Emily St. John Mandel's Latest Is a Modern Morality Test

Goodreads: The Glass Hotel was so beautiful and thrilling. I cannot say enough good things about it. 

Emily St. John Mandel: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

GR: While I was reading it, I kept wondering: How did you do it? I know that's a big question.  

EM: And I have an answer: endless rounds of revisions! There's nothing effortless about this book. The edits were so extensive that when I look back, it feels like I wrote three different versions of The Glass Hotel. 

GR: I've read that you start by writing scenes and figure out later how they go together. Is that still true?

EM: Yes. It keeps me from getting bored, if I don't know exactly where it's going. With this, I knew I wanted to write about a massive white-collar crime. My starting point was actually a chapter that, in the final draft, is somewhere around the middle. It's the first instance we see the office workers who are running this Ponzi scheme. The chapter begins: "We crossed the line. That much was obvious." That was the first thing I wrote in the book. But it's not like I knew how that chapter was going to end when I started it.  

GR: I know you were interested in Bernie Madoff. But what about that made you think, “That's what I want to write about in my book!”?

EM: One thing I like to emphasize is that the crime in this novel is essentially Madoff's crime. But the people are completely different. So it's not actually a novel about Bernie Madoff or his family or his staff. 

That said, the staff was my starting point. Like many writers, I’ve had a lot of day jobs. When the Madoff story broke, I was an administrative assistant at a cancer research lab at the Rockefeller University, and I always really liked my coworkers. 

What quickly emerged when Madoff was arrested was that he hadn't acted alone. That's a pretty big administrative operation—running a Ponzi scheme on that scale, wiring money back and forth, faking account statements. I want to say that six of his staffers were arrested? It was a lot of people! 

And I found myself thinking about the camaraderie that you have with your coworkers. Think of how much weirder and more intense that would be if you were all coming into work on a Monday morning to perpetuate a massive Ponzi scheme. I was fascinated by that. Who are these people? What is the lie that they tell themselves to make it possible to sleep at night? That was my starting point. 

GR: I loved how many perspectives you captured so believably. Again, how did you do that? This will be a theme of my questions.

EM: I appreciate it—it's a flattering line of questioning. To be honest, I just make it up. For me, everything comes about in the revisions. I have this incredibly messy first draft, and then I go over it 100 times in various ways until it's somewhat coherent. And character development is part of that, just trying to make them as believable as possible. 

But it's kind of interesting to write, not just specifically about a Ponzi scheme, but also about money. Broadly speaking, it’s a topic that has huge relevance to all of our lives. It’s also incredibly awkward to talk about, so we don't. 

I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of trophy wives, these women who have made a very explicit trade-off. And I don't judge it, it's a living. So it was interesting to think about a different kind of trophy wife than I've usually seen portrayed—somebody like Vincent [one of the main characters], who's very intelligent, knows exactly what she's doing. She might have been my favorite character to write. 

GR: I almost didn't even think of her as a trophy wife because that is such a stereotype and she is a fully formed character. But, of course, she is one. Do you try to have some sympathy for all of your characters? 

EM: I do. Because you can't really hold your character in contempt. I think that will show and make for a flat reading experience. People are so complicated, and you can be an objectively horrible person in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean that's all you are. 

GR: I'm interested in the fact that you were homeschooled. My impression is that it's become more common, but when I was growing up, I didn't know many people who were educated that way. 

EM: Ten or 15 years ago, if I told people in the U.S. that I was homeschooled, they'd get this cautious look on their faces. And I'd realize they were thinking, "Oh, hard-core anti-science, super-fundamentalist Christian." But my parents were hippies and that was just the counterculture, back-to-the-land thing to do in rural Canada. 

GR: Have you thought about how being homeschooled shaped you as a writer, or if it did? 

EM: I think it definitely did. On the one hand, it was a haphazard education: There was not enough science or math. And I wish I'd gotten a second language when I was young. On the other hand, it gave me an unbelievable amount of time to read, which was wonderful. 

My family never had any money. It was a very solidly working-class environment. But we had a ton of books picked up over the years, and we had a library card. So I spent a lot of time reading when I was a kid, and I have to assume that shaped me as a writer. 

And then, even more specifically, there was a period of time when I was about eight or nine years old, when one of the requirements of the curriculum was that I had to write something every day. There were no flashes of brilliance—we're talking poems about cats. But it developed the habit of writing from an early age, and it was something that I loved and kept doing. 

GR: What about the grit it takes to become a writer and to deal with rejection? Where do you think yours comes from? 

EM: That comes from dance, which was my first career. I was a really obsessive ballet dancer when I was a kid. By the time I was 13, I was dancing six days a week. I was lucky because there was an unusually good ballet school within driving distance of our house. I auditioned successfully for the School of Toronto Dance Theater, which is a conservatory program in contemporary dance in Canada. That’s where I went for my post-secondary education. 

