If the United States collapses in the near future, you’ll no doubt be tempted to point a few fingers. Just don’t blame Emily St. John Mandel.
As Covid-19 tore across the planet, Mandel became something of a pandemic prophet for writing the hit 2014 novel, Station Eleven. Journalists and everyday Twitter users alike looked to her for guidance as they hunkered down at home, desperate for someone—anyone—to tell them what was happening, and what might come next. Now, Mandel is out with a new book, Exit Party, that documents the interwoven lives of people living in two different, near-future versions of the US: A violent, post-civil-war free-for-all, and a totalitarian state where surveillance runs roughshod over a paranoid populace. She started writing the book in 2022, when polarization and political extremism were already surging—but well before the era of Trump 2. 0, widespread ICE raids, and tech-infused surveillance we’re living through today.
Exit Party is a tremendous, riveting, deeply human novel—one of the best I’ve read in years. And despite being strictly fictional, the two futures that Exit Party imagines also feel eerily, uncomfortably close to reality. But as Mandel reminded me when we sat down at WIRED’s New York studio, the book is also infused with plenty of hope, and forces readers to ask themselves important questions about what kind of person they’d be if it all went to hell. She was also, of course, quick to point out that “it doesn't actually take any particular clairvoyance,” to see where this moment in US history might take us. So no, Mandel can’t help you much if the militias roll through—but Exit Party might offer a few lessons in how to show up for your neighbors. (And throw the best post-collapse party.)
You can read our full (light on spoilers) conversation below, or listen to Uncanny Valley anywhere you get your podcasts. Exit Party is out today, September 15, and I highly recommend you pick up a copy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Emily, thank you so much for being here. I will get this out of the way at the top and acknowledge that we are both Brooklyn moms. And sometimes when you're a Brooklyn mom, you become friends with another Brooklyn mom, and we are actually friends outside of work.
EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL: Because you seek out the best mom you can find at the playground.
We met at the playground in the latter stages of the Covid-19 mask era. I've known you ever since. But regardless of that, and I'm saying this very, very genuinely, I read Exit Party—I was lucky enough to get a galley ahead of publication—in a single day. I highly recommend it.
Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here.
For those who didn’t get an advance copy, could you explain what it's about?
God, the elevator pitch on this book has been so challenging.
I suck at elevator pitches generally. But I think of this as a story about crime and resilience. It's about trying to be a decent person when things are falling apart, and it's about who you're going to be at the end of the world. I don't mean to imply that the collapse of a country is the end of the world, but what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it.
I do see this as a hopeful book. It's about what comes next and trying to be a new person in a rapidly changing and difficult landscape.
It feels very timely, in troubling ways. When you think about what's actually happening in the US right now and what’s happening in the US in the book, in what ways are those two places different?
The difference is that in the country that we live in, there's still time. The United States that opens this story, that country ran out of time. That country fractured. I wish that it felt more fictional. You know, I started writing this book in the spring of 2022.
We could already see the division that was coming because Trump was obviously so much on the horizon for a second term. But I wish it felt more speculative. I'm about to go out and do a 42-city tour where I talk about this absolutely fantastical speculative leap of imagination in which the United States falls apart.
Yeah, imagine if that happened. That would be wild.
Yeah, no one would've been able to see that coming. I don't mean to be glib about it. It's a terrifying prospect. A big part of the beginning of this book for me was working through my political anxieties.
Yes. I read the news. I've always read the news. It doesn't actually take any particular clairvoyance to look ahead and see where the incredible division in this country could potentially lead. Of course I hope it won't. But a way of thinking about that for me was, well, what might come next?
Suppose the worst were to happen. Suppose there were to be a second American Civil War. What might the aftermath be like? Which is not dissimilar to the project of Station Eleven. You know, imagining the aftermath of a very different kind of catastrophe and collapse.
This sounds ridiculous given everything I just said, but it’s actually a hopeful book. The book opens at the end of the world, but we're going to a party. That's kind of the spirit of it.
