If the US Collapses Soon, Don’t Blame Emily St. John Mandel
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What is Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party about?
I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swann about how businesses successfully transition to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek.
Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line.
There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired dot com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. From Wired, this is the big interview. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today is bestselling author Emily St. John Mendel. She wrote The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility, and Station 11, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and later adapted into a series on HBO. Emily writes fiction, but what that often looks like is, and I'm sorry to do this, stranger than fiction. Her novels move across time and Between interconnected lives, slipping in and out of pandemics, ghost stories, alternate realities, time travel, and the occasional collapse of civilization.
But the world she creates never feel entirely foreign. They're strange and speculative, yes, but also eerily familiar. The kinds of places, if you squint just a little bit, you might mistake for home. Emily has a new book called Exit Party. It opens in the first spring after the collapse of the United States in the year 2031, with two roommates on their way to a house party in Southern California. Here's a bit from the book's first chapter. The wealthiest Americans had fled overseas or to Mexico or Canada, but that population had been replaced several times over by refugees fleeing more violent places in the interior of the former nation. A soft rain was starting to fall. There was a tent in seemingly every driveway, the streets clogged with parked cars.
It's not quite the United States we know today, and yet it doesn't feel that far off. Emily, thank you so much for being here. And I will get this out of the way at the top and acknowledge that we are both Brooklyn moms. Yes. And sometimes when you're a Brooklyn mom, you become friends with another Brooklyn mom. Because you seek how the best mom you can find in the
playground.
I think that's true. We met at the playground. We did in the latter stages of the COVID mascara. And I've known you ever since. Yeah, it's been years. I read Exit Party. I was lucky enough to get a galley ahead of publication. Read it in a single day. I forced my family to get as far away from me as possible because I genuinely couldn't. I was reading it on the subway. I was reading it at every chance I could possibly get. And in less than 24 hours, I had Finish the book. It's fantastic. And if you are a wired listener or a viewer, I highly recommend it. And if you are a And I'm really excited to talk to you about that and about a lot more. Well, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. So the book isn't out yet.
I think when this episode runs, it will be just coming out. So how would you explain what it's about?
I think of this as a story about crime and resilience. It's about trying to be a decent person when things are falling apart. And it's about who you're gonna be at the end of the world. And I don't mean to imply that the collapse of a country is the end of the world, but what I do mean to imply is that it feels like it. It is an ending. And I do see this as a hopeful book. You know, you just read a scene from the immediate aftermath of a terrible event. So it's about what comes next and trying to be a new person, you know, in a in a rapidly changing and and difficult landscape.
There's a lot of darkness in the book. And I think reading it and coming into it in the year 2031, which is not that far off the year 2026 where we are now in the United States, feels very resonant.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party about?
0:00–4:59
2
How does Exit Party imagine the United States after a collapse?
4:59–8:51
3
Why does the author describe the book as a story of crime and resilience?
8:51–13:19
4
How did the pandemic shape the reception of Station Eleven and influence the new novel?
13:19–17:24
5
What does the author think about the two possible futures – totalitarian state vs. post‑civil‑war chaos?
17:24–20:47
6
How does Emily St. John Mandel handle fame and social‑media pressure as an author?
20:47–24:53
7
What advice does she give to emerging writers navigating today’s chaotic publishing landscape?
24:53–29:33
8
What hope does the author see for the future of America after the book’s bleak scenarios?
29:33–34:02
Speakers
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