Book Five: J. Courtney Sullivan, Emily St. John Mandel and Emma Straub
One of the most gratifying parts of getting older is watching all of my writer friends get older along with me, and to read their books as we go along this ride together. I suspect all writers have a sort of cohort, and this season, two of my friends and I all published our fifth books–Courtney Sullivan’s Friends and Strangers, which is out today, and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which came out in April. I called the two of them in late April to talk about writing, our beginnings, publishing in the pandemic, and lots of other things. It’s a very long conversation, because we are all the mothers of small children, and are starved for contact with other adults, and this is the slightly edited version. We host Courtney in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld tonight, June 29th.
Emma Straub: The reason I wanted to talk to you guys is that I realized we are all on our fifth books and that seemed like a real marker of something. I don’t know what. Maybe being mid-career, or at least waist- to hip-deep in our careers, and it made me think of Saturday Night Live, and how when people host for the fifth time, they get a cool jacket. Five books just seems like a real sizable hunk of books, so I wanted to talk to you guys about how you’re feeling about publishing a book right now, and how different the experience is from your previous publications. I want to start at the very beginning and talk to you about your first books first. How those books came to be, and how you felt about those books being out in the world, and what that moment meant to you.
Emily St. John Mandel: This feels so long ago now, which I guess it kind of was. My first book was called Last Night in Montreal and I started writing it when I was really young. I was, I want to say, 23. So the story had been I went to school for contemporary dance in Toronto. I was living in Toronto and kind of wanted a change of scenery, so I moved to New York to be with my boyfriend at the time. Then we both moved up to Montreal, and it was a total disaster. We almost immediately broke up and then I was stranded and penniless in Montreal. I really didn’t speak a word of French, so it was just this kind of now-what moment. I didn’t really want to be a dancer anymore. I’d never studied writing at all, but I’d been reading and also writing for fun for my entire life, so I just started writing a novel and it eventually became Last Night in Montreal.
It took about four years to write, and it came out when I was thirty. I look back at that book and I don’t actively hate it, but it’s got this weird time capsule feeling. I don’t know if you guys find this with your first novels where it’s like oh, that’s my sensibility that I had in my early twenties. That’s what I was concerned with back then, and that’s sure not the way I’d tell that story now. So when people tell me they’re reading Last Night in Montreal, I find that slightly embarrassing, like why don’t you read one of the better ones? But in the moment it felt kind of amazing to have completed a book, which partly has to do with my life choices. I hadn’t really completed very much. Like I don’t actually have a high school diploma, full disclosure. So at the time, it just felt like the most mind blowing thing in the entire world that there was an actual book in the world that I had written. Did you guys have that experience?
J. Courtney Sullivan: Yes, absolutely. My first novel was Commencement, and it was published exactly ten years ago. It’s set at Smith College in western Massachusetts, where I went to college, and it’s very much a love letter to a certain time.
I was just talking to someone, Emily, and using the term time capsule as well. I think every novel is a time capsule, right? You, as the author, can go back and remember exactly what you were doing at that moment. There are these parts of my book The Engagements that are set in Paris, and I did lots of research for them. But when I was actually writing them I was in the guest room of my mother-in-law’s house in Des Moines, Iowa. And every time I think about those Paris sections I also think about Des Moines, so there’s this weird overlap of the story you were writing and the life you were living.
I think the thing with Commencement that I look back on that was really different–I was the same: I never studied writing in any formal way, but I always loved reading and I always loved writing stories. And when I was in college I wrote part of–or maybe even the whole thing–a couple of different novels that sit in a drawer still; but Commencement was the first one that got published, of course. I lived in New York and I was working as a research assistant at the New York Times for Bob Herbert, one of the op-ed columnists there, and also Gail Collins, another of the columnists. I had friends in the journalism/magazine world but I didn’t know anyone yet in the fiction-writing world, and so I didn’t know what to expect at all. When the book was being published, it was just such a fantasy for me. Things would happen and I would just be amazed. I had no expectations, so when they told me the book is going to be featured in Elle, let’s say, I was ecstatic; I couldn’t believe it.
