FORCE OF WILL

The story of Emily St. John Mandel’s dramatic ascent to the best-seller list after the publication of her fourth novel, Station Eleven, holds valuable lessons for writers about hard work and persistence. Her response to the high expectations for her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, may be even more instructive.

THE STORY OF EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL’S DRAMATIC ASCENT TO THE BEST-SELLER LIST AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF HER FOURTH NOVEL,

STATION ELEVEN, HOLDS VALUABLE LESSONS FOR

WRITERS ABOUT HARD WORK AND PERSISTENCE. HER RESPONSE TO THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS FOR HER FOLLOW-UP,

THE GLASS HOTEL, MAY BE EVEN MORE INSTRUCTIVE.

IN THE winter of 2002 a young woman from a small island off Canada’s western coast was working in the basement warehouse of a home-furnishings store in Montreal. She had moved to Montreal with her boyfriend, but when that relationship ended, she found herself alone in a city where she knew essentially no one and wasn’t fluent in the prevailing language, French. Every morning she met a delivery truck outside the warehouse at seven o’clock and spent the next six or seven hours laboriously slapping price tags on martini glasses and arranging vases on shelves.

The job had one virtue, though: It ended early in the afternoon, leaving her the rest of the day to write. And write she did, quietly, steadily, showing her work to almost no one. Soon she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and kept writing for seven more years until her first novel found a home with an indie press in Colorado. Five years after that, her fourth novel, Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), became a breakout hit, a National Book Award finalist that has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.

The young woman meeting the delivery truck at the warehouse on those cold winter mornings eighteen years ago was Emily St. John Mandel, but she could just as easily be a character in an Emily St. John Mandel novel. The figure of the rootless young woman with few worldly possessions beyond a fierce intelligence and a certain relentlessness crops up again and again in Mandel’s fiction. In Last Night in Montreal (Unbridled Books, 2009), her first novel, her name is Lilia. In her third novel, The Lola Quartet (Unbridled Books, 2012), her name is Sasha. In Station Eleven she

appears twice, once in the guise of Miranda, the secretary/businesswoman who draws a limited-edition graphic novel about a damaged space station called Station Eleven, and again in the figure of Kirsten, an actress who carries Miranda’s graphic novel with her long after a pandemic flu has wiped out 99 percent of the world’s population.

“There is sort of a recurring character with different names, this extremely self-possessed, undereducated person,” Mandel admits with a laugh. “There’s absolutely an element of autobiography there.”

In March readers will have a chance to meet the latest iteration of the Mandel heroine, this time named Vincent, the central figure of Mandel’s new novel, The Glass Hotel. Like so many of Mandel’s female characters, Vincent is a nobody from nowhere, but like her fictional forebears she is also smart and highly resourceful, and over the course of the novel she clears a place for herself in the world through an act of quiet audacity— in Vincent’s case by signing on to be the arm-candy companion to a corrupt New York City financier based on disgraced Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

On the bleak November day when we sit down to discuss The Glass Hotel, Mandel doesn’t seem like the plucky heroine from a novel. She seems like a Brooklyn mom with a lot on her plate. Mandel and her husband, Kevin, also a writer, are midway through a gut renovation of their white-brick South Park Slope home and for now are camped out on the unrenovated second floor surrounded by books and toys belonging to their three-year-old, Cassia. Mandel has recently returned from the second of two trips to Los Angeles, where she helped block out the first season of a planned television series of The Glass Hotel, and soon she will be on the road again doing events for Station Eleven, which is still selling briskly six years after its publication.

But for today she is sitting at her cluttered kitchen table, sometimes halfshouting to be heard over the clatter of hammers and the whine of power drills. In conversation, Mandel’s style of speaking is like the flight of a bird—she pauses briefly to consider each question before diving in to answer with a few finely sculpted sentences. When she finishes, she nods once, then twice, as if to make sure the message has been delivered.

Mandel has gotten pretty good at talking about herself—an ability born of necessity. In 2014, when Station Eleven came out, her publisher sent her on a modest five-city book tour. Then the novel was named a finalist for a National Book Award and the tour expanded to seventeen cities. The National Book Award went to Phil Klay’s Redeployment (Penguin Press), but Station Eleven kept selling and the tour kept adding new cities so that now, years later, Mandel has attended more than two hundred events in seven countries.

“It was like stepping through the looking glass,” she says about the experience. “It was totally surreal. For my first three books, I toured for them, but they were short tours in really budget hotels. I did events for those first three books where three people showed up. I did one event where three people showed up, but not at the same time. People just wandered in and out while I was talking. I did an event where nobody showed up.”

Mandel, the second of five children in a working-class family, kept her day job as an administrative assistant at New York’s Rockefeller University nearly a year into her endless book tour for Station Eleven, answering work e-mails at a book festival in Australia and booking plane travel for her boss from a hotel in London. She only quit when she learned she was pregnant and decided that she couldn’t write books, travel around the world on tour, hold down a job, and raise a child all at the same time.

