Emily St. John Mandel on Writing a Novel of Dystopian Counterlives

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Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel’s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Québec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, takes place before, during, and after a fiercely contagious flu wipes out 99 percent of the world’s population. Sea of Tranquility (2022), which she described to me once as “autofiction through a sci-fi lens combined with time travel,” spans five centuries, beginning in 1912, with a pandemic wiping out Earth’s population (it was written during the COVID pandemic).

In her new novel, Exit Party, the dystopia is political. The year is 2031.“The United States had come undone following a coup d’etat,” she writes. “Several states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbors.” Another United States appears over time, a surveillance state with powerful controls.

In our last conversation, Mandel mentioned that she was working on “a new novel that has characters from two of my previous books.” And here it is; what motivated you to write Exit Party? I asked.

“Yes, here it is! There were a couple of starting points for this novel. One is that years after publishing my second novel, The Singer’s Gun, I remained fascinated by a character from that book, Ari. I found myself wondering what she’d be like after a very long prison sentence, and I wanted to write about her again.

“The other starting point was just the increasingly dire political situation in which we find ourselves in the United States. I started writing this novel in the spring of 2022, not long before I spoke with you, and the country was only slightly less fractured then than it is now. We were already seeing the effects on our politics of years of successful disinformation campaigns. It unfortunately doesn’t take a wild leap of speculative imagination to imagine the country breaking apart, and I was interested in what the aftermath of a national collapse could look like. I’ve never been particularly interested in disaster, but I am interested in its aftermath. There’s hope in thinking about the world that follows catastrophic events.”

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Jane Ciabattari: Exit Party’s cast of characters includes Ari Waker, the villain who blackmails her cousin and partner in crime Anton Waker, the central character in The Singer’s Gun (2015). Elsewhere in the novel, we meet Lucas Alkaitis, the painter from The Glass Hotel. What drew you back to Ari and Anton, and to Lucas?

Emily St. John Mandel: This isn’t a spoiler, because it’s literally the plot of a novel I published in 2010, but one of the defining events of Ari’s life is her decision to take out a contract on her cousin Anton. So as I mentioned, I’d wanted to write about Ari again, and I felt like there was some emotional calculus where bringing Ari into this book required bringing Anton into the book too.

To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you?

Lucas is there largely because of the painting, Swan Dive, which moves through the narrative. I’m interested in the way art moves through time, the way different people have relationships with a given work of art over decades or sometimes centuries. So I wanted to write about that, and I thought, “well, I already have this character from The Glass Hotel who’s a painter, maybe it would be interesting to bring him into this.”

JC: What do you find captivating about criminality?

EM: In real life, it isn’t captivating at all. Real-life criminality looks sad and sordid. It looks like all the locked-up people I’ve met when I do events at prisons. But in fiction, it can drive a plot in an interesting way.

JC: And quantum entanglement theory, which involves particles linked in time instead of in space, which shows up several of your novels?

EM: It’s just so weird. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” I like the spookiness.

JC: How did you settle on the title, Exit Party?

EM: I am terrible at titles! My original title for this novel was James Exits the Party, which sounds like a stage direction, also that’s a little glimpse into a previous iteration of the plot. I liked that title, but literally no one else did. My wife and I talked about it endlessly, and she actually came up with Exit Party.

JC: Your opening scene sets up the puzzle. Ari Waker, 48, released from prison in Spring 2031 after served eighteen years for taking out a contract on her cousin Anton’s life (“It was a mistake and I’m not that person anymore”), is exalted at her freedom as she walks around Los Angeles: “the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” While she was in jail, the United States had disintegrated into civil war, separate nation states, opponents and alliances; the second part of the novel is set in a parallel authoritarian United States. On this spring day, international peacekeeping forces have just departed the city and Ari’s roommate Gloria takes her to Kareem’s party to celebrate the end of the citywide curfew.

There, Ari meets a stranger named Saraya in a silvery dress who recognizes her and calls her “Ibari,” her legal name. Later she spots a woman who looks identical to Saraya, but is wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt and keeps saying “I don’t know where I am.” By the end of the night Kareem disappears, as does a painting on his wall. Identical characters at the same party. Identical countries, with different political systems and freedoms. Doppelgangers, doubles, anchor this novel. How did you develop that plotline?