I got a call, I remember, at my desk at the Times from the Times Book Review–you know, I could see the phone light up and say Times Book Review–and the person on the other end said, ‘we would like to send a photographer to take your picture.’ And I was just so naive. I was like okay, what for?’ I didn’t get it, like they’re reviewing your book. At the time, I was single, I was living in a little, teeny-tiny, postage-stamp studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights and I will never forget, I actually had a huge mouse infestation. Our whole building did, and our landlord was sort of hated by all the local handymen. So this guy had come in on a Friday to rip out my kitchen cabinets in the service of something to do with mice. I was in Boston with my parents for the weekend, and he called me and said, ‘I’m really sorry to do this to you, but I had to quit the job midway through because I don’t think the landlord’s going to pay, so your apartment is kind of a disaster’. I got back late Sunday night and everything that was in cabinets was now on my couch: so just pots and pans and pasta boxes in a heap on the couch, and then there were three dead mice on the floor. And no cabinets, just a gaping hole into nowhere, and first thing the next morning the New York Times Book Review is coming to take my picture. The photographer came in and was like let’s go out in the hall, and that was that. It was kind of an in-between time. And because I was an assistant to people who were amazing, so lovely, they had a book party for me. They really couldn’t have been more supportive, but I was somebody’s assistant, so my whole book tour with that book, I was sort of taking my vacation time from work.
One thing I remember is that I felt I had really pushed my luck with the amount of time I had taken for my book. So I was going to be featured in something for TIME magazine. It was a video, and I didn’t want to tell Bob [Herbert] about it because I felt like I had asked him for one too many things at that point, so I just said I have to go get a prescription at Duane Reade and I’ll be back in half an hour, and I ran from the Times building up to TIME magazine. There were five or six other authors there who were all–this was just what they were doing today. They had gone and probably gotten a blowout or whatever beforehand, and I was just this sweaty mess coming from my office, pretending I was at the pharmacy.
ES: I don’t know if it’s the times–like regular life pre-quarantine, pre-pandemic times–or if it’s just exacerbated by pandemic times, but everything that both of you just described feels like from another world. And somehow it all, even though what you’re describing is approximately ten years ago, it takes on this Mad Men/New York City-of-the-past.
So Emily, your first three books were published by a small press. My first book, Other People We Married, was also published by a small press. I can’t remember when we met for the first time, Emily, but I certainly knew about you and was aware of you when Last Night in Montreal came out. I don’t think I was working at BookCourt yet. What year was that? That was 2009?
EM: Exactly, 2009.
ES: Yeah, I started at BookCourt in 2009. So it was around that time, but you were this creature who was just beloved by all of us. I knew like four people who were my bookstore friends and my Twitter friends, and all of those people were just obsessed with you. So I feel very proud of myself for getting in on the ground floor.
EM: That’s amazing. Yeah, I was published by a tiny press. My first three novels probably sold about 3,000 copies each with them, so I didn’t have to juggle TIME magazine for my first novel–it’s a very different experience. They were great with independent bookseller outreach. It was really cool.
CS: Emma, do you want to tell us your answer to the first question before we move on? I want to hear about your first novel.
ES: Okay, okay. So my first book was my story collection. And Courtney, I should say that when you and I first met, I was working at BookCourt. The first time we really had a conversation was when you wrote to me because you were writing a piece for the back page of the Book Review about writers who worked in bookstores. You took me out for lunch on my break from BookCourt. We went to Bar Tabac and sat outside, and I was like, I am so cool; I am literally the coolest person in the world right now. It was just amazing.
So my first book was published by a one-person small press. It was like a joke how easily it happened, given how hard I’d been trying to publish a book for my entire twenties. Like I spent my whole twenties writing terrible novels and sending them out and having them be rejected. And then I was on tour with The Magnetic Fields, at the merch booth, and met this guy who ran a literary website that I’d been published on. And he said ‘oh, I want to publish books. Do you have a story collection?’ And I was like, sure can! Sure can pull that together! So he published it and there were 2,000 copies printed, and I sold 800 of them at BookCourt–probably more, honestly. And then on my tour for that book, which I arranged by myself and paid for by myself just by reaching out to booksellers I knew, I basically set it up so that I read the first few pages of the novel I was working on at my reading at McNally Jackson. And then I sold my novel. Then Riverhead bought the story collection and republished it. That’s my story.
CS: That is a great story!
EM: It is, yeah. Speaking of hustle, that’s fantastic.
