In short
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party, set in 2031 after a US collapse, and how it explores crime, resilience, identity, trust, and the “counter life” of individuals and states. The episode also connects these themes to AI-era workplace change and the erosion of trust (including AI’s unreliability and reputational risk for writers).
Guests/backgrounds
Emily St. John Mandel, Canadian novelist (The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility, Station Eleven; HBO adaptation; National Book Award finalist). Katie Drummond (Wired). Dan Swan of McKinsey is referenced via a separate Wired segment.
Key claims
Collapse feels “eerily” plausible; the book is hopeful despite darkness; trust erodes when authentication fails (e.g., video evidence, AI-generated content); writers may struggle to prove work wasn’t AI.
Notable examples
Exit Party opens with two roommates heading to a Southern California house party after the US fractures into city-states or a totalitarian police state; AI search once “confidently” claimed Mandel had a son named Leo; she doesn’t use AI for writing.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to AI Transition
0:00 to 0:37
Learn about the AI transition in businesses and its impact.
“I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges.”
Exploring 'Exit Party'
1:20 to 2:08
Discuss the themes and setting of Emily's new book, 'Exit Party'.
“But the world she creates never feel entirely foreign.”
Personal Connection with the Author
2:08 to 2:56
Katie shares her personal experience reading 'Exit Party'.
“Emily, thank you so much for being here.”
Themes of Resilience and Identity
2:56 to 4:03
Emily discusses the themes of resilience and identity in her book.
“I think when this episode runs, it will be just coming out.”
Contrasting Realities in 'Exit Party'
4:03 to 5:25
Emily elaborates on the contrasting realities depicted in her book.
“And in what ways are those two places different?”
Writing Amidst Political Anxieties
5:25 to 7:20
Emily reflects on writing the book during politically tumultuous times.
“And without giving too much away, it's a weird party.”
Counter Lives and Identity
7:20 to 11:43
Discussion on identity and the concept of counter lives in the book.
“Now, your protagonist in the book, Ibarri, am I saying that's how I was pronouncing it in my head as I was reading it, Ari, they're the same person.”
The Fate of Nations
11:43 to 12:18
Exploration of the idea that no country lasts forever and what that means.
“No, it's like, do you want to live in chaos or do you want to live in the totalitarian police state?”
Trust in a Changing World
13:14 to 14:00
Emily discusses the erosion of trust in society and its implications.
“In that surveillance state, there are some very stressful passages, at least for me in the book, where you realize that none of these people can really fundamentally trust each other, right?”
Trust and AI in Creative Work
14:00 to 17:22
Explore the challenges of trust in creativity when AI-generated content is involved.
“It's not specific to this country, but this actually leads us into AI.”
Show all 17 chapters
Early Life and Career Beginnings
17:22 to 20:05
Learn about the early life and career beginnings of the author.
“I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about you and your career.”
Writing Process in Montreal
20:05 to 21:20
Discover how the author's environment influenced their writing process in Montreal.
“It was just something I loved and something I did a little bit compulsively.”
From Writing to Success
22:28 to 28:00
Follow the author's journey from struggles to success and the impacts of their work.
“sublet in the West Village shop when I was 22 or so.”
The Challenges of Modern Book Promotion
28:00 to 29:42
Explore the unique challenges and distractions faced by contemporary novelists.
“I've had a lot of very negative interactions over the years.”
Advice for Aspiring Authors
29:42 to 30:28
Discusses the importance of avoiding bad publishing advice on social media.
“Like, I don't really post, but I do read.”
Reflections on Prophetic Literature
30:28 to 32:19
A conversation about the implications of writing near prophetic themes in literature.
“I want to end by coming back to Exit Party.”
Finding Hope in Chaos
32:19 to 32:46
Emphasizes the presence of hope amidst chaotic and dark political times.
“Like, I get choked up thinking about the way people responded to that.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00WIRED’s best and brightest:I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact. through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com.
0:36WIRED’s best and brightest:Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.
0:46WIRED’s best and brightest:From Wired, this is The Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. My guest today is bestselling author Emily St. John Mandel. She wrote The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and later adapted into a series on HBO. Emily writes fiction, but what that often looks like is, and I'm sorry to do this, stranger than fiction. Her novels move across time and between interconnected lives, slipping in and out of pandemics, ghost stories, alternate realities, time travel, and the occasional collapse of civilization.
