Emily St. John Mandel
hen author Emily St. John Mandel moved from Montreal to New York at the age of 23, she was broke, had no job prospects, and was living in a ramshackle apartment with a mentally ill stranger. Worried her roommate might snap at any moment but unable to afford moving expenses, Mandel spent hours in Brooklyn cafes, drinking tea and writing her first book. Fast forward a few years and she is proof that with a lot of hard work and hope, creative goals are attainable. She has two published novels, Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. Her third novel, The Lola Quartet, is set to come out in May 2012. Each of her books is a winning combination of gorgeous, unique imagery and nail-biting, page-turning narrative. They are the kind of novels that will leave you emotionally fulfilled, exhausted from late-night reading marathons, and reminded that books can be the most satisfying form of entertainment. I was lucky to have this opportunity to discuss all things writing with the Park Slope author. Born in British Columbia, Mandel was raised on an island that has a population of only a thousand people. She was homeschooled as a child, and her parents encouraged her creative interests. “I spent an enormous amount of time alone,” she said, “either building forts in the woods, reading, or creating elaborate fantasy worlds with homemade paper dolls. In retrospect, this probably wasn’t a bad preparation for writing novels.” Although she began writing stories at an early age, Mandel was a serious dancer and studied at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. When she realized her student loan check wouldn’t last forever, Mandel started working a series of odd jobs. “I’ve unloaded trucks at 7 a.m. I’ve spent entire days in underground stock rooms putting price stickers on martini glasses. I’ve risen at 4:30 a.m. to get to a temp job where the work consisted entirely of pasting text into Excel documents for eight hours at a stretch. There was a strange period when I was going to school, working in a café, then going back to the school to work as a janitor one night a week and on weekends.” These experiences would eventually find their way into Mandel’s written work. While contemporary fiction is overpopulated with characters that are either writers or Creative Writing professors,
by Lauren Dlugosz · photo Robert Dupree
Mandel’s characters are a reflection of real people who have to do things they don’t enjoy in order to make rent. In The Singer’s Gun, an office assistant named Elena aptly explains the horrors of the day job to her academic boyfriend: “The initial shock of work hasn’t worn off yet. I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.” An earlier section of the same book describes office girls in New York: “Young and talented and still hopeful but losing ground; bright young things held up by their pinstripes on the Brooklyn- and Queens-bound trains every weekday evening, heading home to apartment shares in sketchy neighborhoods and dinners of instant noodles from corner bodegas.” While Mandel’s Top Ramen days are behind her, she continues to work as an administrative assistant in a cancer research lab. This year, Mandel sold her third novel and made enough foreign rights sales that she could have quit her day job. She appreciates the benefits and steady income, however, and advises aspiring writers to separate the value of their writing from the question of how much money they’ll earn from it. “This will sound harsh,” she said, “but I think you have to give up on the idea that you’re ever not going to need a day job, and focus on finding the day job that interferes the least with your creative life.” Despite her fear of financial instability, Mandel says she has never come close to giving up writing for a more lucrative career. “If your primary motivation is to make money, then law school is probably a better option. I know that some authors do end up making a lot of money, it’s just that I think you have to be reconciled to the very real possibility that you might never be one of them. My personal belief is that at the end of the day, the work is what matters.” Mandel’s work is peppered with fascinating, obscure facts on unexpected topics. Her books are learning experiences that will prepare you for trivia night on the most diverse subject matter. “Usually I’ll read an article that will spark my interest—about dead languages, say, or social security fraud—and that interest will work its way into whatever book I’m currently writing.” There are traveling circuses in Last Night in Montreal,
astrobiology in The Singer’s Gun, and the history of gypsy jazz in The Lola Quartet. While Mandel’s range of knowledge is astounding, what is most impressive is the way she elegantly weaves together information and imagery. Take, for example, this short passage that demonstrates a relationship’s unraveling: “She pressed the length of her body against him again, but so gently this time that it could have been mistaken for an accidental shifting of weight. He didn’t notice, or chose not to…She began stroking his arm instead of answering him. His arm tensed very slightly under her fingertips. Haptics: the science of studying data obtained by touch.” Mandel says she is always writing a novel, and that the book ideas simply come to her. “I wouldn’t want to imply that there’s anything mystical about this,” she said. “I think that ideas for stories probably occur to everyone, and that writers are just the ones who write them down and then spend a year or two or ten developing them.” Though the initial ideas come easily, Mandel knows very little about the story when she begins writing a book. “For my first novel, Last Night in Montreal, I had an image: a car moving across a desert landscape. When I began The Singer’s Gun, I only had a premise: what if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? I’ve never done charts or outlines. That’s probably a saner way to write a book, and there would probably be fewer rounds of revisions if I knew where I was going in advance, but I think I would get bored if I knew how the book was going to end before I started writing it.” Considering the complexity of Mandel’s work, the multiple points of view and storylines, and the masterful way they all converge in the end, her abilities do seem almost mystical. While she is writing, the reader Emily St. John Mandel keeps herself in mind. “I’m writing the kinds of books that I would want to read. I want them to be as literary as anything out there, but with the strongest possible narrative drive. I aspire to write books that are truly great.” As a selfproclaimed reading junkie, I am always happy to share a high-quality find. Mandel’s novels perfectly blend beautiful language and suspenseful mystery to investigate human behavior and relationships. Her stories will leave you satisfied, and the images will stay with you long after you’ve read the last sentence. They are truly great books. 15