Poured Over: Emily St. John Mandel on Sea of Tranquility
“I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe…”
How many times have you re-read Emily St. John Mandel’s genre-blending novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel? Emily joins us on the show to talk about her latest novel Sea of Tranquility—our April 2022 Barnes & Noble Book Club pick—along with what she loves most about writing, breaking the rules of time + space, how character development makes an imaginary world real, the writers and books who inspire her, and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.
One of Our Best Books of the Year (So Far) for 2022.
Featured Books:
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Executioner’s Song by Normal Mailer
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:
Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I am so excited to be here today with Emily St. John Mandel, her newest novel, A Sea of Tranquility. And it is the April 2022, Barnes and Noble book club pick. So, before we start, I’m just gonna warn everyone, this is a spoiler free conversation, if you want that version of the conversation, we’re going to have that in May when Emily joins us for her book club discussion. And if you want details on that, that’s bn.com. And you can find everything you need there. But Emily, thank you so much for joining us. I love this new novel. And I have so many questions. And like I said, we’re going spoiler free.
Emily St. John Mandel: I will do my best. And thank you so much for the kind words about the novel. And it’s a it’s a pleasure to be here.
B&N: So, before we get to Sea of Tranquility, I have one question I’ve been dying to ask you for more than a minute. Okay, go for it. What do you love most about writing?
ESJM: I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe, or this other series that nobody outside Canada has ever heard of. Actually, it wasn’t a series, I think it was just a book called The Golden Pine Cone where a child picks up this golden pine cone on the forest floor. And it’s like this new world rotates into place and like clicks in around her. And I don’t know, I was always really drawn to that. And there’s something about writing a novel that feels to me like building a secret private world. And then you know, of course, you inevitably go through the publication process and like everybody else comes into, but there is a period of time that feels really magical, when it’s just yours. Also just the pleasure of narrative. I just really love telling stories. I’ve never been remotely talented at like telling stories verbally, but I can do it on the page. And it’s just something I truly love.
B&N: We open with a scene of this 18-year-old man on a boat. He has been exiled from his home in England, because he has said some very truthful things at a dinner party and his parents just looked at him and said, I’m not under our roof. And he knew he was going to be sent to Canada, but has travel dates got moved. By about a year. And here he is, Edwin, and he is a very sweet, young man. But I’m wondering how to See of Tranquility start for you?
ESJM: It started almost the opposite end of the timeline where this is not a huge spoiler, I think it’s in the jacket copy, if I say that it moves pretty wildly through times. So we do open in 1912 with Edwin St. Andrew. Now this 18-year-old exile arriving from London, it moves all the way up to the year 2400 in a moon colony and in a sort of second to most futuristic section around the year 2301, there is an author named Olive. Olive has written a very successful pandemic novel, and she’s on an epic promotional tour. So the novel started with auto fiction. And that’s a form that I didn’t ever really think I would do, I guess I’ve always kind of been drawn to auto fictions opposite, which is completely made up stuff, my scientifically implausible flu pandemic, or the moon colony, or whatever it is, but it’s fun to try new things. I feel like I’ve been drawn almost to the opposite of auto fiction to sci fi, or noir, you know, stuff that’s just really made up. But it’s fun to try new things. And it is a kind of compelling form, to me. I’ve never liked writing personal essays, they always make me feel really overexposed. But there’s something about hiding behind this thin veneer of fiction that I think can be kind of an interesting way to talk about one’s life. So about three months approximately before the pandemic, so call it December 2019, I’d started working on these autofiction fragments, and I wasn’t sure if anything would happen with them, because I don’t write from an outline. So it’s not unusual for me to start writing something that I think will be the book, but then you know, I just keep on going down a path. And it’s caught by the second draft. So I just had this kernel of a thing that I was working on, I was writing about this author on tour, which was kind of interesting and also difficult because on the one hand, it’s really easy to fall into this deeply unattractive territory of guise, it’s super hard to be a best selling novelist, which one. This is the most privileged job that one could possibly have. It’s kind of my understanding of my life. At the same time, people say the most extraordinary things to me on the road. And when I say extraordinary, I mean, sexist. I’d had all of these very strange interactions that I wanted to write about, because they were upsetting, but they were also fascinating. It’s incredible what people will say to a female novelist, even quite a successful one, you know, in the year of 2019, at that point, and doubt anything’s changed. So, yeah, it was I was writing about these encounters that out on the road, and then the pandemic hit. And