1:20WIRED’s best and brightest:But the world she creates never feel entirely foreign. They're strange and speculative, yes, but also eerily familiar. The kinds of places, if you squint just a little bit, you might mistake for home. Emily has a new book called Exit Party. It opens in the first spring after the collapse of the United States in the year 2031, with two roommates on their way to a house party in Southern California. Here's a bit from the book's first chapter. The wealthiest Americans had fled overseas or to Mexico or Canada, but that population had been replaced several times over by refugees fleeing more violent places in the interior of the former nation.
1:55WIRED’s best and brightest:A soft rain was starting to fall. There was a tent in seemingly every driveway, the streets clogged with parked cars. It's not quite the United States we know today, and yet it doesn't feel that far off. Emily, thank you so much for being here. And I will get this out of the way at the top and acknowledge that we are both Brooklyn moms. And sometimes when you're a Brooklyn mom, you become friends with another Brooklyn mom. Because you seek out the best mom you can find at the playground. I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And we met at the playground. We did. In the latter stages of the COVID mask era.
2:30WIRED’s best and brightest:And I've known you ever since. Yeah, it's been years. I read Exit Party. I was lucky enough to get a galley ahead of publication. Read it in a single day. I forced my family to get as far away from me as possible. Because I genuinely couldn't. I was reading it on the subway. I was reading it at every chance I could possibly get. And in less than 24 hours, I had finished the book. It's fantastic. And if you are a Wired listener or a viewer, I highly recommend it. And I'm really excited to talk to you about that and about a lot more. Well, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. So the book isn't out yet.
2:59WIRED’s best and brightest:I think when this episode runs, it will be just coming out. So how would you explain what it's about?
3:05Emily St. John Mandel:I think of this as a story about crime and resilience. It's about trying to be a decent person when things are falling apart. And it's about who you're going to be at the end of the world. And I don't mean to imply that the collapse of a country is the end of the world. But what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it. It is an ending. And I do see this as a hopeful book. You know, you just read a scene from the immediate aftermath of a terrible event. So it's about what comes next and trying to be a new person, you know, in a rapidly changing and difficult landscape.
3:39WIRED’s best and brightest:There's a lot of darkness in the book. And I think reading it and coming into it in the year 2031, which is not that far off the year 2026 where we are now in the United States, feels very resonant. I'm curious when you think about what's actually happening in the United States right now, in what ways is this United States the same as what's in the book? And in what ways are those two places different?
4:07Emily St. John Mandel:The difference is that in the country that we live in, there's still time. You know, in the United States that opens this story, that country ran out of time. That country fractured. I wish that it felt more fictional. You know, I started writing this book in the spring of 2022. And look, like we could already kind of see the division that was coming because Trump was obviously so much on the horizon for a second term. But yeah, I wish it felt more speculative. You know, I don't mean to be glib about it. It's a terrifying prospect. I think a big part of it for me was a big part of the beginning of this book for me was just kind of working through my political anxieties.
4:53Emily St. John Mandel:It doesn't actually take any particular clairvoyance to look ahead and see, you know, where the incredible division in this country could potentially lead. And of course, I hope it won't. But that was a way of thinking about that for me was to think about, well, what might come next? Suppose the worst were to happen. Suppose there were to be a second American Civil War. What might the aftermath be like? It is actually a hopeful book. Like the book opens, look, it's the end of the world, but we're going to a party. That's kind of the spirit of it.
5:25WIRED’s best and brightest:And without giving too much away, it's a weird party. But I think a lot of people at the party had a good time.
5:30Emily St. John Mandel:I think so. I think it was a great party for most people.
5:33WIRED’s best and brightest:I think it was a great party for most people, not for everyone who was at the party.
5:37Emily St. John Mandel:But that is true of all parties. That's fair. In fiction and in life. That's fair.
5:40WIRED’s best and brightest:And I'm usually the one like having kind of a weird time. Other people are having a great time. I have a memory of, it was maybe about a year ago, we were having dinner with your wife, and I knew that you had this book coming out. I didn't know anything about it. And she was very stressed because she was like, book publishing is so slow. Look at everything happening in this country right now. This book that Emily has written is so timely right now. I can't believe it's not coming out for another year.
