Last week I went to see Emily St. John Mandel at Old Pine Church in Society Hill (a Barnes & Noble Philly event). Her new book “Exit Party,” which she describes as her best and most ambitious novel, is out. It takes place in 2031 Los Angeles. She gives us Side A and Side B, two different timelines of what is possible. In the first, the civil war has just ended. In the second, the country is under totalitarian rule.
Mandel says it took her about three and a half years to write the book and what began as a speculative novel—people being disappeared by masked men in unmarked vans—had become by the time she finished, the nightly news. But she believes that “the worst moments in our country's life will not last forever.”
One of her favorite quotes from the book is “We were Americans, which is another way of saying that chaos felt like home.”
I think a lot of us feel this way, and I don't know what the midterm elections will bring. More chaos? A path back to “normal”? Timelines, she says, hinge on events such as elections.
Mandel spoke of a conversation she had with the writer and filmmaker Sebastian Junger. They talked about the difference between “Station Eleven” and Cormac McCarthy's “The Road.” Junger said that McCarthy's story is implausible because in it there was no community. There is no hope. Mandel’s is plausible because in his opinion, “We form communities in dark moments.”
When beginning to write a new book, including “Exit Party,” Mandel said she needs to decide if she wants to spend several years in this fictive world and its people she’s about to create. Three plus years is a lot of time. Always she chooses to include hope and joy, in part because of plausibility.
Wherever her imagination takes her, she is still capturing what it is to be human. And to be human is to have hope and to seek joy.
An audience member asked if she had any advice for beginning writers. She said, “Don't be afraid to write a horrible first draft.” For the most part she doesn't write an outline. She just delves in and the first draft becomes the raw material for what the novel will become.
Her second piece of advice: learn to write under any circumstances.
Even in chaos Mandel does this. Maybe especially in chaos.