I was getting a lot of invitations to write op eds and articles and personal essays, kind of on the theme of like, what is it like to be the author of Station Eleven? In a real pandemic, like hashtag irony, it was just like, oh, no, I don’t, I didn’t want to go there at all, because it felt like using this real life catastrophe as a marketing opportunity. And I saw some people do that, and it was gross. Like I saw op eds by other pandemic novelists or short story writers. So I really didn’t want to go there. But at the same time, it was weird and interesting. So that kind of gave me a new focus for the auto fiction, I thought, well, maybe I keep the real part of it about being a writer on tour and what that’s like when you have a child at home and all the rest of it, that’s real. But maybe I could look at it through this sci fi lens. And it was a way of writing about this horrible time that we were all living through in early 2020. Yeah, so that was the beginning of it. And then I had always wanted to write a time travel story, I read a ton of sci fi, when I was a teenager, the problem with time travel stories is that if you look at them too closely, they kind of collapse where it’s like, if I traveled the year 1905, tomorrow, then I was always going to travel to the year 1905, and I’ve created this infinite loop. And that completely removes both cause and effect and free well, which is kind of disastrous for fiction, you really need your characters to have both of those things and your story to have those things. So I thought maybe the way I can make this work for myself is by putting on this whole other layer of weirdness. So enter the simulation hypothesis, which is one of my favorite kind of wild ideas out there. And it’s what it sounds like, it’s the idea that maybe we’re all living the computer simulation, you can find very intelligent people who will persuasively argue either side of that. I don’t really have a strong stance myself, but it was fun. It was that was a really fun thing to write about. And it was a way to make time travel work for me, you know, to have a character in the year 2400. Say, we don’t really understand why time travel works as well as it does. It feels as though the timeline repairs itself in a way that doesn’t make sense. Unless there’s something else going on. We think that might be proof that we’re living in a simulation. Yeah, that was how it came together these very disparate elements, plus the insanity of the pandemic, just this traumatic time that we all lived through that kind of made me feel like, you know what, I’m just gonna write whatever I want. Everything’s terrible. Yeah, it’s very much a product of its time.
B&N: I have a note to myself, from sort of early in the book. Nice to know, misogyny and sexism is still alive and creepy and 2203.
ESJM: I had an interview with The Guardian recently, and the journalist said, I made a list of the things that persist to that time period, cupcakes, red velvet cake, and misogyny. That’s the list.
B&N: But here’s the thing. We’re talking about time travel. And we’re talking about elements of sci fi. It seems to me that your early novels have been described by multiple outlets as Noirs. And I’m not one for technical definitions. So I can’t tell you if they are technically correct. I know I liked them. I liked the characters. I knew stuff was going to happen. I mean, you write beautiful sentences, but the action moves in all of your books, and of course, the dystopian label that has been applied. Why can’t we just have nice things? Emily, why can’t we just have stories where stuff happens? And art takes us out of where we are? I mean, as you’re saying, Sea of Tranquility is a product of its moment, but isn’t all art a product of its moment? Aren’t we in conversation with ourselves? Aren’t we in conversation with what came before us? And what we’re hoping happens next?
ESJM: Yeah, always, I think we are. I think as a species, we have a mania for labeling. And maybe that’s not a strong enough word. It’s more like a mania for silos. It’s sci fi or literary fiction, it’s black or white, one or zero, Republican or Democrat, like whatever the mutually exclusive category might be. And that is such a limited way of looking at the world. And idea I came across when I first started grappling with a sci fi label. So the fall of 2014, when station 11 came out, I came across this really wonderful essay by Joshua Rothman on the New Yorker blog, and he made what I think should be an obvious point, but somehow often isn’t, which is that of course, it can be more than one thing. And I find that to be a much more interesting and expansive sort of theory of genre where, yeah, it’s sci fi and it’s also literary fiction, and maybe it’s also detective fiction, you know, we have an investigation in the middle of it. So I love that, the idea that it can be A and B and C and a little bit of D, I think is a better way of viewing literature. I will say, I think the literary landscape has changed for the better in that regard. When I first started trying to publish, it took two years to sell my first novel Last Night in Montreal, it was rejected by something like 35 publishers before I landed a tiny press. And some of those rejection letters were just we didn’t like it, which is fine. But a lot of them were something like, we don’t know how we would market a book that’s more than one genre. But I literally remember hearing that because it was detective fiction and literary fiction. That was 2006/2007. I feel like at this point, that’s just not a problem. Publishers are very open to books that are more than one genre. And I think it makes it a more interesting time to be not just a writer, but also a reader. And a bookseller.