6:09Emily St. John Mandel:You know, it's funny. I remember that dinner. And I remember my wife, Laura, her concern that the country might collapse before the book came out. You know, the book envisions two different visions in the United States. It's, there's the vision we begin with where there has been a civil war. The country is fractured into, you know, some contentious city states and small new republics and splinter groups. Helping militias. Yeah, it's a bit chaotic. There's another version of the country that is a totalitarian police state. And my experience of writing this book was that when I started writing it, I was just looking at the polarization.
6:50Emily St. John Mandel:And I was thinking, well, obviously we're in that first universe, the one where the country fractures, you know, into these little incompatible small new republics. But by the time I finished the book, the ice raids were happening. And my totalitarian vision of a country where citizens are disappeared by masked secret police, that wasn't fictional anymore. So, you know, there was this feeling of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle through the entire writing of this book.
7:19WIRED’s best and brightest:That is so bizarre.
7:21Emily St. John Mandel:Yeah, it was very surreal.
7:23WIRED’s best and brightest:Now, your protagonist in the book, Ibarri, am I saying that's how I was pronouncing it in my head as I was reading it, Ari, they're the same person. Yeah. But they also aren't at all. Right. How did you think about the idea of identity in writing the book? What was top of mind for you?
7:39Emily St. John Mandel:I've been fascinated for a really long time by the idea of the counter life. So that's the life you didn't live where you didn't immigrate from Canada or you went to a different school or took a different job or married a different person. These inflection points that would have made us over the passage of time into somewhat different people. And I think the reason I'm so interested in that idea is that the life I'm living feels a little bit improbable to me. Your life. Yeah. I'm from Canada and I'm training a temporary dance. And I don't have a high school diploma. I do have moments of thinking this actually feels fairly implausible.
8:17Emily St. John Mandel:You know, this is not a particularly plausible outcome if someone were to say, look at what my life looked like when I was 17 or 18 years old. So I think those counter lives that I could have lived feel so much more plausible to me. The life where I stayed in Canada and kept dancing or whatever it was. So I was thinking of identity in terms of the people we could have been. You know, given different choices, certainly. But then in this book, it was also interesting to me to think about, well, what is the counterlife of the state? Because that's a really interesting idea. I was going to say in any democratic country, but honestly, in any country, like you can look at the history, I think, of any given nation and see the moments where it veered one way instead of another and became fairly rapidly an entirely different country than it would otherwise have been if it had gone the other way at that, you know, those crossroads.
9:12Emily St. John Mandel:crossroads. That's very easy to do in this country for reasons too obvious to even get into. So, yeah, I was thinking about, well, if we take that idea of the counter life of the individual, these different people we could have been, how is that affected by the counter life of the state? Because we are so influenced by the environment we live in, the people that surround us. I think that I'm a different person having lived for, God, 23 years in New York City than I would have been if I had stayed in, say, rural British Columbia where I grew up. For sure. Yeah.
9:47WIRED’s best and brightest:I think about that too all the time. Yeah. Yeah. You're from Canada too. Yes. We're both Canadians and it's like the version of me that stayed in Canada, there was a very formative fork in the road where that changed for me and I moved. Yeah. And I think a lot about what if I had just stayed in Calgary? Right. Like what would that be like? Totally plausible life. And the context of Canada as a country to live in versus the United States. Yeah.
10:10Emily St. John Mandel:It's a little more chill. I'm just going to say. It's a little more chill.
10:13WIRED’s best and brightest:Yeah.
10:14Emily St. John Mandel:So, you know, here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City.
10:18WIRED’s best and brightest:Yes. Thriving. Thriving. Living our best lives.
10:21Emily St. John Mandel:Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives. But here we are. But then you think, well, Ari and Abari, they grow up in different versions of a country. And they are so profoundly shaped by that country. So who are you pushed into becoming by the environment you live in? What I was also thinking about is the way, you know, I think we all have our sort of natural interests and proclivities. We're obviously both drawn to writing and words and stories and different versions of that. I saw Ari as somebody who's, she's got this character flaw where she's fundamentally drawn toward crime. She is.
10:59Emily St. John Mandel:And as I say that, maybe it's not even a flaw. Maybe it's just an interest because there's a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal. But there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. And it was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we're raised in.