I have a memory, it was maybe about a year ago, we were having dinner with your wife. I knew that you had this book coming out. I didn't know anything about it, and she was very stressed because she was like, “Book publishing is so slow. Look at everything happening in this country right now. This book that Emily has written is so timely right now. I can't believe it's not coming out for another year.”
Knowing that you started writing it in 2022 is interesting to me, because you have now watched Trump be reelected. You watched the ICE crackdowns happening at the top of the year. This encroachment of surveillance into different aspects of our lives, the ongoing fracturing of this country, the polarization. How has that felt in these last four years, and particularly once the book was finished and you knew what was in that book?
It's funny, I remember that dinner. I remember my wife, Laura, her concern that the country might collapse before the book came out.
She's like, “They're going to ruin the book.”
Right. That is a spoiler. [Laughs] No. God, we have to laugh because otherwise it's devastating.
Well, Donald Trump is going to ruin Emily's book!
No, it's been a strange experience because, I don't know if this is too big a spoiler, but the book envisions two different versions of the United States. There's the vision we begin with where there has been a civil war, the country is fractured into somewhat contentious city states and small new republics and splinter groups. It's a bit chaotic.
There's another version of the country that is a totalitarian police state, and my experience of writing this book was that when I started writing it, I was just looking at the polarization, and I was thinking, “Well, obviously we’re in that first universe, the one where the country fractures into these little incompatible small new republics.” But by the time I finished the book, the ICE raids were happening, and my totalitarian vision of a country where citizens are disappeared by masked secret police wasn't fictional anymore. So there was this feeling of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle through the entire writing of this book.
Now, the protagonists in the book, Ibari and Ari, they’re the same person. But they also aren't at all.
How did you think about the idea of identity in writing the book?
I’ve been fascinated for a really long time by the idea of the counter life. That's the life you didn’t live, where you didn’t immigrate from Canada, or you went to a different school or took a different job or married a different person. These inflection points that would have made us, over the passage of time, into somewhat different people.
I think the reason I’m so interested in that idea is that the life I’m living feels a little bit improbable to me. I’m from Canada and I’m trained in contemporary dance, and I don’t have a high school diploma, so I do have moments of thinking, “This actually feels fairly implausible.”
I was thinking of identity in terms of the people we could have been. But then in this book, it was also interesting to me to think about, well, what is the counter life of the state? Because that's a really interesting idea. I was going to say in any democratic country, but honestly in any country.
I was thinking about, well, if we take that idea of the counter life of the individual, these different people we could have been, how is that affected by the counter life of the state? Because we are so influenced by the environment we live in, the people that surround us. I think that I'm a different person having lived for 23 years in New York City than I would've been if I had stayed in, say, rural British Columbia where I grew up.
Oh, for sure. I think about that too all the time.
I think a lot about, what if I had just stayed in Calgary?
Yeah. Canada is a little more chill.
See, now here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City.
Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives, but here we are.
Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions of a country. They are so profoundly shaped by that country. I saw Ari as somebody who's got this character flaw where she's fundamentally drawn toward crime. Maybe that's not even a flaw. Maybe it's just an interest, because there's a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal, but there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. It was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we're raised in.
I almost hate to ask this, because both versions of the US that you portray in the book are really frightening in their own respects. But did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another? Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?
No, they’re both really hard. They’re both awful. The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly. It’s like, do you want to live in chaos, or do you wanna live in a totalitarian police state? Hard pass on both.
That's an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot: no version of a country lasts forever, and there's both terror and hope in that idea. The totalitarian police state version's not going to last forever, and neither is the period of total chaos. What I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut for people who have read a lot of my work, but in Sea of Tranquility there’s a futuristic section where an author’s on a book tour in the year 2300, and she’s traveling between the Republic of California, the Atlantic Republic, and the Kingdom of Deseret, and it’s chill enough to support a book tour, you know?
But yeah, I kind of wanted to suggest that this is the founding story of that space.
I wanted to ask you about your multiverse. You have a history that your diehards, your fans, really glom onto, which is you pull from previous works and you bring people and worlds into your new work, and that continues with Exit Party.