B&N: That’s a really good time to be able to, I just get frustrated with people, as you said, trying to silo things keep an open mind. And yeah, I am not a big reader of sci fi and fantasy, but I am perfectly willing to suspend any kind of disbelief when the sentences are gorgeous. And I care about the characters. And that’s not to say that there isn’t great genre writing. Absolutely not saying that. I am simply saying that for me, as a reader, I read what I read. But I do appreciate a gorgeous sentence. I also appreciate surprises. And there are a couple of characters who pop up in Sea of Tranquility from The Glass Hotel. And I was not expect and not that you haven’t done this before. I mean, we have a couple of characters from Station Eleven, including Miranda, who I love, pop up in The Glass Hotel. But did you know that Vincent and her brother had a role to play in Sea of Tranquility,
ESJM: Not when I started, but pretty early on. Because once I realized that I wanted to move through time, I knew I wanted to land somewhere around February 2020. Because I am obsessed with that month as of historical moment, where I don’t know what your experience was. But for me in New York, it felt like that whole month, we knew what was coming, you know, was like that’s the repeated line. And all of this book, we knew what was coming. You know, we’re smart people, we can read the news, we saw what was happening in China. And then Italy, New York City has three international airports that people were pouring in from all over the world. It’s like we knew it was coming. But we didn’t really believe it, because a pandemic hadn’t happened to us in over 100 years. So I’m just kind of fascinated by that period of denial. I think of it as a mass failure of imagination, where we were so breezy about it to kind of deflect our anxiety. We were like, oh, yeah, I’m sure COVID is already here. Well, anyways, I’m going to drop the kids off at school, get on a crowded subway and then go shake hands at strangers. Like we just did not make those leaps. So once I realized that I was moving through time, I knew I wanted to visit that moment. And then I realized I have all these characters who live in that time period and the write city from the book that I just published. So it feels like it cheapens it a bit to say that it felt efficient to bring them back and have these ready made characters. It wasn’t just that it was also an opportunity to go a little bit more deeply into the character of Marilla, who I really liked, you know, Vincent’s best friend in The Glass Hotel. It wasn’t a great pleasure to spend more time with Paul as his brother. That guy’s tedious. But he’s also interesting, and he’s a character who I’ve met in real life fairly often, you know, that the tragedy of feeling like the world owes you something and the way that warps a life and warps all of your relationships. That’s something I’ve seen a few times. So although he’s unappealing as a character, he is interesting and kind of ultimately tragic and sympathetic to me.
B&N: And Paul and Marilla make it possible for us to meet Gaspery. And I’m dancing around him a little bit. I mean, he and Olive and Edwin are the heart of the story. Right. And I don’t want to say that Gaspery isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. But he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows. And he’s a great stand in for us, the reader. I mean, he’s a great stand in, because you see him sort of connecting the pieces, and we know all of showed up first for you. When did Gaspery show himself?
ESJM: I should have an answer for that. Oh, that’s fair. 2020 was so bad. Honestly. It’s like, those first months of putting the book together. That was like, April 2020. And you know, I live a mile away from a hospital in Brooklyn. So just like this atmosphere of death and constant sirens. Yeah, I don’t remember where exactly in the process he came in. My instinct is to say it was pretty early, that I knew that he was going to be sort of a thread through the book.
B&N: So you’ve got the time periods, you’ve got 1912, you’ve got 2020, 2203. Let’s call those the three main periods. You’ve got your main characters, you’ve got the rules of time travel, established as they are in your world. But can we talk about the structure for a second? I mean, you don’t write in a linear fashion, per se you write as you need and then sort of go from there, correct?
ESJM: Yeah, exactly. And also, I’m always trying to write myself out of corners. So You know, the thing with not writing from an outline is you end up in these cul de sacs where it’s like, Wait, what was I doing with this character? I’m just gonna put that guy aside and go right and all of section, you know, set 300 years later. So yeah, I jump all over the place and I’m writing.
