't readers somewhat agree with kafka it's possible but station 11 is a fundamentally hopeful book and i've you know just going from the extremely unscientific metric of my twitter timeline um i get the impression that a lot of
people are reading it because of the hope you know at the end of the pandemic not necessarily because the pandemic sends them reeling and they read about it but probably they don't know what the book will be like right they've just heard it's by you and then it's about a pandemic what do you think of the idea that people might read very scary books or watch very scary movies as a kind of protection against the phenomenon a bit like
wanting to hear the worst up front yeah all subsequent news comes as a relief yeah there's something real there um when i started seeing a lot of people um talking about station 11 like in the last few weeks um you know my reaction was total bafflement like why would anybody in their right mind want to read station 11 during a pandemic i was like god that's crazy so you know i closed the twitter tab went to iphones and bought contagion
i went to itunes and bought contagion stephen soderbergh movie and i realized you're like frauds kafka too yeah exactly but what i realized in bang contagion was which i haven't watched yet it kind of came to my senses
there's just such a longing in times of uncertainty to see how it ends um yeah we just don't know what the world will look like in three weeks and yeah so there's something soothing about narrative i think in these moments um or yeah that
was the only way i could rationalize that impulse purchase of that movie on my part there was an article in the guardian a few days ago that at least in the united kingdom sales of long classic fiction were up by a considerable amount does that make sense to you is that okay yeah it does um yeah there's this longing for familiarity in really chaotic times i think that's what that's about and you know i see it in my four-year-old frankly um
i'm pretty strict with screen time except now we're in quarantine's like that's out the window um so she gets a movie every morning she can watch any from a long list of disney movies she just wants to watch frozen two she's
watched it for the last seven consecutive mornings and for a while i was trying to push her out of the comfort zone like come on ratatouille mulan like there are a lot of great options out there no she wants frozen too and i realized
you know she's lost a lot in the last two weeks um her school's closed she loves her school we were gonna go visit her favorite cousin and now we can't go so she just wants yeah she just wants familiarity so i think that's exactly
the same thing with sales of classic books you know how good is frozen too pretty good yeah um this is a controversial statement i know a lot of parents who hate it but i um yeah i find it more interesting than frozen one
if you speak to people in the book trade they often have the belief that we have been in an age of non-fiction selling very well and if you look at the relative space in bookstores at least for a while more and more was being given over to non-fiction do you think that will reverse and now an age of fiction will somewhat return i don't know yeah i'm not sure um it seems intuitive to me that it might um kind of for the opposite of franz
kafka's formulation like there's a certain desire for escapism just at the moment um yeah it's intuitive to me that it would but i'll be curious to see what the numbers look like in a year when i see many novels and this i think
is true for many of yours they'll be the title of the book and then below it in smaller print or on amazon it will say a novel i find this depressing i prefer a world where the reader ought to know how do you respond to this a novel
to be honest i kind of appreciate the guidance because just because as a matter of personal preference i prefer novels to short story collections so if it's in fiction i just kind of want to know what i'm getting into like um yeah it'll either say a novel or it'll say stories and i to be clear i do sometimes read short stories uh but i uh yeah i want to know what it is if you walked into your favorite bookstore whether it be the strand
barnes and noble in canada whatever and looked at the front table of new fiction books and simply chose a book by its cover the old cliche how well do you think you could do matching that book to your tastes
going only by the cover uh pretty badly there are a lot of seriously mediocre books with gorgeous covers uh because there's a lot of talent in the art departments um i have occasionally yeah you know what i have picked up books based on the cover
but that's got to be backed up in some way you know sometimes you see a gorgeous cover and then you turn it over and it's like wow this looks like something that would hold zero interest for me and it goes back down
but shouldn't you choose a smart looking cover rather than a gorgeous cover because a gorgeous cover is trying to appeal to many people somewhat hermetic cover that has tricks or is subtle you might think oh this is a book i should read
yeah but doesn't that make you feel manipulated when you see a clever cover and it calls out to you you're like that book wants me to believe that i'm smart enough to be attracted to that book it's like the circular thing that happens um yeah sometimes you know what even beautiful and interesting i feel like they're almost the wrong words it's more like is it striking like does it grab your attention and yeah sometimes my attention is grabbed
by sheer beauty but sometimes the opposite you know i love uh black and white covers or books where it's just a white cover with black text just the uh the simplicity of that is striking to me so do i but i think we're both suggesting that maybe our own choosing can out manipulate the manipulators we can spot the covers trying to manipulate us right and not buy those books and then here's something weird in the corner that's not trying very hard