You've talked about it as a multiverse, a cinematic universe. The New Yorker called it, quote, “The Mandel Cinematic Universe,” which I think is pretty incredible. Is there a master plan here, or is it just ad hoc as inspiration strikes?
I wish I could say I had the kind of brain that could hold an entire multiverse. I should just say yes, but, uh, no. There is no plan. That’s the baseline for individual books when I start them, but also for The Mandel-verse, as some people have also called it. I don’t have any kind of master plan that I’m working towards. I just like the opportunities for connection. I guess I have some abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe, you know? I like finding the moments when books can be drawn together, or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character, and I want to spend more time with that person.
Like Miranda in Station Eleven, I really liked her. It was really interesting to get to see a completely different facet of her life in The Glass Hotel, to see her as a shipping executive as opposed to an artist. Then I guess with Exit Party, I did lay the groundwork in Sea of Tranquility for a world where the United States no longer exists, so I guess you could make the argument that that implies the origin story.
One of the things I love about your books, several of them at least, is that they’re set in the future, but they don’t foreground the technology. They foreground the people and the human stories and the lived experience. Technology is often present, and it's certainly present in Exit Party, but how do you think about introducing technology and science into your work? How much research goes into that, and how much commitment to factual accuracy as opposed to just letting your imagination run?
What I’m aiming for is plausibility in the context of a literary novel. Which is going to be a disappointingly low bar for your average WIRED podcast interviewee.
But I think that you’ve touched upon a really interesting choice that writers of speculative fiction need to make every time we embark on a new project, which is really just how deep into the weeds you want to go on your science fictional technology.
There are writers who go pretty deep. I loved Cixin Liu’s work, The Three-Body Problem, and the rest of that series. He will go so deep into these science fictional technologies, which to my totally untrained eye, feel totally plausible.
I did flirt with that a little bit when I was starting out on Sea of Tranquility, which has a time-traveling detective, because we were all deranged during the pandemic, but yeah, I was thinking about “Well, how would this actually work?”
I was reading about the quantum blockchain and trying to understand what the mechanics could be. But then at a certain point I realized, you know what? It's just transport. Like, if I'm not explaining how your car works in the 2020 segment of the novel, then why do I care about the mechanics of the time machine?
There is a part in your book from Ibari’s perspective. She’s working as a detective in the secret police in one of these United States. She has this thought, and I’ll quote it, “I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.” That line, “reality splits into two,” is great. What does it mean to you?
In the context of that passage, she’s a secret agent with a cover story, basically. But the cover story is that she’s a professor, and she actually is teaching real classes. So it’s not false that she’s a professor, it's just that she’s also secret police.
She has the most obvious kind of surface experience of that idea of living a double life. I don’t want to say it's exactly modeled on East Germany, but the Stasi apparatus, where civilians were constantly reporting on each other, which everybody thought was overstated until the country collapsed, and it turned out to have been even bigger than anyone knew. Everybody really was reporting on each other. That does create this awful kind of doubleness where there's the part of you that's a friend, but then there's a part of you that's reporting on the friend to your handler, and both of those ideas are true.
But I think that also living that kind of doubleness would do a lot of damage to a person. It sounds so literary and pretentious to say damage to your soul, but I think that might be the situation.
In that surveillance state, there are some very stressful passages, at least for me, where you realize that none of these people can really fundamentally trust each other. And then in the other universe, there is this baseline notion of trust eroding because everybody is just looking out for themselves in the chaos. How were you thinking about that as you were writing the book? Did you have any revelations about trust in this country that we could all learn from?
It’s not specific to this country, but this actually leads us into AI for me. Do you remember when we were kids and a video was proof? It was like, “Oh, there is video evidence. Case closed.” How terrifying and damaging and ridiculous that our children are being raised in a world where a video means absolutely nothing. It’s incredibly hard to authenticate, and that’s what I find myself thinking about when I think about trust.
Sometimes I lurk on Threads, just recreationally. It is such a trash fire. It’s like Twitter in, I don’t know, 2012 or something. But something real that’s really struck me is the degree of betrayal that people feel when it emerges that an author has been using AI, and I share that sense of betrayal. It offends me in some incredibly deep way, and when I try to parse why that is, I think trust might be the answer.