B&N: But are you starting with character? Are you starting with story? I mean, you write amazing openings. You somehow managed to hit this first sentence thing perfectly. And for the tone of the book to I mean, obviously, the style of your opening sentences changes project project, but I always know what I’m getting. And I really like it. First sentences are I mean, we’ve all are picked up a book where you’re like, Whoa, I see what you tried to do.
ESJM: Exactly, yeah. But you rewrote that 10 times to you know, just as a quick aside, like credit where credit’s due, I’ve been hugely influenced in that regard by Dan Chaon, who’s one of my very favorite writers, for anybody listening is unfamiliar, that last name is spelt like chaos, but with an N, he is the master of the opening, he had this novel Await Your Apply in 2011, which was hugely influential to me in terms of structure and point of view, which was pretty daring, that he did some really interesting things. But also the opening of that novel, it opens with a guy being rushed to hospital with his severed hand in a bucket of ice. And you’re just like, Oh, my God, I have to keep reading, like, how do we get here? So I feel like I’ve been very influenced by him. And I do try to make the create the strongest possible hook with the opening sentence,
B&N: We will include Await Your Reply in the show notes for this episode, too. So people can find it quickly, because it is pretty spectacular, great book, but you’re writing yourself out of corners. It sounds to me like you’re starting with an idea. And then either a person shows up or a scene shows up and it’s always the idea first.
ESJM: You know, it really varies. So, Station Eleven. That was correct. I did start with the idea. The idea was what if an actor dies of a heart attack on stage and the fourth act of Lear, like that gets your rolling, we’re plotting is concerned, The Glass Hotel started with a crime. Every character in that book is completely fictional. But of course, the central Ponzi scheme is based on Bernie Madoff’s. Sea of Tranquility, I guess it started with me. weird way, like started with a character. Yeah, started by writing about all of something that was really different than writing Sea of Tranquility was I had an idea of the structure I wanted going in, which almost never happens. One of my favorite novels is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. And I’ve always deeply admired the structure of that book, which has that incredible symmetry, you know, it moves from way back, I want to say like the 1650s, or something, and then like way forward in time, and then back again, kind of in reverse chronological order. And I wanted to try that structure for a long time. And then this was the project where it finally made sense. I think that partly explains why it did not take that much time to write this book. It’s partly the length, listeners will be shocked to hear that it’s faster to write 150 pages than 350 pages, but it’s also just knowing what the structure was going to be going in. And having that template, I think, that speeded along a bit, it was a nice sort of roadmap and sense of order.
B&N: Grief appears for Olive and Edwin and Gaspery in different ways. In some cases, they don’t even recognize that it’s grief. It’s, you know, grief is tricky. It never looks the same, even for the same person. It’s just it manifests itself so wildly and so differently. And I think exile is a big part of this, as well. And the way grief and exile are intertwined for your characters. I mean, time travel is kind of the ultimate form of exile.
ESJM: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s losing your homeland. You know, even if your homeland, you could think of that as a point in time. Edwin St. Andrew, the first character you meet, he’s based on one of my great grandfathers who had the most incredibly British name, Newell St. Andrew St. John, the double barreled saint, although actually back then it would have been Sinjin, because he was British. He was from a very upper class background, he went to, you know, one of those spectacularly fancy schools and got a beautiful education. He’s a person who got the kind of education where he probably would have been very well versed in the classics would have been fluent in Latin and Greek, absolutely zero skills for the real world, which was a problem because the law in England back then was that the entire estate went to the oldest son. So the solution for what to do with these spare sons essentially was they’d be shipped off to the so called New World and just kind of, you know, here’s some money go make a go of it, which on the one hand, is an incredibly privileged immigration experience. I mean, it’s a trust fund essentially. On the other hand, there is something poignant to me about the condition of finding yourself in a world for which you’re completely ill equipped, like just really no skills and no idea of what of what to do. So my great grandfather, he failed to make a go of it in two countries in both the US and Canada. He did time in prison. He had a life here, it was often difficult. He never saw his family again. That’s what immigration meant back then, he left London at 18. And then in his 80s, his favorite sister came to visit him. And they spent time together in Vancouver for a couple of weeks. And then he died two weeks later after she left. It was like he waited. But yeah, you know, it’s incredible to think about exile and immigration in those terms, where sometimes you don’t see your homeland again, or you don’t see your loved ones again. And yeah, there is true grief in them.
