TY - JOUR
AU - Lesley, Wheeler,
AB - Emily St. John Mandel received much-deserved international attention for her best selling novel, Station Eleven, published in 2014. It won multiple prizes, including the Arthur C. Clark Award and the Toronto Book Award, and was shortlisted for others, such as the National Book Award in the USA. Many publications listed it as one of the best books of the year. One theme of the critical reception was Station Eleven’s generic border crossings. As Mandel describes it on her author website, “My fourth novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It’s also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing” (“Station Eleven: About the Book”). Mandel’s indisputably literary novel, with its strong dystopian elements and speculative premise, inspired many critics to opine about the limits of genre categories, and it represents a prominent turn within contemporary literary fiction toward more intensely plot-driven models. As Joshua Rothman put it in The New Yorker, “The old guard looks down on genre fiction with indifference; the new arrivals – the genrefiers – are eager to change the neighborhood, seeing in genre a revitalizing force.” While Mandel is a “genrefier,” Station Eleven was her first venture into dystopian territory. Her previous three novels, originally published by the independent press Unbridled Books, were thrillers, or what Claire Kirch calls “literary noir” (30). They sold respectably and earned praise, but not so much that Mandel could quit her day job. Unlike many writers living in the USA, Mandel has steered clear of MFA programs and academic employment and, in fact, never finished her arts school degree. This means she has worked in a variety of unglamorous professions. Her fiction reflects this not only by representing a variety of characters struggling to pay the rent, but by positioning work as a focal point of their energy, ambitions, and existential dread. Gender affects the jobs some characters hold, and it shapes their attitudes toward employment, although in the interview below, Mandel discusses her resistance to the term woman writer. For me, the latter category is a useful frame, highlighting the kinds of experiences Mandel portrays, as well as her angle, in articles such as “The ___’s Daughter,” on the publishing industry – but it is far from the only relevant lens for reading this writer. Gender and other aspects of identity, both within Mandel’s novels and in relation to their reception, are complex and mutable. The borders between identities are made visible by their very permeability, and characters cross psychological, legal, and social frontiers frequently. Work, paid and unpaid, is central to how characters define themselves and how they are defined by others, but radical changes of employment often drive Mandel’s plots. The instability of identity, in Mandel’s fiction, is rooted not only in social conflict and economic precarity but in the untrustworthiness of the past. In all the novels, memory mutates, and nonlinear plots circle around impenetrable mysteries. In part because of looping narrative strategies, time, memory, and, therefore, identity seem volatile: Mandel’s stories unfold out of order. They are riddled with flashbacks, and, within them, uncanny connections occasionally spark, never to be explained. Mandel discusses one of the latter, from her most recent book, in this interview, but such incidents occur in all her novels. In the first, for instance, a detective has brief, impossible visions of his quarry (Last Night in Montreal 65). This raises the recurring question of where, when, and who the characters are, to which the answer seems to be everywhere, and all times, at once, with the “who” always in flux. This temporal slipperiness is emphasized in the same book by another character’s study of languages without past or future tenses. Our conception of time as linear, the author insists, is not inevitable. Station Eleven begins onstage, during a prepandemic performance of King Lear, but like Mandel’s other novels, it develops in a nonlinear fashion. As Phillip Smith puts it, this novel, like postapocalyptic tales in general, possesses a “forward-backwardness”: “As the plot progresses, the text continues to circle the moment of collapse with increasingly large revolutions, events are separated from the apocalyptic moment first in hours, and then in years and decades before and after” (290). The past is “redemptively recovered” through a return to premodern life and art: “the post-apocalyptic genre, and Station Eleven in particular, offers a thematic continuation of Elizabethan models of time and apocalypse” (Smith 291). This “forward-backwardness,” however, is not limited to Mandel’s postapocalyptic work. It is deep in the DNA of her larger project, reflecting a deep skepticism about the integrity of the self – and making the fleeting but recurrent blessings of love and community even more important. False and shifting identities are a common element of noir fiction, but in Mandel’s work, these devices are pronounced. Last Night in Montreal (2009), Mandel’s first book, focuses on Eli, a researcher into vanishing languages, and Lilia, a restless amnesiac whose fragmented childhood, consisting of a series of new schools and forged documents, survives in her memory mainly as a “fever-dream place, awash in light, in mirages” (8). Last Night in Montreal launches