11:19WIRED’s best and brightest:I almost hate to ask this because both versions of the United States that you portray in the book are really frightening in their own respects. Did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another? Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?
11:38Emily St. John Mandel:No, they're both really hard. They're both awful. The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly. There you go, yeah. No, it's like, do you want to live in chaos or do you want to live in the totalitarian police state? Yeah. Hard pass on both, honestly. Hard pass on both. Yeah. But there is, you know, what I was trying to convey in this book is that no country lasts forever. That's an idea I've been thinking about a lot. And no version of a country lasts forever. And there's both terror and hope in that idea. So, yeah, the totalitarian police state version is not going to last forever. And neither is the period of total chaos.
12:18WIRED’s best and brightest:We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
12:30WIRED’s best and brightest:There's so much in the book. I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on wired.com.
13:08WIRED’s best and brightest:Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. About the idea of trust, right? In that surveillance state, there are some very stressful passages, at least for me in the book, where you realize that none of these people can really fundamentally trust each other, right? Because they're all wondering who is also involved in surveillance. And then in the other universe, there is this very sort of baseline notion of trust eroding because everybody is just looking out for themselves in this chaos. us. I'm thinking now about the United States that we live in, where trust is in shorter and shorter supply.
13:52WIRED’s best and brightest:How were you thinking about that as you were writing the book? I mean, did you have any revelations about trust in this country that we could all learn from?
14:01Emily St. John Mandel:It's not specific to this country, but this actually leads us into AI. Do you remember when we were kids and a video was proof of anything. It was like, oh, there is video evidence, case closed. How terrifying and damaging and ridiculous that our children are being raised in a world where a video means absolutely nothing. It's incredibly hard to authenticate. And that's what I find myself thinking about when I think about trust. Something real that's really struck me is the degree of betrayal that people feel when it emerges that an author has been using AI. And I share that sense of betrayal.
14:41Emily St. John Mandel:It offends me in some incredibly deep way. And when I try to parse why that is, I think trust might be the answer. You know, that feeling of, I thought this work of art was created by a human. I thought that I was accessing something real. And it turns out, nope, they just fed it into a clot or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:01WIRED’s best and brightest:Like, I thought you made this. Yes, exactly. I mean, your creativity and your voice is yours, and it's how you make a living. I mean, it is very sort of, like, fundamental to you. Yeah. And you write novels. You also work in Hollywood. Mm-hmm. And so you have exposure to sort of what's happening in book worlds around AI and also what is happening in the entertainment industry.
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15:25Emily St. John Mandel:Yeah.
15:26WIRED’s best and brightest:Do you use it at all?
15:27Emily St. John Mandel:I don't. I don't use it. No, I just, I haven't, maybe this makes me an outlier at this point. I haven't found it reliable in search. And so that made me distrust it completely. Every now and again, I like to do a search and make sure that my daughter is not on the internet, basically. So I searched Emily St. John Mandel daughter, I think about a year ago. And AI is so confidently wrong.
15:55WIRED’s best and brightest:Did it confidently introduce you to your daughter?
15:58Emily St. John Mandel:No, it confidently introduced me to my son, Leo, born in 2016, and said, Emily St. John Mandel does not have a daughter. And it's so confident that you have a moment of just like, wait, do I have a son?
16:09WIRED’s best and brightest:What universe am I living in?
16:11Emily St. John Mandel:Exactly. That is wild. So, you know, I do not have a son named Leo. I have no idea where that came from. I searched again a month later and it had revised that. And, you know, my daughter remained unnamed, which is what I wanted to confirm. Yeah. Yeah, but it made me distrust it fundamentally from a search perspective. I know that it can be used to streamline administrative tasks. I haven't used it as such. What I really worry about, actually, is less the work, and I worry more about writers. Because for me, like, I started publishing in 2009, and I have a consistent voice across books. Yeah. My process is such that it would be very easy for me to produce iterative drafts of what I've been doing if I were ever forced to prove that it's not AI, which it absolutely is not.
16:57Emily St. John Mandel:But not all writers have that process. Some are just, you know, changing a word doc over a period of time. Not all of us keep written notes. And something that's emerging, I think, that alarms me is that it's very hard to prove sometimes that your work wasn't AI.
17:13WIRED’s best and brightest:Or like to prove a negative. Yeah, to prove a negative. Exactly. And reputational risk.