so maybe it has something else going for it yeah yeah it's possible how do you see novels changing to keep up with so much competition from the internet um i don't know if it's competition for the internet or i was going to say a competition for tv
but of course that's kind of the same thing sometimes um i i see novels being much more fragmented it seems to me in the last few years where you know you have really short chapters uh really kind of strong visuals where
you you know you read the little fragment of text and you feel like you can see it and to me that seems like a clear influence from television and i don't think that's a bad thing at all you know there have been some pretty amazing tv shows last few years um you could argue that it's a bad thing that it implies that our attention spans might be shorter but i don't know if they are or if it's just you know we just become
used to this kind of more staccato rhythm to novels um i kind of like those books to be honest if the main competitor to netflix is simply going to sleep as has been suggested what is the main competitor for the novel
ah probably the same um yeah i can't read at night i'll fall asleep now the uh the competitor for the novel at all seriousness is probably netflix too um you know you the quality of tv is so high now that there's a great argument to be made
that you're watching you know that you're experiencing an equally complex and deep and artistic narrative through the medium of your laptop you know as you are on the page so yeah i would say those two are in
competition what's your favorite recent tv show the night manager it's not super recent it was a few years ago but uh yeah limited series of my favorite john le carre novel um it was adapted by susannah beer and yeah it was something like six
episodes it departed wildly from the book but i felt like it worked i just had a lot of style uh great writing fantastic acting really high stakes so yeah if i had to pick one it might be that why are so few novels set in toronto
ah it's like this secret city it's weird you know if you grow up in canada toronto is the city but this goes back to the population thing i alluded to earlier there are just not that many canadians you know relative to americans
um so for us it's a major city and i think a lot of canadian novels are set there but those novels don't necessarily even find american publishers so yeah it's weird living in the states thinking about toronto it's like this secret metropolis of 2.8 million people right on the other side of the border and americans never think about it how has science fiction changed since you read so much of it as a teenager it's become i think more subtle
you know or maybe that's just what i was reading as a teenager my memory of the sci-fi i read as a teenager you know it was a lot of isaac asimov um a lot of space stations and androids and kind of like space opera type stuff where it's now um it seems to me that recent sci-fi books i've read like um a great one in the last decade or so was how to live safely in a science fictional universe by charles yu who's writing i really admire and you
know that was that was just such a subtle exploration of kind of humanity in the context of this very surreal sort of uh sci-fi novel so yeah but i don't know if it's that the forum has changed or if i'm just reading
you know better sci-fi now that i was as a teenager what's asimov's greatest work um the one that sticks with me is prelude to foundation but i read them so long ago i feel like i'm no longer qualified to uh if you reread them would they seem crazy
to you or would you think oh this is still wonderful i think i might still find it wonderful i think about that book a lot now in the middle of most of these dialogues we have a segment overrated versus underrated and i'll toss out some names ideas places and you tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated okay sure first up patricia highsmith uh underrated why i just think she's a genius and um yeah i don't think that
i feel like somehow her work should be more appreciated than it is like i know it is but like i'm not gonna call her overrated cause i think she's good if i think if i had to compare you to some other author it might be her is that fair of me or am i off base there i don't know this seems reasonable yeah i mean her work had a literary quality but was also you know heavily plotted so i think that's reasonable calvin and hobbes underrated or
overrated um same problem i'm struggling with this because i love them but you know it's not like they're underrated everybody loves them um i wish they were a happy medium but i guess i'd go with underrated because i'm not going to call that work of genius overrated david foster wallace uh overrated why you know you can write you can write a book that is a profound and fascinating i shouldn't i'm not gonna say fascinating a profound um
exploration of boredom and the sort of evacuity of entertainment culture um that doesn't mean it's not a boring book you know i just found infinite jazz to be really overrated but that being said i love the pale king even though he never finished that novel so it's hard for me to really categorize an entire body of work in that way um if you're going with his most famous book then i guess i would say overrated but i would say that
the pale king was underrated you know that was a chaotic book and fragments that he didn't get a chance to finish but there was great stuff there edna saint vincent malay the poet um same problem you know i can't call her
underrated because she's famous and she filled stadiums in her lifetime with poetry readings which is a fairly spectacular achievement um but yeah but she's not yeah so she's not overrated she's incredible um can you call somebody underrated if