Mandel’s interest in the way memory, or the failure of memory, defines identity and how people may struggle to slip free from the stories they once told about their own lives. “I wish to remain vanishing,” Lilia writes in a motel Bible as a child, encapsulating her maddening elusiveness not only as an attitude but as a grammar (66). Similar motifs pervade The Singer’s Gun (2010). The main character, Anton, tries to ditch his shady past – both his parents’ illegal business and his own career selling Social Security numbers and fake passports – in favor of a fiancée and a corporate job, an apparent normalcy he has always craved (77). When detectives find a shipping container full of dead young women, however, Anton is implicated, and his bosses, rather than fire him, isolate him in a remote part of the building, “Dead File Storage Four” (34), where he gradually gives up even the pretense of work. Meanwhile, he has an affair with one of his former clients, Elena, who immigrated to New York from a remote village in Canada five flights away, acquired false papers, and is now under pressure to help the US government build a case against Anton. Elena, like Anton, is caught between worlds; her motives are complex. Sometimes she feels invisible, although her immigration status exposes her dangerously (97). As in Last Night in Montreal, the law defines some aspects of identity – especially how and where one makes a living – but the characters nevertheless are prone to crossing national and psychological borders with or without permission. The main character in The Lola Quartet (2012), Mandel’s third novel, must reinvent himself after being fired from his reporting job for faking sources. “I lied. I made up people,” Gavin admits to his sister, although he tearfully refuses the label of “plagiarist” (60–61). Out of work, he leaves New York (the center of the world in Mandel’s first three books, although in all cases, action also occurs in other, relatively distant locations). Gavin joins his sister’s bleak business in Florida, of gaining the keys to foreclosed properties and preparing them for quick sale. He also, in returning to the site of his childhood, discovers that he may have a daughter by his high school girlfriend, Anna, who seems to be in hiding. The noir tropes of criminal underworlds, double-crosses, violence, and addiction are plentiful here, but identity is also knotty in ways that are more unusual. Characters’ boundary trespasses turn theatrical and even science fictional, at least through metaphor. Gavin, trying to discover the truth of his personal history, implies that identity consists of performance: he feels he was “on the periphery of some great drama, trapped on the wrong side of the locked stage door” (183). Anna’s sister Sasha, recovering from a gambling habit, compares entering addiction’s world to stepping through a magical portal; she is always conscious of her ability to cross into a “parallel universe” (190, 236). A sense of self, or at least of conscious control, can also dissipate for some characters through artistic practice, as when Gavin’s old friend Jack muses on how a musician can be less player than “conduit” for some larger entity outside individuals (125). Many of the characters in The Lola Quartet are defined by their response to personal apocalypse and the US economic crisis. This prefigures the global disaster affecting the players in Mandel’s most recent and best-known book, Station Eleven. As different as the latter seems in terms of genre signposts, Station Eleven bears many resemblances to her earlier novels, especially in its preoccupations with memory, work, identity, and what it means to devote one’s life to art. Again, performance enables people to metamorphose. Actors and musicians traveling through the upper Midwest, crisscrossing a border between the USA and Canada that has now been rendered meaningless, are at the center of Mandel’s tale, and the author gives us several detailed descriptions of their performances. Other characters build and experience alternate worlds through literature, especially Miranda, author of the comic book Dr. Eleven, and Kirsten, the comic’s most devoted reader. In Station Eleven, however, the existence of multiple realities is both metaphorical and literal. Like Sasha in Mandel’s previous novel, Kirsten’s friend August, a poet, speculates about “parallel universes in which they all led different lives” (200) – but the prepandemic past constitutes one of those increasingly unimaginable, but once acutely real, alternate worlds. As one survivor says about children born after the catastrophe, a universe of electricity and instant communications is “science fiction to them” (270) – not accessible within personal memory and, therefore, in a fundamental way, not real. Again, memory and identity are interdependent. Their entanglement is most strikingly dramatized by Kirsten, once an angelic child actor and now a knife-throwing warrior. Kirsten has forgotten the most horrific portions of her own history, although she redefines this loss as a survival skill. As she remarks to another character, “the more you remember, the more you’ve lost” (195). When memory is unreliable, the texture of the present increases in importance. Characters are defined by whom and what they love and by the obstacles against their happiness. Work, in Mandel’s fiction, can play both roles. In Last Night in Montreal, for