Emily St. John Mandel:
No more anonymity
by Pauline Bock
Emily St. John Mandel arrives early for her reading at Pete’s Candy Store, a bar in Williamsburg. She slips off her chic, white-and-yellow checked coat, and orders water. Nothing in her behavior betrays the way her life has turned upside down. “It’s chaos,” she says. “And overwhelming. And great.”
The author of three relatively small noir novels, she’s seeing her career take a huge boost since her latest novel, “Station Eleven,” was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction. “Amazement, really, is the word”, she says. “I feel like I’ve won the lottery.” Two weeks hence, the award will go to Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” but Mandel is hardly defeated. At the “Great Book Giveaway” organized by the National Book Foundation the morning before the ceremony, as authors Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler offer free copies of shortlisted books in Washington Square Park, Station Eleven will be the most requested. Mandel’s sudden recognition will certainly help the paperback edition, too, released next June in the U.S. and in the U.K. next January. Stone Village Productions, in Los Angeles, has bought the film option. “I’m very happy about it,” she says, “but I can’t say much.”
The novel has sold to 17 countries and will be translated to 14 languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Romanian, Portuguese, and Chinese. She will be in France in March, to receive the Prix de la Critique for her previous novel, “The Singer’s Gun.” The French will not be able to read Station Eleven before early 2016, but they created a Wikipedia page for her. There’s none in English. Yet.
In the narrow backroom at Pete’s, Mandel steps to the stage, crowned with a circle of light bulbs. Every table is taken, with 20 or so people waiting in silence. Shadows from the candles dance on the sound-proof, polystyrene walls. In her reading copy of Station Eleven, Mandel has marked pages with pastel-coloured Post-its.
Her pixie haircut emphasize her pale, thin features and hazel eyes. She’s 35, but someone told her recently that she did not look “old enough to have written a book.”
“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.” Her voice grows smoother, moves rhythmic. She makes eye contact with the audience.
For someone who describes herself as “introverted,” Mandel reads like an actor. “That’s a lot of practice,” she laughs.
She has never acted. But her novel’s Travelling Symphony, going from town to town, on an Earth that a pandemic has left almost deserted, came from a desire to write about the world her husband, playwright Kevin Mandel, inhabits. “About what it means to devote your life to the art,” she says.
“Station Eleven”’s lone troupers devote theirs to Shakespeare. The novel opens with an actor dying of a heart attack during a performance of “King Lear;” a true event Mandel discovered in a history of the New York Public Theater.
“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.” ― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
At Pete’s, a small pile of “Station Eleven” is waiting at the door, along with a short line of soon-to-be readers. Mandel signs each copy with her black felt pen. “The cover is lovely!” one young woman says.
“I loved your reading,” says another. “And I love your coat too!” Mandel smiles.
Mandel lives in Park Slope, in a house she bought with her husband a year ago. What she likes the most is the tiny rooftop garden, she explains on the G train back home. “Last summer was our first in the house, and with the flowers, it was so nice to sit up there.”
Her bookshelves contain works by Irene Nemirovsky, J.D. Salinger, Michael Ondaatje. “I grew up surrounded by books,” she says, “I’m reading all the time.” She just finished Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” which won the award. “It’s an absolutely stunning book,” she says.
Mandel remembers a bucolic childhood on Denman Island, off British Columbia. The second of five children, she was homeschooled, and “had to write something everyday.” She has kept a diary five days a week ever since.
Mandel wrote her first short story, about “an Italian pasta maker,” at 16, but she envisioned herself a dancer, and for a time she was. After a year of college, she studied at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She recalls “the music, the clubs, the young downtown life of Toronto in the late 90s” — a background for the more personal novel she may write someday, she says.
When she “burned-out” and stopped dancing, she moved to Montreal, then settled in New York. Her suitcase already contained the draft of her first novel, “Last night in Montreal.” It was published in 2009 by Unbridled Books and followed by “The Singer’s Gun” (2011) and “The Lola Quartet” (2012).