AS A kid growing up on Denman Island, a sparsely populated speck of farmland and forest a short ferry ride from

Canada’s Vancouver Island, Mandel was home-schooled by her parents. She attended high school for a time in her teens but dropped out one math course short of graduation. She took some classes at a local community college and studied dance at a conservatory in Toronto, but to this day Mandel doesn’t possess a single diploma from an academic institution—not high school, not college, and certainly not an MFA.

This singular education, which Mandel seems to view with a mix of wistful indulgence and mild horror, did introduce her to writing as a daily discipline. “There was a period of time when I was about eight or nine when one of the very few requirements of the frankly quite haphazard curriculum was that I had to write something every day,” she says. “So that got me into the habit of writing from a really early age. I’d write poems about cats and daffodils.

I had to write something.”

For most of her childhood, though, it was dance, not writing, that consumed Mandel’s prodigious energy. For more than a decade she studied ballet and modern dance, often six days a week, at a studio forty miles from her family’s home. Even as a child, says Angela Livingstone, a friend from that time, Mandel stood out for her dedication. “She was constantly working on her craft, even when we were thirteen and fourteen,” Livingstone says. “When a lot of people just relied on their natural talent, Emily, who was already naturally talented, went that extra step. She was always looking for extra opportunities to study dance, which was impressive given where she had to come from.”

Mandel hoped to pursue a career in dance—and, one surmises, to get off Denman Island. She made a good start on both goals when she earned a spot at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, where she studied for three years. Today Mandel describes the transition from rural Canada to cosmopolitan Toronto as “a shock in the best possible way. It was fantastic. Moving to a city like Toronto where you can walk down the street and nobody knows anything about you, that kind of anonymity can feel like freedom if you’re from a small place.”

But if dance facilitated Mandel’s escape from Denman Island—and it’s worth noting that after leaving home at eighteen she has spent her adult life in big cities—as a career move, it was a dead end. Shortly after completing the conservatory program, she stopped dancing professionally, and after breaking up with the writer boyfriend, she found herself stuck in Montreal meeting that delivery truck every morning outside the warehouse.

The novel that came out of that period, Last Night in Montreal, a noirtinged tale of a young woman who has lived her childhood on the run and can’t seem to quit running, has its origins in Mandel’s own sense of rootlessness. After finishing at the conservatory, she moved from Toronto to New York, then from New York to Montreal, and from Montreal back to New York, in little more than a year.

“I remember having this feeling on the train to New York for the second time that it would actually be possible to keep going in this way indefinitely,” she says, “to just go from city to city to city, work in a warehouse job, in a restaurant, whatever, and just drift over the surface of the world, which is kind of the premise of Last Night in Montreal.”

She didn’t do that, of course. Instead, within days of arriving in Brooklyn she met her future husband, found a job as an administrative assistant at an architecture firm, and settled in to write her first novel.

The man who published that novel, Greg Michalson, copublisher of Unbridled Books, recalls that when Mandel’s then agent, Emilie Jacobson, sent him the manuscript she told him it was one of the most arresting debuts that had

come her way in a long time.

“I immediately understood, almost from the first page, what the agent meant—how fresh and dynamic a writer Emily Mandel is,” Michalson says. “One of the things that impressed me about her early on was just how driven she is to get the story and her characters within that story just right. Besides her careful attention to detail that defines every aspect of her writing, in addition to her great flair for storytelling, what attracts me to Emily’s books is that she so obviously cares about her characters.”

Over the course of three books with Unbridled, Mandel built a reputation for turning out lushly written literary novels powered by noirish plots, but when she finished Station Eleven, Mandel felt it was time for a change. “I have such gratitude to Unbridled,” she says. “They were wonderful to work with, but I just felt like we couldn’t find readers. It’s so hard in the small-press world, so I thought for the sake of my career it would be a good time to jump to a bigger press.”

What Mandel didn’t know was that Jason Gobble, a sales rep for Penguin Random House, was a fan of her work and had quietly suggested to Jenny Jackson, vice president and senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, that she keep an eye out for Mandel’s next book. So when Station Eleven crossed her desk, Jackson set everything aside to read it and outbid five other editors for the book, paying $210,000 for North American rights—an advance the novel has since earned back six times over.

Station Eleven takes what is best about Mandel’s first three books—the disparate cast of characters, the seamless blend of literary prose and genrefiction plotting, the pervasive sense of menace—and cranks the volume level to eleven. The audacity that had long resided in Mandel’s characters, by some authorial sleight of hand, worked its way into the premise of the book itself—and readers responded, not merely by reading it, but by tattooing their favorite lines onto their skin and creating miniature Museums of Civilization in homage to one built by a character in the novel.

