From Mother Jones · Ruth Murai · · 3m
Emily St. John Mandel writes the fall, and finds hope
The Station Eleven author on why she keeps writing catastrophe, and what she still sees worth saving.
In brief
The Station Eleven author on why she keeps writing catastrophe, and what she still sees worth saving. Fiction gives you a way to look at the scariest version of your country without flinching, and the people who keep showing up for each other are the reason the story isn't bleak. Originally reported by Mother Jones.
The pandemic novelist returns
Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven in 2014, six years before Covid. Her new novel, Exit Party, imagines something bigger: the United States coming apart as a nation.
First spring after civil war
Exit Party follows Ari Waker, just out of prison, into a country settling into the quiet after its civil war. She goes to a party celebrating the end of curfew. The host steps outside and vanishes.
The news caught up
Reading it in 2026, the interviewer noted ICE moving into Chicago and Minneapolis, a US and Israeli assault on Iran, and 1,000 measles cases. The speculation stopped feeling speculative.
She is not a prophet
Asked what she knows that we don't, Mandel is blunt about it. She follows the same headlines as everyone else and lets her fear go somewhere useful.
“I know nothing. I'm not clairvoyant, I just read the news.”
Discomfort is the price
Mandel says the scenarios in her books are deeply uncomfortable to sit with. She writes them anyway, leaning into her anxiety about the path the country is on.
“you may have to be willing to live with some discomfort to create interesting art”
Two countries, one map
The idea started in early 2020, when Northeastern states banded together to buy protective equipment as a bloc. She looked at the map and saw contiguous states acting against the interests of the rest.
“This kind of looks like a country. This kind of looks like a fracturing.”
The speculative cloak
Fiction is what makes the thinking possible. Dressing a real fear in a made-up future lets her hold it long enough to actually examine it.
“Sometimes looking at something dead-on is a little bit unbearable, but putting it in this kind of speculative cloak makes it easier to consider more deeply.”
We gave privacy away
Mandel's surveillance anxiety starts with us, not with the state. We clicked the videos and looked at the pictures, and a dossier got built in exchange.
“I think that we've surrendered a lot of our privacy, and we've done that very voluntarily.”
Masks on the street
What scares her most is how fast a masked police force in American cities became ordinary. Five years ago the idea lived only on the conspiratorial edges of the internet.
Catastrophe gets boring
She remembers it from 2008 and from Covid: you refresh the mortality graphs until you stop. Humans adapt to anything, which is both the terrifying part and the hopeful one.
“Yep, world still ending, still feels terrible.”
No country lasts forever
A line from the novel doubles as her answer. She has met people born in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and points to Minneapolis neighbors organizing and documenting as proof there is still something worth hoping for.
“You hope that whatever comes next is better.”
The key point
Fiction gives you a way to look at the scariest version of your country without flinching, and the people who keep showing up for each other are the reason the story isn't bleak.