The reviews were good — “Last night in Montreal” was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year, and “The Singer’s Gun” received the Prix de la Critique in France. But Unbridled Books is not Knopf. With Station Eleven, she took a major step.
Her agent, Katherine Fausset, says she immediately saw “Station Eleven” as Mandel’s biggest achievement. “I was reading on my sofa and I stood up thinking: ‘This is brilliant and beautiful; it needs to be published in a truly dazzling way.’” It was time to “move Emily to a house like Knopf,” she says. “It’s so ambitious, the semantic concerns are more plentiful. Emily is an elegant writer in her style.”
Mandel got a “mid-6 figures” advance for Station Eleven; 18 times higher than the one she got for her first novel, she says. This one helped pay for her beloved rooftop garden. The first advance in 2009 “paid the rent.” From cleaning churches in Toronto to unloading trucks at 7 A.M. in Montreal, she has known the world of bills-paying jobs. She still works part-time as an administrative assistant for the cancer research lab at Rockefeller University, a job she loves and doesn’t plan to leave. It provides health insurance, one of the things that make Mandel feel “ambivalent about the U.S.”
During the tour with Knopf, she read and signed in 21 cities in the U.S., Canada, plus London. “It’s exhausting,” she says. “Sometimes you just don’t know where you are anymore.” She recalls odd questions from readers. “One guy wanted to know if after the end of the world, the characters took Vitamin C, because he was…” She has a frank, happy laugh.
The booksellers, she says, were the best part of it. “They were always hospitable and enthusiastic.” She supports indie bookstores in her Park Slope neighborhood and when she shops online, she uses Brilliant Books, advertised as “your long-distance local bookstore.”
It was in a bookstore, too, that she learned about her award nomination. Mandel was signing piles of “Eleven” in advance, in the basement of McLean and Eakin bookstore, in Petoskey, Michigan, when she received an excited email from her editor in New York. “I had to go and do the event, and I could not tell anybody!” She recalls feeling “terrible” for the owners, with whom she ate dinner that evening without “being able to concentrate”. “After dinner I realized that the nominees list had leaked on the Huff Post, so everybody found out that evening!” After the National Book Award nomination, which includes 10 novels came the shortlist, with 5. This time, she was in British Columbia, visiting family.
“Eleven” debuted number 20 on The New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the list for three weeks, peaking at number 15 in mid-October. She says it had “quite bad reviews” in both The Times and The Sunday Book Review, but that’s a bit harsh. In The Sunday Book Review, critic Sigrid Nunez wrote that “Mandel is an able and exuberant storyteller,” and the daily Times called “Eleven” is Mandel’s “stylistic pivot.”
But “even if they say it’s bad, it sells more!” she laughs. “Being on the bestseller list for a while would be nice.”
Now, when travelling to work, she writes on her iPad on the F train, but mostly she meets her deadlines at home. “I listen to music constantly”, she says. For “Station Eleven”, iTunes played Max Richter on in a loop.
On her standing desk, at home, the computer sits on a small chest, at eye level, where her two one-eyed orange tabbies, Ralph and Louie, settle sometimes to enjoy the view. She has hung on the wall a framed, signed design of a comic book named “Station Eleven” inserted in the UK edition.
She has written 40 pages of “Station Eleven”’s successor, starting by hand, with horizontal dashes over the i’s, like small umbrellas. When working on the computer, she “turns the web off,” using Freedom software, which cuts off Internet access for a specified time. Active on Twitter and Tumblr, Mandel feels torn about social media. “The reality is that abstaining from social media in order to focus entirely on writing is a luxury that most debut novelists just can’t afford,” she commented in an essay.
Between deadlines and tweets, Mandel is learning French. “I have French homework to do this weekend,” she smiles. She admits fantasizing about living in Paris, but needs to practice first. “Right now, I can order a café.”