None of this came as much of a shock to people who know Mandel. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my goodness—finally people are noticing her and this is taking it to a whole new level,’” says Angela Livingstone, Mandel’s childhood friend, now a law student in Ottawa. “My second reaction was, ‘Of course. Of course people are noticing her. She’s brilliant.’ Someone was eventually going to see this.”

But Station Eleven’s breakout success, welcome as it was, carried with it heightened expectations. During her time in the indie-press world, Mandel had published four books in five years, earning just enough from the sales of the first three to keep her day-job hours manageable. Now, suddenly, Knopf was offering $800,000 for the U.S. rights to her next book—and it wasn’t even finished yet.

“If you have a book that’s been very successful, there’s this feeling of this invisible audience standing over your shoulder,” she says. “I did feel incredible pressure, not from my publishers, who could not have been more low-key about it, just a bit of self-generated internal pressure to write something people would like as much as they liked Station Eleven.”

Finding the courage to be creative in the face of that pressure was hard, Mandel says, but she’d quit her day job and had a young child and bills to pay. Still, she says, after the madness of the Book Tour That Wouldn’t End, “there was something nice about also having this private world, which was the world of The Glass Hotel. Writing a novel has always felt like that to me. It’s this private world you can step into that nobody knows about. So there was that, too. It wasn’t all terror and financial pressure.”

THE Glass Hotel weaves together two stories, one centered on a billionaire financier named Jonathan Alkaitis, who is running a massive Ponzi scheme, the other involving Vincent’s family, who live in the remote hamlet of Caiette at the northern end of Canada’s Vancouver Island, where Alkaitis owns

a glass-walled luxury hotel. Long stretches of The Glass Hotel are set in Caiette, loosely based on Quatsino, British Columbia, where Mandel spent time as a girl, but the initial impulse for the book, she says, arose not from childhood memories, but from her years as an office worker.

When the Madoff scandal hit the news in 2008, Mandel was still working as an administrative assistant, and her first thoughts were of Madoff’s employees, especially the clerical staff, who saw the crime up close every day. “You think of the camaraderie that you have with any group of people going to work every day,” she says. “How much more intense is that if you’re going to work to perpetuate a massive financial crime, like that’s your Monday morning routine?”

In early drafts Mandel used an ambitious structure, borrowed in part from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Random House, 2004), in which time initially moves forward and then turns back on itself. But when she turned the manuscript in to her editors—she has three: Jackson at Knopf, Jennifer Lambert at HarperCollins Canada, and Sophie Jonathan at Britain’s Picador—it quickly became clear that this structure didn’t work and the book needed major revisions.

Her first reaction, Mandel admits, was near panic. “I was pretty wrecked for a few days,” she says. “I just felt like, ‘This is unsalvageable. I don’t know how I’m supposed to write a completely different book when this one was so hard.’ But I did it.”

In the end the book underwent three grueling rounds of revision, the first of which entailed a complete overhaul that simplified the timeline and stitched together the two interlocking stories. But Jackson, her editor at Knopf, says she was never worried whether Mandel could pull it off. “When I’m working with writers, I usually offer a criticism and then a suggestion for a fix,” Jackson says. “It’s my favorite thing when someone takes the criticism and then comes up with something so much smarter than what I’ve suggested. That of course is always my hope, but Emily does that every single time. She absorbs the spirit of the note and then makes it very true to herself and her voice and her book. It was like having a subscription to my favorite author’s journal because every couple months I would get new pages and the book would be so much better.”

Now, with the revisions behind her, Mandel has started work on a new book, but she gently nudges the conversation toward the pilot for a projected TV version of The Glass Hotel, which she sees as a welcome distraction from prepublication stress. But she also clearly relishes the opportunity to exercise a new writing muscle. “I’ve never written from an outline before,” she says. “My writing process is, I just kind of wing it. I start writing a scene and see what happens. It turns into a chapter, and eventually there’s an incredibly messy first draft and then a dozen rounds of revision. Television, it’s got to be structured going in.”

By now it’s nearly four, and we’ve been talking for the better part of five hours. Mandel’s husband is home, the construction crews are still banging and sawing upstairs, and in a few minutes it will be time to pick up Mandel’s daughter from her preschool. Everyone’s a little talked out, but the discussion turns to what advice Mandel might give to a younger version of herself toiling away at some present-day warehouse job in Montreal.

“Don’t assume the publishing world’s closed to you,” she says. “People think you have to live in Brooklyn or have an MFA or go to the right parties, and I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t perceive any tangible benefit to my career from living in Brooklyn, and I never have. I don’t go to the parties because I don’t have time and I’m not into it. I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t know anybody when I was starting out either.

“I think you have to assume you’ll always have your day job,” she adds. “That was my assumption through all of my books until Station Eleven, that I would always be an administrative assistant. I think finding some peace with that is important for your psyche.”