EM: Slowly and with great difficulty. I’ve been interested for a long time in the idea of the counterlife, which is the life you didn’t live: the life where you married a different person, or went to a different school, or emigrated instead of staying or vice versa, and the way any of those decisions would have pushed you toward becoming a slightly different version of yourself.

But that frames the counterlife idea in terms of agency. There’s another possibility, which is that if you’d grown up in a different country, or a different family, that would also make you a slightly different version of your present self. To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you? It’s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it’s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state. It’s easy for me to imagine a version of the United States that collapses into chaos, but it’s also not hard to imagine a version that drifts further and further down an authoritarian path, especially when we encounter horrors like the ICE raids in Minneapolis.

JC: Ari had been beset all her life by premonitions. She feels pulled toward the party at Kareem’s by “an invisible thread.” Later she senses when it will be her last day in a motel in Ohio, or knows when it’s dangerous to be in a parking lot in Texas. In many cases, her premonitions save her from danger. Why did you choose this as a character trait?

EM: I’m always interested in characters who have some special quality—foresight in this case, or intelligence, or inside knowledge—that should save them from their fates but doesn’t. I think it’s interesting from a narrative perspective.

JC: Part of the intrigue of the puzzle of Exit Party is the structure. The novel is divided into three sections: A-Side, which describes one universe, B-Side, which is set in a parallel universe, and Swan Dive, which deals with a central recurring image, a painting created by Lucas Alkaitis, Sebastian’s father, in 1968, which was hanging on the wall of Kareem’s apartment in the opening scene. How did this structure evolve?

It’s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it’s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state.

EM: I began with the world in the A-Side, this version of the world where the United States has come undone and countless new small nations are forming. I knew early on that doppelgangers of two characters were going to come into that world, and I realized after a while that I was going to have to account for where they came from, so that led me to develop the B-Side universe, which took on a life of its own; it was interesting to consider the psychological implications of life in an authoritarian surveillance state.

JC: You are a master world-builder, having created a multiverse in your novels, sometimes multiple worlds, intersecting worlds, in one book, as in Exit Party. How do you manage the details and keep everything in synch? Do you have computer programs? Walls of imagery or words? What does your writing space look like? Do you play music?

EM: The details of a given book are always in my head while I’m writing a novel, but I lose track of the multiverse all the time. I sometimes have to be reminded about the connections between books. I’d forgotten that the architect of the Ponzi scheme in The Glass Hotel makes a cameo appearance in The Lola Quartet until someone mentioned it on Instagram the other day.

I’ve always liked the idea of a wall of words, and I tried that once with a previous book—I think it was The Glass Hotel—but I just don’t really have the wall space for that kind of thing, and it became more cumbersome than useful. I’ve dabbled with computer programs, but I always run into the same problem, where the solution starts to feel more elaborate and complicated than the problem.

I sometimes listen to ambient music while I’m writing—I like the album Sleep, by Max Richter—but more often these days I just listen to white noise, either rain or the Pacific Ocean.

For years now I’ve been dividing my time between New York City and Los Angeles. In LA the entire apartment is a single room. I love being there, because most of my friends are there at this point, but I have more space in New York City. In NYC, where I’ve mostly been these past few months, I share an office with my wife. I work at a standing desk beside a window with a view of the East River. I love watching the movement of boats.

JC: How do you describe your work? Speculative fiction? Literary fiction? Sci-fi?

EM: All of the above. I like the idea that a book can be more than one genre.

JC: Which authors do you read?

EM: I’m more interested in contemporary fiction than in any other category of books. There are a handful of authors whose latest book I’ll buy immediately as soon as I come across it in a bookstore: Charles Yu, Olivia Laing, Jesmyn Ward, Zadie Smith, Dan Chaon, Han Kang. Probably others I’m not thinking of.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

EM: I just started a new novel. I’ve also been working on the pilot script for a TV adaptation of Exit Party, and I have a couple of other screen projects in development. I’m trying to get a film adaptation of Last Night in Montreal and a TV adaptation of The Lola Quartet off the ground.

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Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.