17:16Emily St. John Mandel:The reputational risk is enormous. Like that's the end of a career, at the very least the end of a book deal.
17:21WIRED’s best and brightest:Let me back up a little bit. I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about you and your career. Okay. You talked a little bit at the top about you grew up in Canada. Yeah. You were in Toronto. Mm-hmm. Tell us about like those early years. Yeah, sure. Those early years.
17:41Emily St. John Mandel:there it's it's just this is kind of I'm going to digress for a second back to the book so much of this book is about the condition of living one life after another and this is so many lives ago that it's like looking back at a stranger um yeah so I grew up in rural British Columbia Vancouver Island and then Denman Island which is just for context about the same size and shape as Manhattan but with a thousand people it's just it's forest and deer and a general store Yes, I grew up there. I was homeschooled. I did a couple semesters of community college without ever getting my GED because I could.
18:18Emily St. John Mandel:And then I auditioned successfully for a conservatory program and contemporary dance in Toronto. And I was a professional dancer after that for like five minutes.
18:29WIRED’s best and brightest:That had been the dream since I was six years old. Was it because you realized the dream and then found that it wasn't what you wanted?
18:36Emily St. John Mandel:I didn't quite realize the dream. I went pretty far, but I never really joined a company. I just danced for a few independent. I don't know what the necessary steps are. Yeah. No, I didn't go all the way. I danced for a couple of independent choreographers. I loved that experience. But I never got into one of the big companies. I think in part because I realized by then that I no longer loved it. There's this phenomenon, I think, where if you've been dead set on one thing your entire life, like since you were six, then you can fall out of love with it. People change. So in my early 20s, I realized that dance was feeling like more of a chore than anything else.
19:13Emily St. John Mandel:And I kind of resented it and I didn't love it anymore. But this is kind of spectacularly poor planning on my part. I'd taken out student loans to go to the School of Toronto Dance Theater, but not a degree-granting program. Oh, dear. So I had, yeah, mountain of student loan debt, no degree, no high school diploma. Like it's hard to feel overwrought if you wrote that in a novel. My editor would probably do like question marks in the margin, like plausible. But yeah, worst case scenario. This many poor choices. Exactly. That many poor choices. Yeah. So yeah, the string of multiple poor choices.
19:48Emily St. John Mandel:I had a totally destroyed credit rating in Canada. Oh my God. Student loan debt. So I moved to the United States. Perfect. Yeah. That was the solution to that problem. No, in all seriousness, I was living in Canada. I no longer love dance. I'd always written just as a hobby. It was just something I loved and something I did a little bit compulsively. Like if I went for a long walk, I'd bring a notebook because otherwise I might start writing stories on Starbucks napkins. Wow. Yeah. So I was starting to write in Toronto and I moved to Montreal. Yeah. You know, Montreal in winter working retail, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
20:30Emily St. John Mandel:It is a cold city. It is a very cold city, which actually played into my writing process. It was so cold. My roommates and I were dead broke. So we kept the heat turned down pretty low. So I would go to bed at like 7 p.m. just because I was so cold. Easier to be asleep. It was easier to be asleep. So I would sleep until about 1 in the morning and then naturally wake up because, again, I'd gone to bed at 7. I'd get up in the middle of the night. I would dress to write. Like, I had this feeling that I was doing something formal and important. I would put on, like, a sweater and a tie and, like, my warmest coat and go out with my laptop to the 24-hour cafe two blocks away.
21:13Emily St. John Mandel:And I would write until morning. And that was the book that ultimately became Last Night in Montreal. Wow.
21:21WIRED’s best and brightest:All right. Another quick break. We'll be right back.
21:34WIRED’s best and brightest:I was AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of rewired McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You got to go and understand what's the opportunity? How much is it worth? What's the investment required to get there? And is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas and then making the hard call.
22:12WIRED’s best and brightest:Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.
22:27Emily St. John Mandel:Able to find a way to move back to New York with, yeah, with, I don't know,$400 and like a 10-day sublet in the West Village shop when I was 22 or so. I've been here ever since. Yeah, so I started writing last night in Montreal and Montreal, I finished it in New York. And then I just started cold querying agents. And the 13th or 14th one found me in her slush pile and took me on. So crazy. Yeah. There was a lot of luck and also an incredible amount of hard work and literally cold nights.