ES: I have always had an abundance of hustle. That’s actually one of the things, though, that I feel is really different now in my life. For the first portion of my career, I really could really just go hard, whether it was writing a certain amount of pages a week or a day, or doing whatever I could to help myself get a little further down the road. Whereas I just can’t do that anymore. When I was first writing novels, like my bad novels that will never get published, I was writing like 25 pages a week, which I know isn’t even that much for some people but I was writing 25-30 pages a week. And now when I’m actually writing, I try to write 10 pages a week and it often doesn’t even happen.
EM: Emma, now you have two kids and a bookstore. I feel like that’s a major life difference from your first novel.
ES: Yeah, let’s talk about life differences. You know we all have children, that’s one for sure, but also just the way you approach your writing now and how that is different.
EM: Sure. When my first novel was published, I lived with my now-husband in a one-bedroom rental apartment on the Upper West Side. So that’s a relatively low overhead. I had a day job, I was an administrative assistant at Rockefeller University by then, where I stayed for years and years. When you have a day job it makes writing much lower pressure, is the reality of it. On the one hand, all writers want to quit their day jobs. On the other hand, once you do quit your day job–which I did about a year after Station Eleven, my fourth novel, came out–it's impossible not to think about your mortgage/childcare costs in the back of your mind as you're writing. And I guess that’s the trade off.
There’s an argument to be made that maybe it taints the….it sounds so pretentious to say that maybe those financial considerations taint the pure artistry of the endeavor in some way, but there is something in there that I struggle to articulate. So when you get older and you have more financial obligations, the mortgage and the childcare are the big ones for me, it's impossible not to approach writing in a slightly more mercenary way where I probably would not spend years working on an extended prose poem. I’m trying to write the best possible novel, but I’m also trying to write a novel that people want to buy. I wonder if it’s like that for you guys, too.
CS: I started in the world of women’s magazines. I worked at Allure magazine and then I was at the Times for four years. The great thing about that job was that the work I did for my bosses was really fascinating work, but there wasn’t tons and tons of it. At the women’s magazine, I worked insane hours and did a crazy amount of work. At the Times it was actually more leisurely, so I also got to work on my novel on the weekends. I wasn’t that burnt out, so I’d work on the novel at night and write for the paper. I’d pitch stories for the paper a lot and write for various parts of the paper, and I think when you are involved in journalism you always have the sense of an audience. You’re always writing knowing that in a day or a month someone will be on the receiving end of what you’re writing, and so I think that was a good sort of training ground for novels. Because the novels that I wrote that live in a drawer, that were so enjoyable to write because I never had to revise them, and that idea of, okay, this ten page detour was really fun for me but actually I don’t really think anyone’s ever going to want to read it–that’s the thing that over time I’ve learned about.
Like I love doing research. When I was at the Times I was a researcher and I’d always dreamed of course, as you said Emily, of quitting my day job. And then a few days after I had quit my day job, I was sort of like, but I really miss doing research and so I continued doing that with most of my books. But learning how to use the research in service of the story, and not just your own adventure for fun, was something I had to learn.
But I think also certainly the financial piece is very real. There’s always kind of a disconnect between how things look to the outside world and what’s really happening when it comes to publishing, I would say. I remember when my first novel had a wonderful thing happen when Janet Maslin included it in the summer books round up, and people in my own office in the Times were saying ‘this is amazing, are you going to quit today?’, ‘are you going to give your notice?’. And I was like no, because I didn’t get any money in the bank account for this article in the Times. There’s no actual dollar amount attached to it. So that kind of thing certainly played a role, and I left that job after I sold my second novel, Maine. So for Maine I wrote half the novel before I sold it to Knopf. With Commencement, I had written the whole thing before they bought it.
ES: God it’s so funny to think about now, Courtney, because when Maine came out I really thought of you as a fancy novelist.
CS: Really?
ES: Yeah, I did. I think it was just, I mean Commencement had such an iconic cover and really did make a splash, and then Maine...I love Maine. I mean it’s funny what perspective can do. Where now, thinking about it, I’m like oh, baby Courtney!
CS: Yeah, so Emily and I now have the same editor, the amazing Jenny Jackson at Knopf. And she’s been my editor on all of my novels, which has been amazing because we’ve kind of grown up together, in a way, and Brettne Bloom, my agent, as well. The three of us have all really grown up together. Because we started–I mean I met Brettne when I was 20 and she was 25.