B&N: Gaspery has a question that he sort of asked the air more than anything. What makes a world real? And you do this thing in your novels, that it’s so real, even though everything is extraordinary, and I mean, certainly, we’re talking about time travel. We’re talking about time travel, and I’m completely bought in, yeah, the way it’s set up. But what makes a world real for you, as a reader, what makes a world real for you as the writer?
ESJM: It all comes down to character development. For me, I feel like if you care about the characters, you will follow them anywhere, including through time and including to a moon colony in the year 2400. I set people on these extraordinary circumstances. And it’s not that I make them mundane it’s that I make them human. I think that’s what the key is, for me, not just as a writer, but as a reader for any fiction to work, it almost goes back to that genre thing we were talking about. I don’t care what the genre is, as long as I care about the character. So for me, that’s everything. I think that if you’re going to write novels, you have to be fascinated by people and how they think and how they operate and their weaknesses. And I am, I feel like I’m always studying people, you know, or I’m studying myself partly just as a human for curiosity, but also for my work. I’m really interested in people and how they interact and how they move through crises. And I think that might be the key to writing a compelling narrative.
B&N: One of the books that I was thinking about as I read Sea of Tranquility was Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. And he does a not dissimilar thing, I mean, cloning, right, but he never loses sight of his characters humanity, even though they have no idea at first, what’s going on, and much like Olive and Gaspery and Edwin, they really do not know what’s going on. But as more as revealed they start to and their eyes get really big.
ESJM: There’s something devastating about the prose style in that book, because it is almost mundane, you know, it’s a very, like, purposefully pared down. style. If I say it’s pedestrian, that sounds negative, but it’s simple. And that way that’s really hard to pull off. It’s like actually secretly complicated for me at that made it much more devastating to me, which is kind of how matter of fact, this whole situation was.
B&N: And this is also partially what is happening with Sea of Tranquility, too. I mean, you’ve got characters who, technology has its place here, don’t misunderstand. I mean, there’s there is technology in this book, but the real challenges for Olive and Edwin and Gaspery are the human parts, really hard for them to process what they’re going through. And certainly Olive in the context of her husband and daughter, and the choices that she makes. She has a moment as she’s leaving a hotel. But having spent a lot of time in hotels, it’s kind of your worst nightmare, but at the same time under the circumstances, and yes, I’m being intentionally oblique, but her first thought is I’m leaving, right? I’m going directly where I need to go. And yeah, I’m done.
ESJM: Absolutely. Is that like the secret fantasy of business trips? Where you’re like, what if I just went back to the airport? It is sometimes, yeah, you know, the technology, it’s not that it’s uninteresting to me. It’s that. Maybe it is? I don’t know. It’s like, I do think there are writers who go deep into the technology in a really interesting way. Like I love Cixin Liu’s work, The Three-Body Problem and the rest of that, that’s just never been an interest of mine as a writer. I guess, I just come back to people where it’s like, I don’t really care exactly how time travel works. I care what it does to people. Yeah, and how they think about it and interact around it.
B&N: Whether or not you’re gonna save a drowning man. Yeah, exactly. And how you respond to saving a drowning man. And it’s a powerful metaphor and the character who is sitting with that thought it’s…
ESJM: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, to go back to something interesting. You said a minute ago about what makes a world real. That was something I was thinking about a lot and thinking about this book and sort of mapping that idea onto the simulation hypothesis where it’s like, okay, suppose we’re all living in a simulation, where I land on that as so what, that doesn’t make our lives less meaningful. On the other hand, what is a simulation? If you’re living in a city, with its water systems and gas that comes through a pipe under the street and all the rest of it? Is that somehow a less real life than living out in the country with a deep water pump on your well? Like, of course not, you know, but but they do seem like weird gradations. Or if you’re living under a dome city on the moon, is that life in some way a simulation where your atmosphere is being pumped to you through filters or something? I don’t think that life is less real than a city on Earth or the countryside on Earth, either. So, yeah, it’s a really interesting philosophical rabbit hole to go down.
B&N: I also think labels are part of that, whether they’re labels we ascribe to ourselves, or that people try to ascribe to us that if a label isn’t the ultimate definition of a simulation.
