Emily St. John Mandel

Sunday Stories: "The World's First Publicly Traded Man"

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:29:00 -0400

Sunday Stories: "The World's First Publicly Traded Man":

This is the beginning of my husband’s novel:

“To my ex-Board of Directors,

I don’t know if you’ll remember me but together, just a handful of years ago, we launched an enterprise which in short order rendered me a hunted fugitive and rained upon you some combination of public humiliation, criminal and civil prosecution, financial ruin, cardiac arrest, impotency, attempted suicide and—though the diagnosis seemed somewhat, well, slapdash—insanity. My name is Zakary Nimmler. The trading symbol was NimCo.

Deciphering my notes from Adelaide Writers Week

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 02:12:00 -0400

“We are a migrant country,” the Australian author Brenda Niall said, “and the deep Australian question is, where is home?”

___

“If I absolutely had to choose a god to worship,” said the British novelist and historian Tom Holland, “I would probably choose Athena.”

Later, a question from the audience: “If you could choose to have been born at any time in history, which time period would you choose?”

Holland: “I’d have been born now. Dentistry. It’s as simple as that.”

___

An Australian novelist, Rohan Wilson, on a panel about the history of Tasmania. This history has extremely dark moments and includes a genocidal attack on the local aborigines. “You realize,” he said, “[that] … you’re living on land that doesn’t belong to you.”

Later at the same panel, possibly the best audience question I’ve ever heard:

“You’ve talked about this very dark history of colonization in Tasmania,” the woman standing at the microphone said. “What lessons can we learn from that history? If in future we go out into the galaxies and colonize new planets, what can we do to make it different?”

___

On a YA panel, a writer—I couldn’t see who it was from where I was sitting—on the disorienting and warping pain of losing one’s mother:

“You had a love, it existed, just because it’s gone doesn’t mean you can’t be yourself.”

____

Charlotte Wood, Australian novelist, on her childhood, which sounds very much like mine: “We always had beauty around us. There was very little money, but beauty and creativity steeped through our lives. There were books everywhere.”

Charlotte Wood, Australian novelist and extremely sensible person, on success and competition: “Younger writers are more competitive, you know, ‘her book is doing better than mine,’ etcetera. But as you get older you let that go, because you’ll bore yourself to death.”

She spoke of noticing and paying attention to details — the particular blue of a pair of shoes, the shape of leaves, etc. — as a way of honoring life.

____

Chika Unigwe, author of the novel On Black Sisters Street, which I want to read and which I would’ve bought if I hadn’t been traveling solely with carry-on luggage and thus acutely conscious of keeping the suitcase under the weight limits.

Unigwe is originally from Nigeria, but has lived in Belgium for some time. She interviewed trafficked Nigerian women for the book. These are women who went to their smugglers and asked to be brought into Europe, women sometimes bought and sold at auction, who will work for years to pay off their enormous smuggling debts while sending money home to their families. What did their families—often conservative, often religious—think of the arrangement?

Some, she said, were unable to admit the truth of what was happening, even to themselves. She told the story of a girl trafficked into Turin from Nigeria: she was told she’d be a dancer, but when she arrived she was expected to work as a prostitute. She couldn’t bear it, and called her mother begging to go home. Her mother seemed unable to comprehend what she was saying.

“It’s dancing,” her mother said, “you can handle it.”

“It’s not dancing,” the girl said. “It’s prostitution.”

“So it’s topless dancing,” said the mother. “What’s the big deal?”

The girl sent her mother a photograph of herself standing by the roadside, dressed to attract clients. She called her mother. “You see?” she said.

Her mother said, “My darling, your shoes are so beautiful.”

____

A note about names: Chika Unigwe said that the Nigerian sex workers with whom she spoke tended to go by short names that their clients could easily pronounce: Juli, Hani, Susie. On Sunday mornings they went to the black churches, and reverted to their real names while they were there. When they stepped out of the church, they were again Juli, Hani, etc.