ES: You have both–not disowned any of your early work, but you’ve both said things in this conversation that make me think that it’s not the book you think is the best that you’ve written. So I wondered if you each have a moment or a book where you feel like you really clicked into gear as a writer; if there was a transition between book A and book B where you really felt like, ok, no I understand this is what I can do. What about you, Emily?
EM: I think I clicked into gear as a writer with my fourth novel Station Eleven. But there was a moment before that that was maybe more important, that was between my first and second novels, Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. So Last Night in Montreal–like I said before, I don’t hate it but it’s not the way I’d write a novel now. I think there’s a trap you can fall into when you’re just starting out as a novelist where you kind of know you have some talent, that you can write, so you go a little crazy with these really elaborately beautiful, self-consciously ornate sentences. I definitely fell into that with my first novel. You’re just trying to make it really beautiful in a way that when you look back on it it seems a little bit fussy.
So I wrote my first novel, and then while I was just beginning to write my second novel I read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. I find him really hit or miss as a writer, but that's a book of his that I really like or that I loved when I first read it. It’s just written in the most clear, lucid, pared-down style, and it was really kind of a revelatory moment for me. Like you can make it incredibly simple and that simplicity is beauty, just in and of itself. So I think of that as maybe the most pivotal moment for me in my writing, and my novels since then have been way more pared down and much clearer and sharper than Last Night in Montreal was.
ES: What about you, Courtney? Is there a moment where you made a leap or you realized what you were good at or something like that?
CS: I’ve recently been thinking that I’m glad I’m a fiction writer as opposed to, say, a gymnast, where I, and all of my friends, would’ve peaked at age twelve and then it would just be a long road down. Because I loved your new book so much and I see my friends who are writers getting better and better with age, and I hope that I’m getting better with age. I think with each book I try to do something I don’t feel at the outset I can do, so every book feels like its own challenge. It never feels like, well I’ve already done this before so I have it in the bag. Every book at the outset feels just as terrifying as the first one did, or maybe even more so. But I think what’s lovely, and this is actually true as you get older in a lot of ways, is you feel the panic of I can’t do this but you know you’ve done it before so you know that really you can.
I think the turning point with my writing was, like I said, when Commencement came out, I just didn't really know any fiction writers and so that wasn’t my world. I mean, now I look at my younger self and I think you really should’ve spent more time at readings and less time in bars in your twenties, but I just didn’t. And so it was once I started going on book tour and going to festivals and hearing other writers talk that it went from being a really private thing that I’d always done–I’d always written fiction even as a small child and my first novel still felt that way to me, like it was just me and this book. It didn’t really occur to me that it would be out in the world, even though I knew it would.
And so when I started hearing other writers talking about their craft–craft being a word I had never really thought about–I had this feeling like some of these people are working a lot harder than I am, to be honest. My novel Saints for All Occasions was the book that I struggled with so much and so I threw away hundreds of pages and started again, and I think it paid off. But it was funny because prior to that book, I had heard so many authors talk about how they had thrown away hundreds of pages and started again for various reasons, and every time I would think that would never happen to me. I would just make it work: add some elmer’s glue, just figure it out; throw some glitter on it and make it work. But I found myself in the position where structurally this book was much more complicated than what I’d written before. I had to acknowledge that it was not working and I did figure it out. Actually, Emma, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this but I heard you and Jess Walter on the Lit Up podcast. You were talking about how a lot of times when you’re writing instead of just going for the bullseye you’re just kind of circling the bullseye, and, as a writer, it takes time to get to that bullseye, and that really clicked in my head. I realized that actually the story I was telling wasn’t the story I was supposed to be telling when I heard that podcast. I had been writing this story about two sisters who have been estranged for decades who, I guess you could say, reunite. But the reason for their reunion is one of them has died and the other one is coming to her funeral. It just had....there was nothing to it, there was no power because what’s the point of coming and reuniting if one of you is dead, there’s no drama there. But there was this little scene in the book about what had happened five years earlier when one of these women’s sons had died, and I realized listening to that podcast that actually the whole book needed to be about that and that I was just afraid to write that because it was just going to be a lot harder and I did.
ES: Well done!
CS: Thanks! Thank you. Thanks for that advice that you didn’t even know you gave me.
