Sheltering: Emily St. John Mandel on ‘Predicting’ the Pandemic
On this episode of Sheltering, Emily St. John Mandel speaks with Maris Kreizman about her recently released novel, The Glass Hotel. Mandel also talks about the relevance of her 2014 novel Station Eleven, the story of a flu wiping out most of the earth’s population, and having to deal with Twitter vitriol because of the current-day parallels to that novel. BONUS: this episode features a surprise guest star (spoiler: it’s her sleepy daughter, who does not wish to be interviewed at this time). Please purchase The Glass Hotel online from your local bookstore, or through Bookshop!
From the episode:
Maris Kreizman: Do people think that you are an expert on all of this, because you wrote Station Eleven?
Emily St. John Mandel: Not so much, which I’m grateful for, because I am in no means an epidemiologist, but I do get a lot of uncomfortable comments like, “Oh you predicted this”. No, I didn’t. There was always going to be another pandemic because they’re something that happens, like earthquakes and hurricanes. It’s gotten a bit better, but there was some weird vitriol, one guy said on Twitter that he “wouldn’t let his dog pee on Station Eleven“. It’s Twitter, I don’t know. People are mad that I wrote a pandemic book that they decided to read during a pandemic. So, no comment on that.
Maris: [laughs] Those are choices.
Emily: Exactly, like the jacket copy is pretty clear on Station Eleven, you know what you’re getting into. But it’s died down a bit, I think people have gotten it out of their system.
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Maris: Are you doing any reading? Any work? You’re doing a lot of digital stuff—
Emily: Yeah, I’ve been trying to work. My Twitter timeline is kind of divided, who has young kids and who doesn’t. That’s a real time divide. But I’m seeing a lot of people talk about how much reading they’re getting done, and at first I was just like, I am not getting any reading done at all, come on. But let’s be honest about the psychological impact of living in the red zone, hearing ambulances all day. It’s rough. Even if I haven’t been personally affected, it turns out it’s really hard to work with the constant backdrop of ambulances all night.