they're widely read um ron james might be underrated right okay not finishing books you have started underrated or overrated um underrated you know i've that's never happened to me which is something i'm really grateful for but i have friends whose quote-unquote first novel was actually their fourth or fifth book and you know writers tend to see that as kind of an awful thing like you know god i've wasted two years of my life writing
this novel and now it lives in a drawer but that was how you were learning how to write a novel so you know i would see that as a valuable experience but i mean as a reader not finishing books just tossing them sorry
uh yeah that is underrated you should absolutely toss books you don't like i um you know i meet people sometimes that have these hard and fast rules you know i'll never uh put down a book before page 150 or i have to finish every book i start
and i just think you know life is pretty short like i don't want to spend a lot of time reading work that doesn't interest me so yeah that is uh that is underrated you should put down a book if you don't like it
if you start ten books on average how many do you finish uh nine i finished most of them what's your favorite alfred hitchcock movie um i haven't seen enough of them to be honest favorite film noir brick i can't remember the name of the writer
director she just put out knives out um ryan johnson yeah that was an amazing new movie now your previous book station 11 which of course is about a pandemic a reader writes to me quote i believe that she has described station 11 as
paraphrasing a valentine to the modern world uh is that true yeah definitely um the project to station 11 was i wanted to set a novel in a post technological world because i thought it might be interesting to think about and write
about the modern world by contemplating its absence you know in the same way that you can talk about a person by delivering a eulogy so yeah it can absolutely be read as a love letter to electricity plane travel antibiotics insulin like all of the all the trappings of civilization that we tend to take for granted if the pandemic came on the scale of what is portrayed in station 11 which is that it wipes out most of the known world
where would be the safest place to be would it be on a navy ship it might be yeah yeah because they have supplies for a long time um and they can fish right you can fish exactly fresh water i guess would eventually become an issue but if you
have the equipment for desalinization then you'd be okay for a while yeah i think your best bet would be to stay on board until the pandemic burned itself out what are other candid places to be anywhere away from other people
with enough supplies to be self-sufficient so new york city is the worst case scenario but um yeah if you had some kind of secluded place far away from other people where you could feed yourself and have enough water that would absolutely be the best scenario say we have an intermediate kind of pandemic worse than covid19 but better than what's in your book uh where you have a reasonable chance of recovering given adequate medical care
how densely populated an area do you wish to live in you know it's not even the area anymore you know this has become clear to us in new york city in the last couple of days it's the amount of equipment so the problem in new york with covid19
it's not that there are too many of us it's that there aren't enough ventilators so yeah i see it as more an equipment problem than a um in a population density issue in so many post-apocalyptic novels it seems that
people wander a lot do they wander too much should they just stay put i had this conversation with another post-apocalyptic novelist you know would everybody stop walking like why is everybody wandering endlessly in the post apocalypse uh it's a fair question um you know i think that in the same way that in our modern hopefully still pre-apocalyptic world um some people are content to live their entire lives in their hometowns
while others get out really as soon as they possibly can and that was me um i think some people can live quite happily in a very small probably inevitably insular community you know in your post-apocalyptic wasteland
whereas others it would be like if i have to look at these same 300 people in the same same place you know for one more day i'm gonna go crazy so i think those are the people who would start wandering how in all have you been influenced by
the post-apocalyptic noah story in the bible book of genesis not really at all you know i'm not from a religious household so i didn't grow up with that story and yeah it just um i guess it doesn't grab my imagination in a way that some other post-apocalyptic stories do the one that really grabs my imagination is a uh a 1960 novel called the canticle for leibowitz by walter miller which is one of my favorite books i read that when i was about 15
and it kind of blew my mind it's it's a very different apocalypse than station 11 but i think of it as the book that made me first think about what a post-apocalyptic world might look like and that is highly religious that book yes
it is yeah it's true do you think that glass hotel is a more pessimistic vision of human nature than station 11 yeah yeah you could definitely make that argument um on the other hand most people in the glass hotel are not actually horrible
you know and something i was really interested in was thinking about the uh the permeability of our moral borders i guess you could say it seems to me that probably most of us are corruptable and that you probably don't have to be an entirely horrible person to find yourself participating in a ponzi scheme even though that is a horrible thing to do so yeah that kind of moral slide was interesting to me so you know you could say that the
people behave worse in the glass hotel than station 11 but at the same time they're not awful people how do the two novels fit together in your mind so they have a number of common characters miranda i think is the same miranda liam provent is the same first and last name what's your meta take on the two novels and their overleaf ah parallel universes so you know all of my novels are standalone works but sometimes i'll have a character who i