I was going to ask you about AI. You write novels. You also work in Hollywood. And so you have exposure to what's happening in the book world around AI, and also what is happening in the entertainment industry. Do you use it at all?
I don't. Maybe this makes me an outlier at this point. I haven’t found it reliable in search, and so that made me distrust it completely.
Every now and again, I like to search and make sure that my daughter is not on the internet, basically. So I searched “Emily St. John Mandel daughter” I think about a year ago, and AI is so confidently wrong. It confidently introduced me to my son Leo, born in 2016, and said, “Emily St. John Mandel does not have a daughter.” And it's so confident that you have a moment of just like, “Do I have a son?”
I do not have a son named Leo. I have no idea where that came from. I searched again a month later, and it had revised that, and my daughter remained unnamed, which is what I wanted to confirm.
But it made me distrust it fundamentally from a search perspective. I know that it can be used to streamline administrative tasks. I haven’t used it as such. I can write my own emails.
I was going to say, you're still writing your own emails.
I read your interview with Matthew Belloni talking about the use of AI. It was interesting to me because without refuting anything he’s saying, I’ve just had a different experience, and I haven’t heard of people using it in my writers’ rooms in Hollywood.
I suppose AI is an argument for the in-person writers’ room. You really can’t use it if you’re sitting around a table and there’s a chalkboard. Probably people are using it without my knowledge, but I haven't personally encountered it.
When you look at the effect it’s having on book publishing—we have covered some of this—but it is chaos out there.
How does that look from where you sit? Do you worry about AI slop books becoming a mainstream commodity, taking up a bigger share of the fiction market? Or do you think people just don't have the taste for that?
I’d like to think they don't have the taste for it, but I think the slop will get less sloppish with time. What I really worry about, actually, is less the work, and I worry more about writers. Because for me, I started publishing in 2009, and I have a consistent voice across books.
My process is such that it would be very easy for me to produce iterative drafts of what I’ve been doing if I were ever forced to prove that it’s not AI, which it absolutely is not. But not all writers have that process. Some are just, you know, changing a Word doc over a period of time. Not all of us keep written notes. Something that’s emerging that alarms me is that it’s very hard to prove sometimes that your work wasn’t AI.
Yeah, to prove a negative. The reputational risk is enormous. That’s the end of a career, or at the very least, the end of a book deal.
I had a weird experience a while ago where I was just curious, so I found some free AI detection thing online, which probably stole my work, and I pasted the first chapter of Exit Party in, and what it came back with was there’s a 20 percent chance that AI was used on this. At first I was completely beside myself. I was like, “How does it think that?” And then I realized, oh, because Anthropic stole five of my novels to train their LLMs.
But to your point, I mean, the idea of being a writer for a living right now, and you’re doing the work yourself, you’re doing it with integrity, you are painstaking in your process, and one accusation or one result … And these tools are extremely flawed …
… But that can end a career. The stakes of this are very, very high. I actually did the same thing. I think anyone who writes for a living right now has this paranoia. I fed some of my articles into one of these tools because I was like, “I just want to know what it's going to say.” And I got back zero percent.
Thank you, but it was such a relief because there is this sense, this cloud of someone can point a finger. And the people who are using AI, I would argue, in creative pursuits, are ruining it for everybody else.
I would agree with that, and I don’t have any respect for them. It’s like if you can’t write, then maybe do something different. There are a lot of better jobs.
I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about you and your career. You grew up in Canada, you were in Toronto. Objectively speaking, where you are now is improbable relative to where you were then. Tell us about those early years.
I’m going to digress for a second back to the book. So much of this book is about the condition of living one life after another. And this is so many lives ago that it's like looking back at a stranger.
I grew up in rural British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and then Denman Island, which is, just for context, about the same size and shape as Manhattan, but with 1,000 people. It’s forest and deer and a general store. I was homeschooled. I did a couple semesters of community college without ever getting my GED. I auditioned successfully for a conservatory program in contemporary dance in Toronto, and I was a professional dancer after that for, like, five minutes.