instance, Eli holds a “mind-numbing” job: he is “paid a reasonable salary to stand in an empty art gallery five days a week, surrounded by art that he found incomprehensible” (11). His linguistic studies and his love for Lilia form counterforces to the desolation of his remunerated work. In an extreme example, “Work is always a little sordid,” reflects Elena in The Singer’s Gun, about posing for pornographic photographs (98). In the latter novel, employment also disappoints and demoralizes Anton, who orders a copy of a Harvard diploma earned by a young man with the same name but finds, when he enters an office job under that false credential, that it has little substance: “The transferability of his skills was truly startling; the confidence required to sell illegal documents was the same confidence required to sit in an office beneath a framed Harvard diploma and pretend he knew what he was doing until he learned the job” (99). Respectable work, and the academic credentials that underlie it, are as much of a con as officially criminal enterprises. Similar meditations occur in Mandel’s latter two novels. In The Lola Quartet, Gavin disgraces the imperiled profession of newspaper journalism, while in Station Eleven, Jeevan, a perennial searcher who changes jobs multiple times, announces, “Work is combat” (103). While for many of Mandel’s characters paid work is “all but unsurvivable” (Singer’s Gun 252), certain kinds of labor can redeem struggle. Across all of the books, suffering people take pleasure in and identify with dance, music, theater, and quirkier pursuits. Less prestigious jobs and vocations can also confer dignity and merit contemplation. In Station Eleven, the comics artist Miranda, after a stint as a wealthy actor’s wife, becomes nostalgic for her office position: “She misses the order of the place, the utter manageability of her job there” (103). Others in the latter novel find occupations, after the flu, to give their lives shape and meaning: Jeevan puts his medical training to use; Clark curates the Museum of Civilization; and the librarian François Diallo publishes a newspaper containing interviews with survivors (108). The author’s own experiences with work and migration influence the stories she tells. Like Miranda and Arthur in Station Eleven, Mandel was raised on a small island in British Columbia, after which she moved to Toronto and, eventually, to New York City, where she now lives with the playwright Kevin Mandel and their young daughter. As she describes in the interview below, she spent her first months in New York believing she was undocumented, although her father was from the USA, and she was eventually able to claim US citizenship. Mandel’s preoccupation with the necessity of work, likewise, stems from her own experience. The “daughter of a plumber and a social worker . . . she herself lived life perilously close to the edge after she left home at 18 to attend the School of Toronto Dance Theatre,” Kirch writes, going on to quoting Mandel about the long-term resonance of living through a period of economic insecurity: “There have been times in my life when I’ve had to decide to pay the rent or buy groceries,”’ she says. “I had a job in Montreal where I had to unload a truck at 7 a.m. in the winter”. . . She suffers from ‘survivor’s guilt,” she says, knowing too many people who’ve been unemployed for years, “despite their best efforts,” while she enjoys a stable job with an adequate salary, a flexible schedule, and health benefits. (30) In the interview that follows, Mandel discusses her stint as an administrative assistant in more detail, reflecting on some toxic workplace experiences and the skills and priorities one learns in surviving them. Emily St. John Mandel gave a reading at my own workplace, Washington and Lee University, in November 2017, and this interview occurred via e-mail in the two months subsequent. As well as treating work and migration, it ranges over gender, genre, publishing, reading habits, and the occasionally uncanny practice of writing – as well as the usefulness of Excel in many of life’s endeavors. LW: You’ve often been asked about your relationship to genre fiction, but I’d like to start with gender. In “The Gone Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the Train,” you make some sharp observations about books with the word girl in the title: that two-thirds of those girls, for instance, are women; and that when these books are written by men, they are more likely to concern dead women. It’s a great essay, magnifying the way publishing choices not only reflect a sexist culture but contribute to it. What’s an author to do? ESM: I think the most important thing is for authors and publishers to just be aware of the problem. I’m inclined to give everyone the benefit of the doubt where intent is concerned, but we all came of age in this sexist culture, and we’ve all absorbed messages that we might not be consciously aware of. I think it’s important for us as authors to think through the implications of the choices we make with regards to how we write about women and how we title our books. If you’ve written a book with a woman in it, but you’re calling her a “girl” in the title, why is that? Is there some reason why that character’s not worthy of being considered an adult? If she’s dead, is she really a character, or is she more like a plot device? Do you really want to add to the “pretty