23:02WIRED’s best and brightest:And you had a day job until like a bizarre juncture, I have to say. I did. I did.
23:08Emily St. John Mandel:Yeah. So, you know, I'm from a very working class background. And what that came with for me was an absolute terror of quitting the day job because there is no safety net. So, yeah, I was working retail in Toronto and Montreal. I became an assistant in New York. I had a really great job for a long time at the Rockefeller University. I was an admin in a cancer research lab. And I loved that. It was such a pleasure to be surrounded by such smart people doing interesting work. And the health insurance was incredible. So I kept that job until a year after Station 11 came out. That's so wild to me.
23:48Emily St. John Mandel:It got so surreal, Katie. I can't tell you. You know, one of my jobs in that position was I had to book plane tickets for my boss. But I wasn't booking my own plane tickets for the tour. I had three publicists doing that. Or like there It was a day when I had to leave work early because I had a photo shoot at Time magazine. Yeah, I stayed until, so I kept that job until I found out I was three months pregnant and then that was too many things.
24:16WIRED’s best and brightest:Yeah. Yeah. Adding a baby onto that would be a little much. Station 11 was successful at the jump, right, out of the gate. And then it had this second life during the pandemic. It did. That was surreal. You became this almost like online magnet, this like pandemic profit magnet for people. It was so weird. Who were asking you like on Twitter, like help, like what do we do in the pandemic? And you've talked a little bit about this. I mean, you did some interviews around then and afterwards. Looking back on it now, right, it's been five, six years. what stands out to you from that experience which like COVID was weird for everybody weird and scary and sad for you it was weird in a very singular way there are there weren't many people being consulted as like a prophet of pandemics it was so surreal and the requests were so misplaced like
25:20Emily St. John Mandel:if you're gonna look to a writer for guidance like I want to be like go talk to Ed Young Yeah, I was just thinking Ed Young. Yeah. The thing that I was never able to quite convey at the time was that there was always going to be another pandemic. So I didn't see myself as having, you know, foretold anything. Like, the way I thought of it at the time was, well, if I'd written a novel about a fictional war, does that mean that I predicted whatever war came next after that in the real world? But the pandemic just felt so singular to us. What's funny is I was exactly as unprepared as everybody else.
25:58Emily St. John Mandel:And the reason why this is embarrassing is, you know, I've had this sideline for years of doing onstage conversations and lectures. And I was doing that right up until March 2020. So I had this long lecture that I developed about post-apocalyptic literature, about pandemics and Shakespeare and like, you know, all themes that dovetailed with Station 11. So I was literally traveling the country delivering a lecture that contained the phrase, there will always be another pandemic. It is so embarrassing how shocked I was that there was, in fact, another pandemic. And I was scrambling for toilet paper like everybody else.
26:40WIRED’s best and brightest:Yeah, you're like, guys, I don't know if you should put Clorox all over your groceries. I'm just trying to figure this out. I was like, yeah. Yeah, oh, I definitely did that. Yeah. For probably longer than I should have. Same, yeah. I'm curious about how you deal with celebrity. Just thinking about that sort of social media onslaught during COVID, you don't strike me as someone who's particularly eager to post. You know what I mean? No, you've discovered my secret. I'm not eager to post. How do you deal with that part of the job of like being famous, being famous on the Internet? I think for some people they would go, you know, full throttle into like posting Instagram stories, whatever it is they're going to do.
27:23WIRED’s best and brightest:How do you handle it? And do you feel pressure to do it differently than what you're inclined to do?
27:28Emily St. John Mandel:Yeah. I think that if I were doing – if I were on Instagram just to be on Instagram, I don't know if you'd ever see my face. You know, because I love posting the weird, beautiful little videos. Like, I just posted one that's spiderwebs on a hiking trail in the Adirondacks last week.
27:47WIRED’s best and brightest:I have to admit, I saw that because I was curious about your Instagram profile. And I was like, yep, she definitely is not someone who's like dying to post. I'm not dying to post. I'm really not.
27:58Emily St. John Mandel:I find social media generally terrifying. I've had a lot of very negative interactions over the years. And what's funny is just the way the human brain is wired. The positive interactions outweigh the negative interactions a thousand to one. But like, of course, I also remember the negative ones.