just really want to use again and um in station 11 i really liked miranda and i really liked clark and i really liked leon even though by the final draft of that book he was basically a cameo character so i wanted to reuse at least a couple of those people but that's a little tricky when you're about to kill off the entire population with the flu um so i tried to sort of cover my tracks in station 11 with this chapter toward the end of the
book in one of the post-apocalyptic sections where two characters i think it's kirsten in august are talking about this they're playing this game they play sometimes where they sort of trade alternate universe ideas you know an alternate
universe where i didn't lose all my teeth or an alternate universe where the georgia flu never happened and civilization moved on and then in the glass hotel i tried to plant that seed again with that chapter where
vincent is kind of wandering down the street sort of thinking to herself this own kind of game that she plays um imagining a world where for example that terrifying new flu in the republic of georgia had it been quite so swiftly contained so i know that a certain number of readers will read the glass hotel waiting for the flu pandemic to arrive but i see them as kind of operating in parallel realities one recent review of glass house i think
it was from the washington post it suggested that contingency was the fundamental theme of most of your novels do you agree i do yeah i'm fascinated in the what if you know you went right instead of left in the intersection
um how would everything be different if you've made that choice now anne mundo in the wall street journal she wrote this about your novels and i quote the question of what is real be it love money place or memory has always been at the heart of ms
mandel's fiction do you agree i do yeah it's a topic that interests me from what writer or source do you think you get those emphases or it just comes from your personality i think it comes from my personality um yeah the way sometimes the world can seem kind of not quite unreal but somehow improbable or um you can look around at your life speaking for myself i can look around at my life and think this seems implausible
um i don't think it's quite as severe as any kind of disassociation syndrome but you know it is this kind of idea that plays at the back of my mind sometimes so i think that absolutely comes out of my fiction so in station 11
as you know an airport serves as a kind of museum of civilization if we had an airport as our museum of civilization what is the biggest bias we would come away with trying to understand our civilization say you're born in that airport
you're homeschooled in that airport what's the biggest thing you get wrong i think you would just assume that everybody flew you know you'd be like well you know something everybody did in that lost world was getting an airplane on a
regular basis and you know there are 5 000 boarding passes here in this uh here in this museum i think it's actually a fairly small percentage of the population that flies regularly um yeah that might be the biggest thing
now you live in brooklyn correct yes i do and we're speaking in late march the situation with the coronavirus you've obviously thought a good deal about pandemics in writing your novel but what in the real world has been the biggest surprise to you so far i don't mean about politics but right human beings yeah um the biggest surprise for me i guess you know what i was i did do a bit of research into pandemics when i was writing station 11.
but something i never really thought about was the dread of waiting for a pandemic to arrive like and that's just um yeah that was that's been really unexpected to me that we were in this long period over the last three weeks or so when intellectually we all knew it was coming but somehow at the same time didn't really feel real so we you know we weren't really stocking up on lysol wipes like the things you want to have um yeah the uh
that atmosphere of anticipatory dread was something that i hadn't really considered or expected have people been more or less cooperative than you had thought i would my impression and you know the problem is like we don't see people anymore but yeah my overall impression is they've been more cooperative um you know definitely in the literary community i've seen a lot of people really trying to support their independent bookstores which
has always been a thing but you know i think there's been a greater awareness that look if you don't buy your books from your independent bookstore and you know by the way they do all sell online mostly then that store might not be there when
all of this ends so you know i see people pulling together like that to try to support the businesses they love that's been a major one um yeah i wish i could see people and bring back a report from like actual
humanity that is my impression there's been more cooperation what have you learned about new york city in particular about new york um that's a good question i'll have to think about that more because i'm trying
to think of something i've learned about new york that wouldn't be true of other places at the moment and drawing a blank is there anything you're doing or planning on doing with your quarantine time that you feel free to divulge to us that
would be interesting or surprising uh to be honest you know i feel like and you know at this point most of my um contact with human beings is email and twitter i feel like everybody kind of is divided into one of two groups
in group a you have these people who are you know they're saying at least i have time to read and quarantine and you know by the way i'm accepting recommendations for tv shows to binge watch um the second group of which i'm a part um