ESJM: Yeah, exactly. And then, what I also found myself thinking about was the way the simulation ideas speaks to the tragedy of colonialism, or colonization, where, you know, for people like my great grandfather coming from London to Canada, in 1906, or oh eight, or whatever it was, I feel like those people were caught up in this kind of false narrative that was devastating and had an incredible human cost. And it varies by geography. But in Canada, it was this narrative of the empty country, like the empty land, like here for the taking, of course, it wasn’t empty, you know, the end. That’s what made it a bloodbath, and a nightmare. And of course, that still reverberates. But there was an interesting parallel in there for me, where that was another kind of living in a simulation, wasn’t it? You know, like crossing the ocean under the spell of a false narrative.
B&N: I mean, we have the same thing here, this mythology of the American West. And it’s like, well, of course, my great grandfather built a house because he was sold an acre of land for $1. And by the way, there were people there already. And yeah, in America, we love that math. We love more than anything, and we will do so much to protect it.
ESJM: Yeah. And I’m we’re not alone. I have dual citizenships. Besides here, yeah, Australia is the same way. You know, it’s just stark.
B&N: It is. But you do have a moment in Edwin’s section. It’s not Edwin, who says this. There’s another character is like, well, Aren’t we here to conquer? Aren’t we here to do it and Edwin just in his very edwyn way. It’s like, well, what if we just want to disappear into the woods?
ESJM: Yeah, exactly. Can I be absorbed by this landscape instead of killing it?
B&N: I’m very fond of Edwin. He’s just he’s not who one might expect. Yeah, even though he’s the second son being sent off into the world, because he’s just very true to what he thinks. And he’s inappropriately honest for his time. And I appreciate it. He’s just he really, he wants to be left alone to draw and noodle, and he’s not really sure what he wants to do, when does he really need to do anything? Right. But his story does bookend an important piece. And we’re gonna let readers discover that because I had a moment where my eyes got really big. And it involves time travel, and involves a decision that another character makes, and it was like, oh. But at the same time, I’m not the only reader, I think, who has this idea that of course, you know, time travel is something you do in one piece of time reverberates through whatever. Right. And that certainly holds true here, but in a different way. Yeah. So when you’re sitting down to create your rules of time travel, and we’re not going to get into super heavy detail, but we are noodling with a very elastic sense of time we are playing with people who are facing a challenge that, frankly, none of us have. I mean, the time traveling I do is with books, right? Just read Oh, yeah, yeah, those are portals, right? And then I closed the book and everything. I’m out of it. But put the book on the shelf, and everything’s fine. But where do you start? I mean, was it the simulation hypothesis? Or did you just think, well, I’ve got these three pieces that I’m going to connect, you are, again, creating world and rules of engagement.
ESJM: Yeah, there was this feeling of sort of breaking the rules of the world in a way that was really fun. And I have to say, a really nice respite during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I feel like I’ve sort of fallen into that thing in this book, where a novelist will write a few novels. And then at a certain point, the novel becomes about writing a novel. It’s like, it’s almost the story is about story. So somehow, like sending these characters all over the place and breaking the rules of time and space, it just kind of felt like an extension of what I’ve done in all my movies, and like moving characters through plot and time and circumstance. And just kind of an exaggeration of that. In a strange way. I hope I don’t go like too far down that rabbit hole, where it’s like, all of a sudden your books are about writing books, or your narratives are about constructing. It was interesting to me in this book.
B&N: Did anything really surprise you while you’re writing Sea of Tranquillity?
ESJM: Yeah, it’s hard to talk about without spoilers, but you know what, I can’t talk about all the spoilers. I’ll tell you offline.
B&N: Okay. All right. And you know, and we can also we can come back to it ar book club, Because that’s exactly the place for it, but I am dying to know. Do you have a favorite moment?
ESJM: Yeah, it’s close to the end. And has to do with the violinist.
B&N: Okay, I know exactly. Yeah, I know exactly the moment you’re talking about, I think we will confirm this offline.
ESJM: Okay.
B&N: There was more than one moment where I was happy to not be reading on the subway because I was making lots of little noises. I am a person who gasps quite a lot. And actually, I’ve also given myself the hiccups, because I’ve held my breath reading.
ESJM: That’s great publicity for my book, if you want to read the subway like gasp every so often.
B&N: People start to look at you a little funny. Here we go. There were so many surprises. And again, we’re talking about a novel that has time travel as a major point. But as I puzzled through sort of what the connections were, and it becomes very, very clear, as you move through the story, what’s happening, it was the kind of glee that you have when you’re like a kid learning how to interact with narrative and read to a certain extent, because I mean, obviously, you’re reading chapter books, you know, the physical act of reading, but the physical act of reading isn’t the same as sort of dissolving into a story. And it’s like to have that joy and that pleasure. And in a way that hopefulness, because this is a strange little book, but it’s still very hopeful.