ES: I think that when you’re writing your first book, it’s just you and this thing, and nobody knows and it's your private little world, so you can work on it for an infinite period of time. Like that’s how I felt about my story collection, where it just was what it was. And I’d worked really hard on those stories, but I wasn’t trying to be something. Like they weren’t trying to be anything other than just what they were, which was just domestic short stories where people fell in and out of love. That’s just what they were because that’s what I was thinking about. But when I started writing Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, I feel like it was almost like invasion of the body snatchers, where I was like ok, everything I’ve ever written is this kind of thing and the way I talk is this kind of thing. But let me just go ahead and write a historical novel about the Hollywood studio system that covers 80 years. Like why not? And I think part of it was feeling the opposite of what you said, Courtney: I felt like I had to work hard. Working hard was going to be the proof that I was doing it right. And working hard and having something that I had to research–that was going to be proof that I could write a novel and that I was allowed to write a novel. Even though, in some ways, it was just the successful version of what I had done in my twenties. Like the first novel I tried to write in my twenties was kind of a very sexy YA Wuthering Heights, but set in my high school. If I ever go back to anything, it’ll be that one.
CS: I was just going to ask you–do you ever think you would go back to it? Because that sounds amazing.
ES: Yeah. I would have to rewrite the whole thing from jump street. But after that didn’t sell I tried to write a mystery novel, which it turns out is really, really hard to do. And then I tried to write a fantasy novel, and that’s even harder; and those were all disasters. But I think I gave myself that same kind of task where I was like now I’m writing a historical novel that requires research. And even though I am really proud of that book, when I’m in the store and someone touches it, I’m like oh god, no, no, no, just keep moving.
EM: I love that book!
ES: Aww, thank you! Because when I wrote The Vacationers, which took me a long time and was like a million drafts, it took me a long time to figure out what that story was, but when I got it I was like oh man, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is what it’s supposed to feel like to write a book, where you know your characters so well and it feels...not easy. Writing is always hard, but I felt like instead of trying to speak another language I was finally just speaking my own language, and that made it so much easier. And I feel like all the books I’ve written since have had their own challenges. Like with All Adults Here, the biggest challenge was that I had two children and a bookstore, but that it took me writing The Vacationers to get over the hump of self acceptance, I guess.
CS: Well I think one of the big challenges of being a fiction writer or any kind of writer is–and it comes up again and again and again–is just the belief and the understanding that what you have to offer is your own voice. That’s it. The stories have pretty much been told, or a lot of them, and whether it’s a novel about family dynamics, and yes, we’ve all read those, but we’ve never read yours until you’ve written it, you know what I mean? So I feel like that’s something the youngest, earliest writers have to confront. Like don’t try to sound like Stephen King, just try to sound like you. And I do it all the time, like if I read a book I think is amazing I’m like, you know I’m just going to try to be Anne Enright. Well, you’re not, so don’t.
It is a struggle but I think you’re right, there’s a way when you’re on, you’re clicking into a track you actually belong on, your voice, and it feels really natural even though it is hard. In a way it’s weird, books that are easier to read, and by easier I just mean–and both of you, your books are like this–the kind of book you’re just flying through, even though it’s a quality literary novel. You’re just pouring through it. And I think in some ways that's a sign of harder work on the author’s part. Like if it’s easy to read it was probably pretty hard to write because you’ve gone back and you’ve pared it down to what it needed to be, and you’ve pruned it, you’ve reworked it.
EM: Yeah. I think it takes a long time to reach that realization. Yeah, the books that are easiest to read are hardest to write.
CS: It takes so much work to make it look effortless; it’s like figure skating. When you’re watching you’re like I’m pretty sure I could do a triple axle, but no, you can’t.
ES: I want to talk about book five and this moment, and how you feel publishing a book right now. Like Emily, your book came out a couple of weeks ago. And Courtney, yours is June 30th and mine’s May 5th. So maybe, Emily, you should start. How does it feel?
EM: It’s been surprisingly good. It’s been this real bright spot in a pretty dark time. You know it’s funny, Emma, I was just thinking about a conversation I had with your dad a million years ago. I think you were having a house party at your old place in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. I was talking to your dad and he was asking about my writing, and I said oh, I’m working on my fourth novel. And he said ‘I want to read your fifth book, that’s when people really hit their stride and get it together; book five is the book’. And you can’t predict what throwaway line from a party will just kind of embed itself in your psyche, but I think I had kind of been thinking, book number five, this is the book. And I have to say, it’s been much better than one would imagine for launching a book in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, which I realize is a low bar. I’ve been doing a lot of Zoom and Crowdcast events. They’ve been way less creepy and weird than I would’ve imagined. I think I was just reflexively anti-internet or something, which makes sense when you can go out into the real world. But when the real world’s closed to you, you could do a lot worse as a substitute. So I’ve actually really been enjoying these Zoom events, getting to talk to people who don’t live with me is a real pleasure, and the reception the book has gotten has been kind of extraordinary. So yeah, I’ve been feeling good about it. It’s been this really great experience in a really dark time.