we're homeschooling our kids there is zero time so yeah to be honest my day is pretty much consumed with um hanging out with my four-year-old and trying to create as good and as structured a day as i can for her
and then working kind of frantically um you know she naps for an hour or so and i can maybe get a couple hours of child care in the afternoon and after she goes to bed so every day is just this crazy juggling act and is homeschooling harder or easier
than you had thought uh it's about what i would have expected i was homeschooled when i was a kid so i have some background you know from the other side of the equation um it is intensely time-consuming you know the wonderful thing about
preschool is you drop off your child then you come back six hours later and somebody's done the work for you um but yeah it's uh it's about what i expected how do you think being homeschooled influenced or shaped you
i think it pushed me to a large degree on the path that i'm on uh kind of in both a positive and negative way the negative of homeschooling in my case was it was not a particularly well-rounded education i really didn't get much of a grounding in science or math and that's that's that's regrettable um on the other hand my parents really loved books we always had a ton of books in the house you know we went to the library every week so
i had an enormous amount of time to read and i was encouraged to read and there was a period of time when one of the requirements of the curriculum was i had to write something every day so that's what got me writing in the
first place so yeah i don't know um you know i might have had a completely different life if i hadn't had so much time to spend reading and you know such a focus on books at such an early age for how long do you think an extreme
form of lockdown is stable at what point will we see large numbers of individuals simply going out and deciding to have fun maybe even just as an act of rebellion yeah um i don't know i mean because there are obviously people who are already there you know i've i've been hearing these crazy stories you know i live in brooklyn pretty close to prospect park about people congregating for like big group play dates um like you know 10 or 15 adults
and kids in prospect park that seems insane to me and it actually seems really um it seems really unethical because you know if you need a ventilator because you uh you know you recklessly mingle with a crowd of people
um that's a ventilator that somebody else won't get so yeah it's it's reckless and kind of crazy for myself i feel like with our household you know my husband and i both have jobs that we can do remotely um we can handle our child we could keep
going this way for a very long time if we needed to um yeah i could do this for months um but there are a lot of people who might not be able to you know just very different family circumstances and yeah so you know i'm aware of how privileged i am in this now you also have a background in contemporary dance is that correct how has that shaped your writing and your thinking ah in a couple of ways one way is that dance requires the most
incredible uh discipline and i think that that's helpful for writing i think actually it'll be helpful for anything like you know it probably would make you a more disciplined attorney if you'd been a dancer first it's just
it's pretty hardcore um it's also to be honest a much harder career than writing and i think that's i think that's pretty good um so you know there there are difficult moments as a writer but at the same time what i find myself
thinking is you know my worst day writing or like the terrible review or whatever it is i'm dealing with that's still better than a dance audition you know never again hopefully will i be in a room with 200 other women competing for one
job wearing skin tight clothes the number pinned to my chest i mean that's dehumanizing so yeah it's uh it's helpful to writing kind of in that contrast i think everything you do after dance probably seems a little bit easier
how impressive do you think is your own level of discipline and conscientiousness um i'm i'm very disciplined and conscientious but i don't really know how it compared to other writers to be honest um i only have one other close friend who's
a writer and she's at least as disciplined and conscientious as i am i have a lot of acquaintances like i don't know well enough to really know what their day-to-day is like so yeah i feel like i don't have a good
enough pool of comparison who first spotted your writing talent and how did they do it what did they see in you uh it was really nice so i uh you know i have no training as a writer i never even took a workshop but i wrote a novel which i finished in my mid-20s and i started querying literary agents so my method was you know i was cold querying i didn't know anybody i would send out a cover letter and three sample chapters
and i just worked my way down a list of new york city literary agents who represented literary fiction uh the 13th or 14th person on that list was emily jacobson and curtis brown and she she requested the full manuscript and
then rejected it but she rejected it with the most thoughtful detailed editorial letter it was it was the first really substantial feedback that i'd gotten on the book and it was basically a list of problems that she had with the book
you know i didn't understand why character x did why i didn't understand this plot point so i read that i thought well there's no guarantee of future representation here but worst case scenario if i take these suggestions i'll have a better book so i i spent um six months revising and then she agreed to read it again and took me on as a client so yeah emily jacobson of curtis brown she she was in her 80s and she took me on and she died
like four years later pneumonia um she's a real role model for me she was incredibly sharp right up until the end an incredible sense of style and she was really my first champion she was wonderful and your first three novels which we haven't had time to discuss but they're especially popular in france correct that is correct yeah why france is it the the film noir tradition the french love of film noir i think it is you know genres work a