I went pretty far, but I never really joined a company. I danced for a couple of independent choreographers. I loved that experience, but I never got into one of the big companies, I think in part because I’d realized by then that I no longer loved it. There's this phenomenon, I think, where if you've been dead set on one thing your entire life, like since you were six, then you can fall out of love with it. People change.
In my early 20s, I realized that dance was feeling like more of a chore than anything else, and I kinda resented it, and I didn't love it anymore. But this is kind of spectacularly poor planning on my part. I'd taken out student loans to go to the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, not a degree-granting program. So I had a mountain of student loan debt, no degree, no high school diploma. It would feel overwrought if you wrote that in a novel. My editor would probably do, like, question marks in the margin.
I had a totally destroyed credit rating in Canada due to student loan debt. So I moved to the United States. That was the solution to that problem. I’d always written just as a hobby. It was just something I loved and something I did a little bit compulsively. Like, if I went for a long walk, I’d bring a notebook because otherwise I might start writing stories on Starbucks napkins.
I was starting to write in Toronto. I met a guy who lived in New York and we were dating, and I moved to New York to be with him. Moved back to Montreal, broke up, and then I was kinda stranded in Montreal working. In winter, working retail, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
It is a very cold city, which actually played into my writing process. My roommates and I were dead broke, so we kept the heat turned down pretty low. I would go to bed at 7:00 pm just because I was so cold. It was easier to be asleep. I would sleep until about 1:00 in the morning and then naturally wake up. I'd get up in the middle of the night. I would dress to write. I had this feeling that I was doing something formal and important.
I would put on, like, a sweater and a tie and my warmest coat and go out with my laptop to the 24-hour cafe two blocks away, and I would write until morning, and that was the book that ultimately became Last Night in Montreal.
I was able to find a way to move back to New York, with, I don’t know, $400 and a 10-day sublet in the West Village when I was 22 or so. I’ve been here ever since. I started writing Last Night in Montreal in Montreal. I finished it in New York, and then I just started cold querying agents, and the 13th or 14th one found me in her slush pile and took me on.
There was a lot of luck and also an incredible amount of hard work and literally cold nights in Montreal.
I did. I’m from a very working-class background. And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job, because there is no safety net. I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal. I became an assistant in New York. I had a really great job for a long time at The Rockefeller University. I was an admin in a cancer research lab, and I loved that. It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work, and the health insurance was incredible.
I kept that job until a year after Station Eleven came out.
It got so surreal, Katie, I can’t tell you. One of my jobs in that position, or one of my tasks, rather, was to book plane tickets for my boss. But I wasn't booking my own plane tickets for the tour. I had three publicists doing that. Or, like, there was a day when I had to leave work early because I had a photo shoot at Time magazine.
Did someone tell you, “Emily, it’s time. You need to quit your job?”
You know, you know what it was? I did a podcast where the other guest was this comedian, Josh Gondelman. And at the time, I guess it was a few months after Station Eleven had come out, and I was really grappling with the day job question. Like, does it make sense to leave? Is leaving crazy? What if I never have another successful book? And he told me that a fellow comedian had once told him, “Keep your day job until you can't afford to anymore.” I found that to be a really helpful way of framing it. I kept that job until I found out I was three months pregnant, and then that was too many things.
Station Eleven was successful right out of the gate, and then it had this second life during the pandemic. You became this pandemic prophet for people who were asking you on Twitter, like, “Help. What do we do in the pandemic?” Looking back on it now, what stands out to you from that experience? What was it like to write a fictional book and then be asked for guidance in a real-world pandemic?
It was so surreal, and the requests were so misplaced. Like, if you're going to look to a writer for guidance, I want to be like, "Go talk to Ed Yong of The Atlantic." Or a scientist or something. There were so many people who were more qualified than I was to say what to do in a pandemic. It was very strange being … accused sounds too dramatic, but being accused of being a prophet in a weird way.