CS: What about you Emma? Yours is in the near future.
ES: I guess the way that I’ve been feeling is really lucky. I feel really lucky that it is my fifth book and not my first. I feel lucky that I’m published by a place that’s really supportive of me and is doing everything they can for all their books right now. And just personally, I feel totally ok with it. I don’t feel any of the usual crippling anxiety and fear that comes with a book’s publication, I think because all my crippling anxiety and fear is used up elsewhere. So I’m like yeah, okay, it’s coming out. Some people will say nice things, some people will say not so nice things, like so what? Great. And then I get to do it again. That’s how I feel about it at the moment. What about you, Courtney?
CS: I think I have a similar feeling about it. I was on a call with my publisher last week and I think in some ways they were trying to reassure me that there is a way forward even if we’re not going out and touring, and what I said to them, and it’s really true, is nothing takes the edge of pre-pub anxiety like a global pandemic, you know? It’s really hard to care about your book at this moment. I will say, on a small, very selfish, very privileged note, my kids are still one and two, and so I was really looking forward to sleeping in hotel rooms on book tour and I am sad that that is probably not going to happen. But other than that, really can’t complain. I guess it’ll just be what it will be. It’s such a strange time, so all we can do is kind of hope for the best, I guess.
ES: Yeah, my thought about it really is that we’ve been talking a lot at the store about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it because it’s so upside down right now. Mike is shipping out packages all day long and our whole staff is stressed and anxious and I’ve been coming back to what I feel like is my mission, both as a writer and as a bookseller, which is just to bring people joy, to bring people happiness. I think that my books and Courtney’s, too, have been on beachy lists and things like that, and I never had a problem with that, mostly because I always saw that as what they’re really saying is pleasure. Books to read for pleasure. And I thought if I can bring people pleasure, what more profound gift is there? Especially right now, I feel like anything any of us can do to bring people a little escape, a little pleasure, a little joy, a little window into another life–another apartment–then we’re really doing our job.
CS: I love that idea. And I have, as I’m sure you do, so little time to read right now, but whenever I do get a chance to read fiction, even if it’s just for twenty minutes before I pass out, it is just the one thing I find real comfort in. I think that and getting out in nature, whenever that’s possible, but reading fiction reminds me of the time before this and hopefully the time after this. It’s just such an amazing escape like nothing else. I love it.
EM: Yeah, same here. But are either of you struggling with how to write? Because I’ve only been interested in writing hardcore sci-fi, and I think it’s just like take me to a moon colony, get me as far away from my living room as possible. All of a sudden, I find when I write about the normal world it feels like...I don’t know, it feels like writing about the Weimar Republic from the vantage point of Nazi Germany. I don’t mean a political parallel there, just in terms of thinking of a lost world you’re not sure will come back. It feels so weird all of a sudden.
CS: I also think so many fiction writers I know were already really struggling with what to do about Trump, Trump times, and do you include it in the story. I think we’re going to see a lot of novels set in 2015 and earlier, and I understand why that is and I’ve done that actually, now that I think about it, with my fifth novel. Because it’s almost like it’s too much of a distraction. It’s really hard to write a novel about now and include that, the way that the world has changed, our country has changed so much in the last couple of years. And I think now even more so. Like now you can’t even write a novel about people living their lives because we’re not really living our lives.
ES: I feel like the auto-fiction writers will come for it first, you know, and I think there will be waves because I feel like I can’t write about anything, like anything similar to what has happened in my own life or like a feeling or anything in the world around me until it’s sort of done almost or until I’ve had time to process it. And this, I think, we’re going to be processing for decades, really.
CS: I read something this week, and I think it was in a Tweet because that’s all I read now, but it said that The Great Gatsby was written two years after the flu epidemic of 1918. And yet that the book didn’t mention it at all, so maybe the decadence of characters in that book was reflective of something that, when we read it now, we don’t even have a concept of it, but if you had just lived through a pandemic, maybe you just want to party.