To be honest, dance is so much harder than writing. I suspect that writers don't really appreciate this when I point it out. But if you think that the writing life is brutal, try being a dancer. Unbelievable! My worst day as a writer is better than going to an audition, being one of 200 women competing for one job in skintight clothes with a number pinned to my chest. That's dehumanizing. I was used to having a very precarious career, and writing somehow felt less precarious. If you break your knee, you can still be a writer. That's not true of dancers.

GR: Do you have a routine now when you write? 

EM: I do. To backtrack a little: I never, ever thought I'd be able to quit my day job, but Station Eleven made that possible. I'll tell you my routine now and then I'll tell you my routine for when I had a day job, which might be more helpful to writers who read this. 

So now, I have a four-year-old daughter, and I live in Brooklyn, so preschool is within easy walking distance. I drop her off at school between 8 and 9, and then I have six hours to do everything. That includes writing and also the tedious stuff of adulthood: errands, paying the gas bill, grocery shopping, etc. I do all my writing and everything else in about six hours, and then I pick her up in the afternoon. 

When I had a day job, I had this fortunate situation where the work wasn't quite full-time. It was 32 to 35 hours a week. So I’d write early in the morning and then go into work, or sometimes the opposite. I’d go into work a little early, so that I could leave early and write for a couple hours in the afternoon. I wrote all the time on weekends before I had a kid. 

What I think was the most helpful thing for me through all of that was training myself to write whenever I could, under any circumstances. If you can write for a half hour at Starbucks on your lunch break, you'll get some work done by the end of the week. I remember doing line edits on Station Eleven on the F train going to and from Brooklyn and my job on the Upper East Side. 

GR: Wow. Do you have any other tips for aspiring writers? 

EM: There's never enough time to write. If there's not a day job, there's a child, or both. Another thing I've found really helpful over the years is a certain social ruthlessness. It sounds kind of awful. But, you know, I'm not going to your poetry reading unless I really want to, because I need to write. Or, if I have plans to meet a friend for lunch on a given week, I'm not going to make any more lunch plans that week because I don't have a ton of extra time. I don't watch as much television as I'd like to. 

GR: I noticed in the acknowledgments that you thanked your daughter's nanny. I hadn't seen that before and wondered how you got the idea or if you'd seen that somewhere else. 

EM: I hadn’t seen that before, which is probably why I did it. I feel like we should acknowledge our privilege where we can. And I had been thinking about who and what made it possible for me to write this book. You cite all the books, then you cite all the people—my agent, my editor, early readers. But then I found myself thinking, Well, who was more key than the person who was looking after my baby and then my toddler while I was writing it? That was my daughter's nanny. So it just made sense to include her. Nobody was more important than her in terms of my being able to write every day. 

I also have a generalized impatience with writers who are a little bit vague about their good fortune, financially speaking. They'll say in interviews, "Oh, I just cobbled together these freelance projects and made it work." And it's like, “Yeah, but also, you were on your spouse's health insurance and the spouse had a full-time job and was paying the mortgage!” They don't mention that. Why not be up front about it? 

I think writers who are just starting out can get an unrealistic idea about what the financial picture looks like based on interviews like that. And then people can feel like a failure if they're not, quote, unquote, making it, financially speaking. And they feel like that because some writers are not being up front about these privileges that we have, like being able to have a nanny, or a spouse who's helping with the mortgage, or whatever it is. So, acknowledging my daughter's nanny just seemed like the right thing to do. 

GR: Has she seen her name yet? 

EM: I'm not sure. I gave her an early copy of the book, but I didn't want to be like, "Hey, did you notice you're in the acknowledgements?" It's too awkward. So, I have no idea. 

GR: I get that. I know you’re working on a pilot for The Glass Hotel right now. Do you have time to read? 

EM: I read when I can, but it's not nearly enough. I'm reading a book now that I love. It's obnoxious of me to recommend it, because it's not out until August, but it's The New Wilderness, a debut novel by Diane Cook. It's another postapocalyptic book, which I've read too many of, but this one's really good. 

GR: Are there any authors who inspire you now?  

EM: I really like Roberto Bolano's writing. I find whenever I dip into his work, it makes me want to write. I've also been reading a collection of essays from Valeria Luiselli, mostly about Mexico City, where she’s from. She has the most incredible sense of place and this wonderful, clear, simple style. 

GR: What about when you were starting out in your career? Who influenced you? 

EM: When I was about 15, I read this classic sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, written by Walter Miller. It’s a postapocalyptic book, but it's a very different apocalypse than the one in Station Eleven. It’s the book that made me think for the first time about what a collapse of civilization might look like. 

Another was Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. When you grow up in Canada, Ondaatje's in the canon. I read it when I was 14, and I can't bring myself to watch the movie because I love the book so much. It made me see for the first time how beautiful language could be. 

And one last one. When I'd written my first novel, Last Night in Montreal, and was working on my second book, I read The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, and it changed the way I write. My first book had some ornate sentences, and the style got a little fancy sometimes. The Executioner's Song had such a pared-down prose style. And it altered my sensibility to see that there can be beauty in simplicity. It doesn't have to be so ornate all the time.