Emily St. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. Her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, was a finalist for Foreword Magazine's 2009 Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, recently released in paperback, won the Indie Bookseller’s Choice Award and was the #1 Indie Next Pick for May 2010. Currently a staff writer for The Millions, she is married and lives in Brooklyn.
An excerpt from her novel, The Lola Quartet, appears in Issue Thirty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, Emily St. John Mandel answers questions "in the form of excepts"--with further excepts from The Lola Quartet.
1. What is writing like?
Sasha was raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Narnia was behind the coats in a wardrobe. Alice fell down the rabbit hole. There was another story whose name she couldn’t remember about a brother and sister picking up a golden pinecone in the woods and in that motion, that lifting of an enchanted object from the forest floor, a new world rotated silently into place around them.
2. What isn’t writing like?
There was a plastic shopping bag duct-taped to the underside of the stroller. It held a little under one hundred eighteen thousand dollars in cash.
3. When you do it, why?
He chose a table at the front in the hope that if the music was beautiful it might sweep him up. … He must have smiled, because the woman said, “Well, that seemed to make you happy,” and he said, “Yes, it does.”
4. When you don’t, why?
It was nice to think of not being alone for another long evening, so when night fell he put on a clean shirt and left the dorm. It was an unusually cold night, the coldest he’d ever seen. There was a light frost and the grass sparkled underfoot. Jack wasn’t sure that he’d encountered frost outside a freezer before. He knew what it was but couldn’t stop staring at it, stooped down once to touch it. The sparkling turned to cold water on his fingertips. Jack stood for a moment in the middle of the Commons, looking up at the stars. He’d meant to practice today but hadn’t. It had been two weeks since he’d played the piano and nothing about the thought of sitting down at a keyboard was appealing to him.