ESJM: Strange and hopeful. And you know, what, it was fun to write, actually, you know, in a way, yeah, in a way that not all of my previous books were. I’m very happy with The Glass Hotel. Oh, my God, that book was a grind. That was that was five years of trying to figure out what I was doing. And this felt like the opposite of that. So I love hearing you say that about the experience of reading and it feels to me when you say that, like the the fun I had writing it, it comes through.
B&N: Okay, so, you’ve mentioned Await Your Reply, the Dan Chaon, you’ve mentioned Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which the opening scenes on the boat, they’re great. Yeah. Who are some of your other literary influences?
ESJM: This one surprises people, but Norman Mailer has actually been influential on me and I find him pretty hit or miss as a writer, but I read his novel The Executioner’s Song in between my first and second books, and it absolutely changed the way I write. Where with my first novel Last Night in Montreal, I don’t think it’s a bad book, I stand behind it, was a little bit ornate and like in a way that I think happens to a lot of novelists starting out where you know, that you can write and things just get like a little, fuzzy is too strong a word, self consciously pretty sentences, you know, that kind of phenomenon. So that was Last Night in Montreal, and then I read The Executioner’s Song, which has that incredibly lucid, minimalistic, pared down prose style, and it was revelatory to me. When I wrote The Singer’s Gun, I was very much going for that. And that’s really stayed with me as a value. Another novel that’s been very influential is Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. It’s an incredible book with an incredible story behind it. So the backstory is pretty devastating. She was a Russian Jew who had converted to Catholicism, and therefore assumed she was safe in France in the 1940s. And she wasn’t. She was arrested and died at Auschwitz. She left behind two daughters and a suitcase with notebooks and the daughters preserved the notebooks which had minuscule writing, they couldn’t bear to read them for decades. They assumed it was a diary. And then at some point in the 1970s, they had this moment like okay, I guess we’ve got a face mum’s notebooks. So they started transcribing. And it wasn’t a diary. It was this gem of a novel, which she never quite finished. She didn’t have time. But what stands feels complete when you read it and called Suite Francaise about the Nazi invasion of Paris. And it’s just got that elusive combination of beauty, but also lucidity and simplicity. But I really love those have been my major influences. Also, I think, to some degrees Zadie Smith, the velocity of White Teeth was so dazzling to me.
B&N: I love that book. So what’s next for you?
ESJM: I’m working on a secret TV project, which I’m hoping to be able to talk about publicly at some point. I’m also I’m writing a screenplay with a friend of mine, Semi Chela, it’s a noir adaptation of Last Night in Montreal, my first novel, it’s been really fun. You know, I love writing novels. But I’ve written six. And it’s kind of fun to do something completely different and learn how to work in a totally different form. So that’s a big part of the appeal of screenwriting for me. So that’s been great. I’m also working on my next novel, which doesn’t even have a title yet. I don’t really know what it’s about. It’s pretty early stages. So I like having a number of projects going at the same time. It’s, it’s kind of fun.
B&N: All of that sounds awesome. And I cannot wait for both the new film projects and the new book. Is there anything we missed that you wanted to talk about with Sea of Tranquility that we didn’t hit?
ESJM: The one thing I try to emphasize with Sea of Tranquility is I’m always concerned that when people read the autofiction section that will come across as complaint and I feel such gratitude to be able to do this and to live this life. So, no, I tried to really Telegraph that in that section. It’s also something I try to emphasize in interviews.
B&N: And it works. I mean, the narrative as it appears there, readers will understand the context. I had many, many notes around that section, none of which are repeatable here because I don’t like to swear on the air.
ESJM: It’s all autobiographical. People said all those things to me.
B&N: I do not doubt that for a second. I have spent a lot of time around authors and occasionally my jaw has dropped when you hear a question, you’re just like, wow.
ESJM: There’s a lot of wow, but Sea of Tranquility is a better kind of, wow. It’s the kind of wow that you want when you need to escape into not just a new world, but just a really great story. It’s just a really, really great story and I cannot wait for readers to get their hands on it. Emily St. John Mandel. Thank you so much for joining us. Sea of Tranquility is out now. It is the April 2022 Barnes and Noble book club pick.
ESJM: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.