dead girl” trope? LW: I don’t have the charts and graphs to prove it, but I have the sense that when you write or give interviews about contemporary fiction, you cite mainly writers who don’t get enough press – people of color, women, indie press authors. I wonder how much that reflects your reading preferences. Do you know what proportion of the books you read, for instance, are authored by women? ESM: It’s true, I do try to give shout-outs to books that I think didn’t get enough press. Something I learned the hard way, as a small press author with my first three books, is that it’s extremely difficult for small press books to get any kind of attention. So if I’m reading two novels, one by Christopher Boucher and the other by Zadie Smith – two of my favorite contemporary authors – I’m much more likely to mention the Boucher novel, because Boucher’s published by a very small press, so his book presumably has a tiny fraction of Smith’s marketing budget. I just flipped through the notebook where I record all of the books I read, and it looks like the gender divide is about 50/50. I choose the books I read pretty haphazardly – usually some combination of “someone told me this was great”; “I’ve been meaning to get to this for years”; “my back’s killing me so I need a light paperback that won’t add too much weight to my carry-on” – but one of my goals for the next year is to read more books in translation. LW: Do you identify with the term woman writer? ESM: No, I actually really dislike that term. We don’t use the term man writer; a man who writes is just, well, a writer. LW: I think I’m friendly to the term because it marks a group of authors, living and dead, I feel solidarity with, partly because I recognize my experiences in their work, but also because their example gives me permission to take certain risks. But I can see that defining writers by identity has boxed people in as often as empowering them. Does your dislike of the label mean that another community has been more significant to you – writers from a particular place or artistic tradition, maybe? That gender doesn’t seem very relevant to how you read and write, in comparison to other factors? Or do you wish all books could be read and discussed without reference to their authors’ identities? ESM: I really like your reason for being friendly to the term. This is actually the first time I’ve understood why a person might embrace it. I personally distrust the term because I feel that it implies that to be male is the natural state of a writer, and that we’re adding this modifier, woman, to signify a deviation from the norm: “this person’s a writer, but not the normal kind of writer.” I feel that I’m engaged in essentially the same project as my contemporaries who aren’t women, in the sense that we’re all just trying to write really, really good novels. So I guess I’d have to say that I agree with your suggestion that gender doesn’t seem hugely relevant to the way I read and write. Your follow-up question about groups has made me realize that there’s no group to which I can really cleanly claim membership. All of my books have occupied multiple genres. I don’t fit easily into the sci-fi community, partly because I have some problems with the way we categorize books, and partly because of my four books, only one can be labeled science fiction. I was embraced by the crime fiction community in France with my first three novels, but Station Eleven isn’t crime fiction, and my next book isn’t either, and my first three novels weren’t really “crime-fictiony” enough for me to be considered a crime writer in the English-speaking world. I’m inarguably a Canadian writer, also an American writer, because those are the two passports that I hold, but those clubs have a lot of members. LW: You cross gender, racial, and national boundaries in the characters you represent and have portrayed the stress and danger of being undocumented. This makes me wonder if anti-immigrant prejudice in the USA and elsewhere is affecting what kinds of plots you want to tackle. ESM: My interest in writing about undocumented immigrants had more to do with personal experience than political pressures. Here’s a mildly embarrassing true story: I didn’t realize I was an American citizen until I was twenty-two and had been living here for months. I was born and raised in Canada, and while my father’s from California, he was under the impression that he’d given up his American citizenship when he emigrated in the early seventies. So when I moved to New York City at twenty-two, I thought I was coming to the USA as an undocumented immigrant. (I was in good company. There are a crazy number of undocumented Canadians in New York City.) I had a retail job in SoHo, for which I was paid in envelopes of cash. In those days I spent a lot of time clicking despairingly through the green card application website, trying to figure out some way to become legal in the absence of a college degree or job offer, until one night I accidentally clicked the “American citizenship” link, which said something like, “In general, if at least one of your parents were born in the United States, you’re probably an American citizen.” I was shocked. I had an American passport and a Social Security number within a couple of months, after which life was much easier. So I was never actually an undocumented immigrant, but for a few months I thought I was, and I met a