I was never able to quite convey at the time that there was always going to be another pandemic. I didn’t see myself as having foretold anything. The way I thought of it at the time was, well, if I'd written a novel with a fictional war, does that mean that I predicted whatever war came next after that in the real world?
What's funny is I was exactly as unprepared as everybody else. I’ve had this sideline for years of doing on-stage conversations and lectures, and I was doing that right up until March 2020. I had this long lecture that I developed about post-apocalyptic literature, about pandemics and Shakespeare and all themes that dovetailed with Station Eleven.
I was literally traveling the country delivering a lecture that contained the phrase, “There will always be another pandemic.” It is so embarrassing how shocked I was that there was, in fact, another pandemic. I was scrambling for toilet paper like everybody else.
Yeah, you're like, “Guys, I don’t know if you should put Clorox all over your groceries.”
I definitely did that, for probably longer than I should have.
I'm curious about how you deal with celebrity. Just thinking about that social media onslaught during Covid. You don't strike me as someone who's particularly eager to post, you know what I mean?
You've discovered my secret. I’m not eager to post.
How do you deal with that part of the job? And do you feel pressure to do it differently than you’re inclined to do?
If I were on Instagram just to be on Instagram, I don’t know if you’d ever see my face, you know? Because I love posting weird, beautiful little videos. Like, I just posted one that’s spiderwebs on a hiking trail in the Adirondacks last week.
If I see something cool and beautiful and I think, “Oh, that's kind of amazing,” in just a tiny little moment, and could I set it to music? That would be cool. I really like Reels. That’s how I probably naturally would use it. I do feel a certain pressure to post, I guess, to post my face for the algorithms. I do feel like I need to promote my books because it is literally how I pay my rent.
It just kind of feels like part of the job. I don't want to get too negative here because I do genuinely love interacting with readers. So I guess I kind of want it both ways.
There is pressure there. I find social media generally terrifying. I’ve had a lot of very negative interactions over the years, and what’s funny is just the way the human brain is wired, the positive interactions outweigh the negative interactions 1,000-to-one. But I also remember the negative ones. The negative ones stand out.
What is it like to promote a book in the year 2026? How has it changed?
I think that I have a very atypical experience of book promotion, because I had these three novels published by a really small press, and then I jumped to Knopf in the US, HarperCollins Canada, and Pan Macmillan in the UK for Station Eleven, and I've been with those three publishers ever since.
Because Station Eleven was so successful, a lot of marketing resources have been poured into the subsequent books. I think that that gives me a really unusual experience, and I think that it’s not normal at all. So it makes me hesitant to draw any generalizations, because for me it’s fine, you know?
But that’s certainly not the case for the vast majority of novelists. I think there's so much distraction and chatter and such short attention spans that I think it's incredibly difficult to start out as a novelist now. It was never actually easy, but my sense is that it might be harder now in this more fractured and more chaotic media landscape. I think it becomes harder for a novelist to break through.
Do you have any advice for those people?
Stay off Threads, for real. I don’t really post, but I do read. I see the most deranged publishing advice on Threads.
I don't even know. Every time I read it, I’m like, “No, that makes no sense. Don't do that.”
I want to end by coming back to Exit Party. [As you said], you were accused, for lack of a better word, of being a prophet when Station Eleven came out before the Covid-19 pandemic. You've now written a book that is close to what we are going through in the US. Are you bracing yourself for a similar reaction?
Yeah. But look, if the country collapses, it’s not my fault.
I didn’t do it. I just read the news and got freaked out like everybody else.
Is there anything in the worlds you’ve created in the book that you hope turns out to be prophetic?
Absolutely. I don’t want to take credit for the parties after … but you know what? It's hope itself. There is a lot of hope in this book. It opens at a moment when the country has collapsed, but something new is taking its place, and it's a kind of chaotic in-between period, but I never meant to imply that would last forever.
I think that settles down into something more stable and potentially better. And then on the side of the book that deals with a totalitarian state, that totalitarianism is already crumbling toward the end. I think that we see that even now in our current incredibly dark political moment.
I mean, maybe what you’ll get credit for predicting is the dawn of an even better version of this country.
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