Emily St John Mandel is the author of six previous novels, including Sea of Tranquility; The Glass Hotel, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. Her work has been translated into 37 languages and adapted for television. She grew up on Vancouver Island and lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
A breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change, Exit Party is an exploration of the price of safety and the perils of the surveillance state. It’s a novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answer.
Interviewed by Nancy Pearson
Nancy Pearson (NP): Let’s start with a broad question. Exit Party is assigned to the speculative fiction genre. And yet, I see strong elements of both dystopian and utopian genres at play here. In 2031, on the one hand in the dystopian realm, the U.S. government has collapsed and the country is fractured by civil war into multiple mini-countries. People are displaced by conflicts. Urban tent cities proliferate. New governments and gangs control every aspect of people’s lives. Employment is hard to find. On the other hand, in the alternate dimension, utopian elements show people have plenty of food, a cancer vaccine, financial stability, housing, and cool technology. But the State watches every aspect of their lives—no one is free from the gaze. Both of these near-future realms seem plausible given the current state of our world. So, what I’m wondering: Quite some time ago, Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin had a debate about the difference between speculative fiction and science fiction. What would you say to them on this topic?
Emily St. John Mandel (ESM): Not to be difficult, but who decided that Exit Party is assigned to only one genre? A number of years ago, I read an interesting essay by Joshua Rothman on The New Yorker website, where he made the point that a book can be more than one genre. Personally, I find that idea liberating, and it changed the way I think about my books.
So yes, Exit Party is a speculative novel, because it’s set in the future, and it has both utopian and dystopian elements. But it’s also literary fiction, by which I mean that there’s an emphasis on prose style and character development, and it’s also sci-fi, because it employs a fictional futuristic technology. One could make a case that the book’s also a mystery. I wouldn’t particularly want to wade into a debate between Atwood and Le Guin, but the broader point I’d like to make is that just as a person can be more than one thing—I’m a novelist, a screenwriter, a parent, a wife, a runner, a very mediocre pianist, etc.—so too can a book.
NP: In the opening scenes of Exit Party we meet Ari, who has recently been released from prison after 18 years behind bars, and Gloria, her roommate. Soon afterwards, we start to meet their and others’ doppelgängers. Time dimensions split, complex double characters constantly disrupt one plot line over the other. I’m wondering if you see each set of doppelgängers’ character arcs (for example, Ari’s and Ibari’s) as being two separate arcs or one combined? Maybe another way of looking at this is, when developing the doppelgängers, did you begin with one and split it into two?
ESM: I see it as two separate arcs beginning from the same point of origin. With Ari / Ibari in particular, it was fascinating to consider the way the same character might be altered by very different circumstances and environments. I was imagining a person who’s fundamentally drawn to criminality. I liked the idea that given one set of circumstances, a character like that will become a criminal (Ari), but that in another set of circumstances, that same person might become the police (Ibari.) There’s probably a third, unexplored universe where she’s a crime writer or hosts a true crime podcast or something.
NP: As time dimensions shift throughout the novel, the reader is disoriented repeatedly. Different narrative structures also play into unsettling the reader. An example is the conversation between Nico and Ari, where we see only one character’s comments at a time and blank space for the other character’s responses. In a way, it allows for a smoother narrative flow for one of the women, but at the same time, it silences the other. It’s like a type of monologue. Could you talk about your goals with this technique, please.
ESM: Sure. It’s a monologue, as you say, but the monologue doesn’t come out of nowhere: it’s directed by a flow of unheard questions from an interviewer. There’s a certain tension in that, in the way the monologuist can be challenged and redirected by her unseen interlocutor, and I like the challenge of implying the questions without spelling them out. I didn’t invent the technique—David Foster Wallace employed it in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men—but I find it to be an interesting way to tell a story sometimes.
NP: During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I read Station Eleven for the third time. I was seeking a kind of solace in the fact that the world within the novel has a hopeful ending. It also portrays art—Shakespeare’s plays—as an enduring and sustaining force in the characters’ lives. In Exit Party, art is an influence again. We first see the painting, Swan Dive, at the house party. The painting becomes a touch point throughout for the main characters. Could you expand on the role you see for art on and off the page?
ESM: I’m interested in the way art travels through time and means different things to different people. I wanted to write about a painting specifically, because paintings are static and can pass easily from hand to hand over the passage of years. Three characters in this novel love the same painting for different reasons.
So that’s the artistic reason for the painting’s existence in Exit Party, but there’s also a technical reason: I find that in a very complicated novel—one with multiple timelines, a lot of characters, multiple points of view, etc.—it can be helpful to have an object or two that travels through the narrative. It helps pull the whole thing together.
NP: In 2025, four speculative novels were longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This question is posed on the Booker’s library website, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it: What in our current world is pushing writers, and readers, toward imagined futures and alternate presents?
ESM: The climate crisis lends some urgency to the project of imagining different worlds, but writers have always written speculative fiction. What’s changed over the past twenty years or so is that speculative fiction is taken seriously at the level of major literary prizes.
I think it’s partly just that literary tastes shift over time. But I believe another factor is that in 2006, Cormac McCarthy published The Road, and it seems to me that that book gave a generation of literary novelists permission to write stories that might not previously have been taken seriously as literary fiction. One can point to the occasional speculative novel that was taken seriously as literature before then—George Orwell’s 1984, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—but it seems to me that The Road opened the floodgates.
Also, things just shift over time, in literature and in fashion and in everything else. When I first started publishing novels, back in 2009, there was considerable resistance to books that were more than one genre. A lot of the rejection letters for my first novel, Last Night in Montreal, included variations on “we don’t know how we’d market a book that’s both detective fiction and literary fiction.” But by the time I published Station Eleven in 2014, the idea of a book being more than one genre was absolutely not a problem, and I think this shift has created a much more interesting publishing landscape.
NP: That’s my last question, Emily. There are so many elements of this amazing novel that I’d love to talk about with you, but we’ll have to let your many readers discover them on their own. Is there anything you would like to add?
ESM: Thank you so much! I really appreciate the kind words. I think the one thing I’d like to say about this book is that it’s ultimately a very hopeful story.
Interviewer Bio: Nancy Pearson is a local writer who chronicles coin-op stories and issues on her Facebook blog, The Great Laundromat Adventure. She is a former government communications professional. Her published work includes literary and personal essays, as well as articles about laundromats.