few other people who were, and I remember the permanent unease of that life. LW: That unease is vivid in your book, especially as the characters navigate the complexities of employment. Why is work such a big subject in your fiction? It’s not just that your characters have interesting jobs; they also reflect on work constantly, like Jeevan in Station Eleven saying “Work is combat,” or the characters in The Singer’s Gun, for whom work can sometimes be “all but unsurvivable.” ESM: Work has been a big subject in my life. I’ve been supporting myself since I was eighteen and changed cities a few times in early adulthood, so I’ve had a lot of day jobs, everything from janitorial work to making lattes to restocking shelves to (eventually) administrative work in companies and in a university. Some of those jobs were fine. A few of them did feel all but unsurvivable. I never minded the work itself, but hell is other people, and in two of my administrative jobs, I had fairly abusive bosses. In my best moments I could summon a certain sympathy for them – both were women who came of age in a time where women had to be extremely tough to get ahead in their fields – but that didn’t make it bearable to work for them. While I was writing The Singer’s Gun, I had an unstable boss who once threatened to fire my coworker because he accidentally printed a thirty-page document during a period when she was on a let’s-save-paper kick. She frequently shouted at all of us and went out of her way to embarrass us in front of our colleagues in staff meetings, but even when she wasn’t coming after me directly, I found the overall environment excruciating. (It’s hard to focus on your work when your boss is yelling at your coworker six feet from your desk.) It seems to me that figuring out how to make a living without losing your mind is one of the major problems of the modern world, not just for writers but for everyone who works. LW: I’m interested in how being an administrative assistant may have influenced your writing. That Excel spreadsheet you gave Claire Cameron at The Millions haunts me. ESM: Yes, I was an administrative assistant for twelve years or so, most recently in a cancer research lab at a university in New York. I’m not sure if it influenced my writing in terms of practice and such, but it definitely gave me a lot of material, because administrative skills are endlessly transferable, so you can move around between wildly different industries. There’s a lot in Station Eleven about management consulting, because I was an executive assistant for a management consultant for a few years, and we did a lot of 360 reviews together. Excel is just an extremely useful organizational tool. I use it for all kinds of things. LW: You’ve created a lot of characters who fail at a job or another endeavor and have to start over. Does that theme spring from your own change of career from dance to writing? ESM: Yes, probably. An early reviewer of Station Eleven took a swipe at Jeevan’s work history – he goes from being an entertainment journalist to being an EMT, which the reviewer seemed to find implausible – and I remember thinking, “I don’t know, that doesn’t actually seem weirder than studying dance all my life and then becoming a writer.” LW: The artists in your books take more joy in labor than any other kinds of workers do – it absorbs them in other worlds, almost magically. ESM: For me there’s something magical about being absorbed in the private world of a novel. I love the period where I’m working on a novel and no one else has read it, when it’s just this private world that I enter at will. LW: In The Lola Quartet, I love how Jack characterizes a skilled musician playing well: “‘Damn, he has the music.’” Liam glosses this as the musician becoming a conduit: “music’s something that moves through him, like religion or electricity” (124–25). Does that describe your experience of writing, or is it mostly spreadsheets? ESM: The experience of writing is both of those things, for me. There are interludes where writing can feel almost effortless, where you just sit down and write something, it comes fairly easily, and you feel afterward that you’ve done something good. This isn’t to suggest that that text will necessarily survive the first revision, but still, those conduit moments are nice. But there’s also a very technical aspect to writing, in terms of building up the structure of a book, balancing the pacing to maximize dramatic tension without sacrificing character development, all the way down to the nuts-and-bolts stuff, like “did I repeat the same word too many times on this page?” There’s nothing magical or conduit-like about this part of writing, but I enjoy it. LW: I’ve been teaching Station Eleven and during the first session, I asked students if they noticed any patterns developing. A couple of them answered “paranoia” – the characters feel watched by paparazzi before the pandemic and by scary cultists after. The flip side of feeling watched, especially in your earlier novels, is a concern with disappearance and invisibility. Is this connected to your interest in the performing arts – that being watched is both frightening and attractive? ESM: That’s possible. I think that’s also part of the female experience: you want to not be invisible, to be taken seriously in your professional life, etc., but what if you’re noticed by the wrong person? As American women, I believe our