____

Another panel on Tasmania, toward the end of the festival. The Tasmanian writer Rodney Croome:

“Tasmania has a lot to teach the world about belonging. In the twentieth century, the dominant idea was individual freedom, but in the twenty-first, it’s interconnectedness.”

He spoke of interconnection as a driver of social change. Tasmania went from having the lowest to the highest levels of support for gay rights in Australia, and this was achieved, he said, by gay rights activists talking to everyone who would listen. And people would listen, he said, because they knew these activists and had known them all their lives.

Countless gay people had left Tasmania, he said, but he’d refused. “I carried a sense that I couldn’t be free unless I could be free in Tasmania. … I thought, no one is going to turn me into a sexual refugee.”

“You’re never free,” he said, “unless you’re free in the place that shaped who you are. It doesn’t have to be a geographical place. But for me it means Tasmania.”

I walk down to the Adelaide riverfront with M, another novelist....

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:53:00 -0500

I walk down to the Adelaide riverfront with M, another novelist. There are black swans in the river. All the swans in Australia are black, M. tells me. She’s from Australia originally, but has lived in London for a very long time. We wonder about the challenges of marketing Nassim Taleb’s book in Australia.

M. flies off to another city — someone’s always flying in or flying out at large-scale literary festivals — and a day or two later I take my camera back to the river at sunset. Ducks trail me along the waterfront, hoping I’ll feed them. The black swans hope I’ll feed them too, and come close to the water’s edge with their fluffy little cygnets. I find myself thinking about the disorientation of the first English settlers: they leave their crowded white-swan island and set off by boat to the far side of the world, and the ones who survive that harrowing voyage land eventually in a place so wildly different that even the swans are inverted.

West Stage and book tent at Adelaide Writers Week. The picture...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:54:02 -0500

West Stage and book tent at Adelaide Writers Week. The picture doesn’t do it justice. There are parrots in the trees. You can sit under the trees and listen to writers and it is sublimely peaceful. I was thinking earlier, why haven’t I done more outdoor book festivals? Outdoor festivals are wonderful. And then I remembered: because most of the other festivals I’ve done have been in Canada in October.

In Adelaide, Australia, for Adelaide Writers Week. I found this...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:25:39 -0500

In Adelaide, Australia, for Adelaide Writers Week. I found this great back alley while I was looking for a grocery store the other day.

I will travel very long distances if there are books at the other end.

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:49:00 -0500

I’m going to Australia soon! The distance didn’t really sink in until the wonderful festival organizer who booked my travel said something about getting me back to the other side of the world, and I realized: Right. The other side of the world. I am going to the other side of the world.

(I know air travel’s one of those things that we’re just supposed to take for granted in the modern world, like telephones and the Internet, but I frankly find all of these things somewhat breathtaking.)

But anyway, if you’re in the vicinity of Adelaide, Australia, next week, perhaps you’ll consider stopping by the Adelaide Festival. I have four events. There will be books. I’m greatly looking forward to it. I’m presently neither published nor distributed in Australia and have no idea how this festival even knows I exist, but I am honoured and grateful that they’re importing me.

Later, I’ll fly directly from Australia to AWP. I’m looking forward to AWP! I’ve never been. But to clarify re: travel, by the time I arrive at the hotel in Boston I will have been traveling for 29 hours straight. I will sleep for a few hours and then get up for a morning panel. What I’m trying to get at here is that I apologize in advance if you say hi to me at AWP and I can’t remember your name. Candidly, I probably won’t remember my name either. Also, if you come to my panel, and I look like I’m hallucinating? It probably won’t be your imagination. I will probably actually be hallucinating.

"Gentlemen,” he said, “… here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined..."

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:59:47 -0500

““Gentlemen,” he said, “… here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.””

- From The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace

Emily, Actually

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:23:31 -0500

Four questions directed to me by the same person over the course of an evening at a reading earlier in the year (where my name and the word “novelist” were displayed prominently in the venue), in this order:

1) “Your name’s Evelyn, isn’t it?”

2) “Your name’s Elizabeth, right?”

3) “For how long have you been a poet?” [nb: I’m not a poet.]

4) “Oh, is this your husband? Is he a poet too?”

Off On a Tangent: Life Lessons For and From the Literary World

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 20:07:56 -0500

Off On a Tangent: Life Lessons For and From the Literary World:

I know this is six months old, but I just came across it the other day and really like it. Especially the bits about parties and narcissists and the Internet. I haven’t really gone to any parties this year, unless it’s a party that exists because a friend has just published a book, or the party and I are both attached to an out-of-town literary festival and I’m in the hotel anyway, or it’s a small-scale dinner party situation, which is totally different. I vacillate between on the one hand an undeniable preference for staying home in the evenings and writing instead, and on the other hand a vague notion that I should maybe be networking or something. All I’m saying is, it is nice to see my non-partying ways validated.

offonatangent:

To be clear, this is a collection of largely bullshit aphorisms that have formed, stalagmite-like, in my head over the last few years. Please take with as many or as few grains of salt as you like.

— The vast majority of people are nice. Even those whose first impressions make them appear to be…

Walking home over the Manhattan Bridge, late afternoon: a red...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:28:58 -0400

Walking home over the Manhattan Bridge, late afternoon: a red jacket hanging up to dry, rooftops, the Woolworth and Freedom Towers in the distance. This is the Manhattan Chinatown. These are very strange days. Three blocks away from where the red jacket was hanging, the National Guard was handing out food.

Canada

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:41:00 -0400

-I’m living in a hotel room in Toronto this week. But first there were days and days on Vancouver Island, where my family lives. An event at North Island College, where I sold all the books I’d hauled across the continent in my carry-on luggage and saw people I knew when I was a baby in a rural place called Merville.

-“We feel that you’re giving Merville short shrift,” one of them said.
My bio says that I’m from Denman Island, which is actually where I moved when I was ten.
“Well,” I said, “I did leave when I was seven.”
“Those are very formative years,” he said.

-A day in Vancouver. Two events at the Vancouver Writers Fest. The Douglas & McIntyre party was canceled at the last possible moment. I assumed bankruptcy and hoped I was wrong, but I wasn’t.

-I went to the airport and caught an 11:30pm flight, drifted in and out of a hazy half-sleep all the way to Montreal. I meant to practice my French when I got there, but after a night on an airplane I don’t even really speak English. I changed into a suit in an airport restroom and boarded a taxi, spent a long time drinking coffee and trying to crack into a WiFi network in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel.

-I was there for Paragraphe Bookstore’s Books & Breakfast series. Alix Ohlin was as lovely in person as she is on Twitter. There was also Stuart Clark, whom our mutual Canadian publisher likes to introduce as a rockstar astrophysicist when we’re all at parties together, and a former football player whose name I might’ve remembered if I’d slept the night before. “There is a God,” the former football player said, toward the end of his talk.

-My heart was racing, because of all the caffeine. When I was up on the podium I was thinking about the ease that comes with practice; how nervous I’d been when I did this event three years ago, how much less nervous I felt now that I’d talked to three years’ worth of rooms full of listening people, considerations of whether I’d be more nervous if I’d slept the night before, if one can be too tired to be nervous, if the little built-in timer thing counting the minutes and seconds I’d been at the podium was accurate, etc.

-I talked about my book, Raymond Chandler, Florida’s exotic wildlife problem, Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia, suburban sprawl and the way when I travel I sometimes feel like I could be anywhere — the same hotels, the same restaurants, the same retail operations in every. single. city I travel to — and then back to noir, the hope embedded in Chandler’s famous 1944 essay in the Atlantic Monthly (“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”) You’re not supposed to read at these things but I read the first page of the book anyway, because I have a theory that ending a talk with the final line of the final paragraph on the first page of the book might help to move copies, because that line raises certain questions.

-This is the line: “There was a plastic shopping bag duct-taped to the underside of the stroller. It held a little over one hundred eighteen thousand dollars in cash.”

-I went back to the airport and flew to Toronto. The International Festival of Authors. “We have you here with us for seven nights,” the woman at the front desk said.

-A headline on a magazine I picked up in Canada: “What If America Fails?” It struck me as one of the most quintessentially Canadian headlines I’d ever seen.

Best dialogue of the Midwest tour

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 12:15:28 -0400

Going through the notebook I was carrying when I was touring the Midwest a couple weeks back. The captain’s announcement from my final flight of the tour, Chicago-NYC:

“On behalf of myself, our flight crew, the entire JetBlue family, and most importantly, my mortgage company, thank you for choosing JetBlue and welcome aboard.”

Merci, Carole

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 12:08:10 -0400

Just when I think my esteem for booksellers couldn’t possibly be any higher, one of them shows up in my Facebook feed with a poem. From the Facebook feed of Librairie VirginAvignon, Avignon, France:

Un polar à découvrir absolument: “Dernière nuit à Montréal”, de Emily St.John Mandel.
“Une petite fille en pleurs
Dans une ville en pluie
Et moi qui court après
Et moi qui court après au milieu de la nuit…” (Merci Mr Nougaro)

Une fuite éperdue,
Une quête obsessionnelle,
Une mélancolie crépusculaire
habitent ce texte court, percutant comme le chien d’une arme.
Une découverte!

Coup de coeur de Carole

My French author photo is very dramatic.

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:12:33 -0400

My French author photo is very dramatic.

Sunday September 23, 2012

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:10:00 -0400

-I haven’t been updating this much lately. But I have a good excuse! I’ve been working on my new novel. I’ll talk about it when it’s done.

-An email arrived the other day from the press attaché at my French publishing house. On this continent you’d call her a publicist, but everything’s more glamorous in Paris, including job titles. She sent along a bouquet of flattering reviews en français (at least, they seemed flattering, my French is still horrible because there aren’t enough hours in the day and I’ve been writing instead of studying, see above). She tells me that the first novel just went into a second printing in France. Preliminary evidence suggests that I’m going to be one of those writers whose work is more popular in France than it is in their home country. (Or home countries, plural, given the dual-citizenship thing. Still!)

-I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s wonderful. I love Paris so much that I actually kind of want to move there. On the other hand, what a peculiar turn of events: why is it easier to find an audience in a foreign language?

Naples, Florida, September 9 2012. With Rich Rennicks of...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:41:53 -0400

Naples, Florida, September 9 2012. With Rich Rennicks of Unbridled Books (left) and Peter Geye (right), whose novel The Lighthouse Road is very good and comes out next month. Photo by Jon Mayes, sales rep extraordinaire. It turns out you can roll this dress up in a ball at the bottom of your overnight bag and it comes out unwrinkled.

The American paperback.

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 23:48:22 -0400

The American paperback.

"It was my first flight, it was magnificent, there is nothing like flying to ease a distressed..."

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:31:05 -0400

“It was my first flight, it was magnificent, there is nothing like flying to ease a distressed spirit. The beautiful little farms of the Rhone valley appeared below me. I saw a little dot shoveling manure in a field and recognized a critic, I got to Lyons, ate some good food (there are good restaurants there) and immediately got to work again.”

- Saul Bellow Letters, ed. by Benjamin Taylor

Brooklyn, July 30 2012.

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:29:09 -0400

Brooklyn, July 30 2012.

"Martha shipped out on May 13 as the only passenger aboard a ship with a cargo of dynamite."

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 10:57:48 -0400

“Martha shipped out on May 13 as the only passenger aboard a ship with a cargo of dynamite.”

- Baker’s Hemingway biography, on Martha Gelhorn’s WW2 Atlantic crossing