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Emily St. John Mandel is perhaps best known for her 2014 novel Station Eleven, which presciently depicted a devastating global pandemic. Her new novel, Exit Party,out this week, isn’t much sunnier: This one imagines the aftermath of the collapse of the United States as a nation, and both the banality and turmoil that might follow. Exit Party centers around Ari Waker—a character Mandel first introduced in her 2010 novel The Singer’s Gun—who has just been released from prison as the United States settles into its first spring after civil war. She and her roommate attend a party to celebrate the end of curfew, but something isn’t quite right. The party’s host steps outside for some air, and is never seen again.
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As I read Exit Party earlier this year, ICE agents were taking over cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, scanning the faces of protesters for some unknown database. The US and Israel had just launched a military assault against Iran. The CDC confirmed 1,000 measles cases, four times the number from the same period last year. Mandel’s speculation about the disintegration of the country didn’t seem as far-fetched as her pandemic might’ve seemed in 2014. Still, I was surprised she was writing about such a dark topic, when in a 2023 Reddit AMA she mentioned that she’d written Station Eleven before having a child, and that she might not have been able to do so after, because “imagining the world ending with my daughter in it is unbearable.”
When we spoke earlier this summer, I asked how she was able to overcome that impulse. Though she said that looking at these ideas “dead on is a little bit unbearable,” the “speculative cloak” helps. And ultimately, what she wants readers to know, is that this novel, like her others, is full of hope, too.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There’s probably going to be a reaction to your new book, Exit Party, that’s like, “Oh no, the author who wrote a book about a pandemic years before Covid hit is now writing about the fall of the United States! What does she know?”
I know nothing. I’m not clairvoyant—I just read the news. There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about thinking about some of these scenarios that I’ve written about in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and now Exit Party, but you may have to be willing to live with some discomfort to create interesting art. So I tried to lean into my fear and anxiety around the very dangerous path that the country is on.
What led you to want to write about this?
I am drawn to writing about the aftermath of catastrophe. There’s something very clarifying about how we respond to disasters as people. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the United States fracturing in a serious way since the early pandemic, when there was a real shortage of personal protective equipment and obviously a total vacuum of leadership in the first Trump administration. There was this weird moment where Northeastern states banded together to buy PPE as a bloc. I remember looking at these states on a map, thinking, “Well, here are these contiguous states working together to advance their interests, kind of at odds with the surrounding country. This kind of looks like a country. This kind of looks like a fracturing.” This feeling of there almost being two countries superimposed on top of the same geography with totally different cultures and ideas and understanding of reality—it’s that idea that animated the whole writing of Exit Party and channeling my political anxieties into fiction. Sometimes looking at something dead-on is a little bit unbearable, but putting it in this kind of speculative cloak makes it easier to consider more deeply.
You talk about your anxieties around the news being channeled into Exit Party, and surveillance seems to be a big part of that.
I think that we’ve surrendered a lot of our privacy, and we’ve done that very voluntarily. We’ve clicked on the videos; we’ve looked at the pictures. This dossier is being built around us. Another thing that scares me is the situation these days with ICE, and how it’s become normalized to have a secret police. Try to imagine how shocking it would have been five years ago for there to be a police force that floods the streets in American cities with masks on their faces. That’s not something that I think most of us would have anticipated for the United States or that we thought was possible in any kind of serious way, outside the conspiratorial fringes of the internet.
Early in Exit Party, some characters have a conversation about how boring living through catastrophe can be.
There’s kind of a banality of catastrophe, which I remember from the 2008 financial collapse, where you’re checking the news every day and after a while, there’s this feeling of “Yep, world still ending, still feels terrible.” I remember that from Covid, where you go from hitting refresh on the mortality graphs to thinking, “Well, yeah, okay, it’s another absolutely god-awful moment in a whole sequence of them.” There’s something both terrifying and hopeful in human psychology around the way that we can get used to anything and adapt to anything.
Yet your books are ultimately quite hopeful.
If a book is completely bleak, that feels implausible to me. Look, it’s a dark time in a lot of ways, but there is still a lot of joy, and there are still people resisting in honestly kind of silly ways that are super-effective. The actions we saw among citizens in Minneapolis were spectacular. Like that level of community organization and resistance and relentlessness in documenting what was going on and people helping their neighbors—that was pretty wonderful. You hear about things like that, and you think, “You know what? There is actually some hope here, even though the country does seem to be flirting with authoritarianism.”
A character in Exit Party says, “No country lasts forever.” Is that, to you, a hopeful statement or a terrifying one at this point in time?
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That’s something that I found myself thinking about in the first Trump administration, when there was such despair on the left, and we comforted ourselves with this idea that “Well, nothing lasts forever. Life continues.” I don’t mean that in any kind of callous way. There’s something devastating about the idea of losing a country. At the same time, I’ve certainly met people who were born in places like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that no longer exist in those forms, and that is the reality of countries. They don’t always last forever. You hope that whatever comes next is better.