28:16WIRED’s best and brightest:The negative ones stand out.
28:17Emily St. John Mandel:Yeah.
28:17WIRED’s best and brightest:What is it like to promote a book in the year 2026?
28:22Emily St. John Mandel:I think that I have a very atypical experience of book promotion. Because I had these three novels published by a really small press. And then I jumped to Knopf in the U.S., HarperCollins Canada, and Pan Macmillan in the U.K. for Station Eleven. And I've been with those three publishers ever since. And because Station Eleven was so successful, that meant that a lot of marketing resources had been poured into the subsequent books. So I think that that gives me a really unusual experience. And I think that it's not normal at all. So it makes me hesitant to draw any generalizations because for me, it's fine.
29:04Emily St. John Mandel:But I think that that's certainly not the case for the vast majority of novelists. I think there's so much distraction and chatter and such short attention spans that I think it's incredibly difficult to start out as a novelist now. And, you know, it was never actually easy, but my sense is that it might be harder now, just in this, the more fractured and the more kind of, I keep using the word chaotic, but the more chaotic the media landscape becomes, I think the harder it is for a novelist to break through.
29:35WIRED’s best and brightest:Do you have any advice for those people?
29:39Emily St. John Mandel:Stay off threads, for real. Stay off threads. Okay. Like, I don't really post, but I do read. I see the most deranged publishing advice on threads. Like, I can't. Like what? Like, I don't even know. I just like every time I read it, I'm like, no, that makes no sense. Don't do that. Don't do that. No, like I have very concrete advice for writers who are trying to get an agent, for example. But yeah, there's just a lot of bad advice floating around social media. Yeah.
30:08WIRED’s best and brightest:And there's a lot of noise. Yeah. And I have to imagine for anyone trying to break through now, they would feel like so much of that success is contingent on social media and TikTok and Instagram and sort of how they show up on those platforms. Yeah. And I would say you miss that by a few years. I think so. You're very lucky. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. You're welcome. Yeah. I want to end by coming back to Exit Party. Okay. And I hate to ask some of this, but I'm going to anyways.
30:37Emily St. John Mandel:Okay. Go for it.
30:39WIRED’s best and brightest:You know, you were accused, for lack of a better word, of being a prophet when Station 11 did not cause the pandemic but happened to be about a pandemic. You've now written a book that is uncomfortably close to what we are going through in the United States. Are you bracing yourself for a similar reaction? Yeah.
31:06Emily St. John Mandel:But look, if the country collapses, it's not my fault. That's my— She said it here first. That's what I said first. She didn't do it. Yeah, I didn't do it. I just read the news and got freaked out like everybody else.
31:19WIRED’s best and brightest:Yeah. Is there anything in the world you've created in the book that you hope turns out to be prophetic? Yeah. Maybe you could get credit.
31:32Emily St. John Mandel:Absolutely. I don't want to take credit for the parties after— But you know what? It's hope itself. There is a lot of hope in this book. It opens at a moment when the country has collapsed, but something new is taking its place. And it's a kind of chaotic in-between period, but I never meant to imply that would last forever. I think that settles down into something more stable and potentially better. And then on the side of the book that deals with a totalitarian state, that totalitarianism is already crumbling toward the end. So, yeah, you know, I think there is hope. And I think that we see that even now, you know, in our current incredibly dark political moment.
32:18Emily St. John Mandel:On the one hand, you have the ice raids. On the other hand, look at Minneapolis. Like, I get choked up thinking about the way people responded to that. Yeah. It's incredible and it's incredibly brave and extraordinary.
32:33WIRED’s best and brightest:I mean, maybe what you'll get credit for predicting is the dawn of an even better version of this country. That would be lovely. We can hope. We can hope. Emily, thank you so much for being here. It's been such a pleasure. This was great. Thank you.
32:54WIRED’s best and brightest:The Big Interview is produced by Lina Masitsis. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel.
33:32WIRED’s best and brightest:I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com.
34:08WIRED’s best and brightest:Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller.
From the publisher
Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, turned her into something of a pandemic prophet. This month, she’s releasing her newest novel, Exit Party, which imagines two possible American futures—totalitarian state and post-civil-war chaos.
Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from Alexis Ohanian’s newest tech venture to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.
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