little bit differently in different countries and in france there's this genre that doesn't really exist here it's called polar and um it's you know the scope of things that fit under polar it's huge so it's everything from
vaguely atmospheric literary fiction um with kind of like a slight noir tinge to it to three days of the condor you know um so yeah it was my first three novels were categorized as noir you know i'd go to these noir or polar festivals um
i'd sit next to the guy who wrote three days of the condor so in france i was a crime writer for my first three books and it was really it was really kind of interesting and great um yeah i had a wikipedia page in france
long before i had won the us and what country do you think you're most popular per capita um probably the u.s not canada no not canada um i don't know why that is but i i've i definitely feel like i have a much better career in the us than i do
in canada you know i've been shortlisted for major american awards but um there are three big awards in canada every year and i've never even made a long list so yeah do you think there's ever a feeling in canada that somehow you're not canadian enough as a writer and that you're just writing you're right it's possible yeah i uh yeah it's a weird thing i i did think in the back of my mind that setting so much of station 11 in toronto would
uh make people in canada think of me more as a canadian writer and i don't know if it did or not to be honest i did win the toronto book award which is cool um but yeah yeah i don't really there's such a randomness to awards you know ultimately it's just whichever books the five people in the jury liked so i try not to put too much weight on it but yeah it's definitely a better career in the us when you were younger you used to unload
trucks at seven a.m is that correct that is correct yeah um that's the kind of job you can get in montreal if you don't speak a word of french i speak some french now but i didn't speak any back then and that was the job i could find it was
actually okay it was really cold you know 7 a.m in montreal in the winter um you know minus 20 celsius it was pretty brutal at the same time though if you start work at 7am you're done by one in the afternoon so i had time to
write in the afternoons and i was working on my first novel so it worked out okay so even then you thought you would be a writer while unloading the trucks yeah that was kind of a weird in-between time in my life where i didn't want to be a dancer
anymore and i was just kind of starting to write and yeah i was very drawn to being a writer and then you worked for seven years at the rockefeller university cancer research lab yeah there are a lot of cancer research
labs at rockefeller it's a cool place it's all science i was in the tava zoe lab which was researching the role of micrornas and cancer metastasis and you know i i have no science background but i'd been an administrative assistant in various companies for years before that so i could do anything with an excel spreadsheet so it was a lot of a lot of budgets um booking travel for my boss trying to make the lab run as smoothly
as i could that was a great job i held on to it for maybe longer than i should have when did you stop it why did it stop it when i stopped it a year after station 11 came out uh yeah i was on something like my second tour of the uk and still booking plane travel for my boss but i didn't book my own travel anymore it just yeah it just didn't really make sense anymore do you have a unified theory of you yes no i don't think so no that's my
yeah that's my gut response without actually thinking other than talent at writing of course if you try to think about what are your career strengths that have gotten you to the position you're in so there's discipline right right and
what else is there uh nerves of steel which i definitely didn't always have but you know by my fifth book i've kind of gotten to the point where um yeah i'm pretty impervious to criticism in a way that i wouldn't have
been when i was younger i got a bad review in the new york times and like i didn't find that it even really ruined my evening which is kind of surprising you know that definitely would have laid me low a couple of books ago so yeah um tenaciousness and uh yeah nervousness kind of sturdiness right yeah exactly last question your next project whatever it may be is there anything you can tell us about it no no but there is a next project there
is a next project i'm working on a new novel um i can tell you what another project about another project i've been working on which is um the television adaptation of the glass hotel and that's been fun it's my first time
writing for tv so you're actually writing part of the script i am yeah um i love writing novels but after five novels it's kind of fun to try something completely different so yeah that's been kind of a cool collaborative experience i've been
enjoying it does that feel like a new skill or you just feel like you're still writing it feels like a very different skill and it gives me a new appreciation for why film adaptations are so different from the source material
but you know as a reader your favorite book is adapted to the screen and there's this moment of uh wow they mangled this thing it's completely different yeah there's a reason for that you know in screenwriting every scene has to
drive the plot forward in a way that it just doesn't really have to in novels so yeah learning at scale has been great emily st john mandel thank you very much to all our listeners and readers i very much recommend emily's latest book the glass hotel also station eleven the book about a pandemic and she has three other earlier novels which are beloved in france and deservedly so emily thank you very much my pleasure thanks a lot you