odds of being stalked in our lifetimes are about one in six. There’s always a tension between wanting to be seen, because everyone has the need to be acknowledged, and the fear of attracting the notice of someone dangerous. LW: Sometimes the watching is uncanny. In Station Eleven, the haunted nursery scene strikes me as a fascinating violation of what counts as real in the story world (307). I didn’t catch other moments like it in that particular novel, although perhaps the general web of coincidence is uncanny, too. The postpandemic universe is metaphorically haunted by the dead, but why did you literalize that for a moment? I find myself wanting the haunted nursery scene to be signaling that reality itself can be slippery, but maybe your intent was more psychological. ESM: I dropped in the ghost story because I felt like Station Eleven was at risk of getting too airtight, for lack of a better word. Sometimes I’ll read a novel, usually one that the author labored over for a decade or more, and it will seem to me that it’s been revised to the point where it’s almost too smooth: there are no hanging threads of any kind, every word of dialogue either advances the plot or serves as character development, and the novel as a whole is just this kind of towering edifice, technically impressive but somehow a little airless. With the ghost story in the nursery, I wanted to introduce an element of weirdness, like placing a strange little minor chord in a C Major symphony. LW: Here’s where I slip into genre questions. You joked to Sarah McCarry at Tor.com that “I am apparently terrible at writing literary fiction. It always veers off into something else.” Does that mean you think there is such a thing as literary fiction? If so, how would you define it? ESM: I do think there’s such a thing as literary fiction, but an idea I really like – advanced by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker blog back in 2014 – is that of course a book can be more than one genre, and with that in mind, I’d say literary fiction usually overlaps with other genres. I’d define literary fiction as fiction with an emphasis on (a) character development and (b) prose style. LW: You’ve told other interviewers that you like the puzzle-solving aspect of devising nonlinear plots. Is your preference for complex, looping structures rooted in a general attitude toward time or meaning or art? ESM: Maybe all of the above. When I first employed a nonlinear structure, with my first novel, it was with the idea that it might be interesting to build dramatic tension in two timelines at once, and after that it just seemed to me to a natural and interesting way to tell a story. LW: Is there a kind of narrative structure, or a kind of novel, that you want to try in the future? ESM: I love complicated nonlinear structures, but I also love reading books that are the opposite of mine: simple plot, perfectly linear, only one point of view. I’d like to write a novella like that someday. LW: Is there a kind of novel you’d put out of bounds or a taboo you wouldn’t break? ESM: I wouldn’t write a book that was critical of Islam. I read Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton recently, and while I don’t wish to imply that any of what he went through was easy, what I kept thinking about was how much more difficult it would be to go into hiding with a two-year-old. Works Cited Cameron , Claire . “ Artifacts of the Present: The Millions Interviews Emily St. John Mandel .” The Millions , 13 Nov., 2014, https://themillions.com/2014/11/artifacts-of-the-present-the-millions-interviews-emily-st-john-mandel.html. Kirch , Claire . “ Dark . . . and literary: Emily St. John Mandel .” Publishers Weekly , vol. 259 , no. 11 , 2012 , p. 30 . https://search.proquest.com/docview/928043587?accountid=14882 Mandel , Emily St. John . “ The ___’s Daughter .” The Millions , 28 Mar., 2012, https://themillions.com/2012/03/the-___s-daughter.html. —. “ The Gone Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the Train .” FiveThirtyEight , 27 Oct. 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-gone-girl-with-the-dragon- tattoo-on-the-train/. —. Last Night in Montreal . 2009. Vintage , 2015 . —. The Lola Quartet . 2012. Vintage , 2015 . —. The Singer’s Gun . 2010. Vintage , 2015 . —. Station Eleven . Knopf , 2014 . —. “ Station Eleven: About the Book .” Author website, www.emilymandel.com/. McCarry, Sarah. “‘I Want it All’: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel.” Tor.com, 12 Sept. 2014, www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st- john-mandel. Rothman , Joshua . “ A Better Way to Think about the Genre Debate .” The New Yorker , 6 Nov. 2014, www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/better-way-think-genre-debate. Smith , Philip . “ Shakespeare, Survival, and the Seeds of Civilization in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven .” Extrapolation , vol. 57 , no. 3 , 2016 , pp. 289 – 303 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Published by Oxford University Press 2018. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.
TI - “How to Make a Living without Losing Your Mind”: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cww/vpy023
DA - 2018-11-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/how-to-make-a-living-without-losing-your-mind-an-interview-with-emily-rXgRvL5AF4
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -