When Emily St John Mandel was a child she had a dream that would stay with her for decades. It was a nightmare in which “I was trying to find my dad in a crowd, and there were other people who looked like him but weren’t him”, she says. Doubles of some guests appear.
Someone else disappears altogether. The novel then alternates between two potential future Americas, one riven by the chaos of civil war, the other a surveillance state. Doppelgangers and alternative realities are having a cultural moment in our uncanny, deepfake times.
Mandel says the biggest challenge western democracy faces is “the collapse of consensual reality. When you get to a situation where half the electorate disagrees on basic reality – for example, who won an election, or is Covid real? I don’t know how you come back from that.” On a more personal level, she has always been fascinated by what she calls “the counter-life – the one where you took a different job or married a different person.
The way that, if we made a different decision, we would have become a somewhat different person.” This interest comes, she thinks, from a feeling that “my life as a writer in New York City is a bit improbable”. Mandel was home-schooled on a tiny island in British Columbia, Canada, before training as a dancer. As she puts it, she was “essentially not educated until I was about 15 … I haven’t got a high school diploma.” She wrote while working office jobs until her third novel, Station Eleven, became a smash hit.
The 2014 story of life after a global pandemic felt so prescient when readers rediscovered it during Covid that she developed a reputation for clairvoyance. It has sold 1.5m copies and been translated into 37 languages. Her novels since – The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility – were global bestsellers too.
It’s a staggering career, and, as she sees it: “There are a million ways this might not have happened.” We meet on a sunny New York City day, in the lobby of a sleek Williamsburg hotel. Mandel, who lives in nearby Queens, wears a rose-printed shirt and comes across as warm yet precise. She’s off to have a haircut after we meet, even though her neat pixie cut scarcely looks trimmable.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
