Yeah, you’re from Canada too.

I think a lot about, what if I had just stayed in Calgary?

Yeah. Canada is a little more chill.

It is a little more chill.

See, now here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City.

Yes, thriving.

Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives, but here we are.

Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions of a country. They are so profoundly shaped by that country. I saw Ari as somebody who’s got this character flaw where she’s fundamentally drawn toward crime. Maybe that’s not even a flaw. Maybe it’s just an interest, because there’s a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal, but there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. It was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we’re raised in.

I almost hate to ask this, because both versions of the US that you portray in the book are really frightening in their own respects. But did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another? Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?

No, they’re both really hard. They’re both awful. The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly. It’s like, do you want to live in chaos, or do you wanna live in a totalitarian police state? Hard pass on both.

That’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot: no version of a country lasts forever, and there’s both terror and hope in that idea. The totalitarian police state version’s not going to last forever, and neither is the period of total chaos. What I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut for people who have read a lot of my work, but in Sea of Tranquility there’s a futuristic section where an author’s on a book tour in the year 2300, and she’s traveling between the Republic of California, the Atlantic Republic, and the Kingdom of Deseret, and it’s chill enough to support a book tour, you know?

But yeah, I kind of wanted to suggest that this is the founding story of that space.

I wanted to ask you about your multiverse. You have a history that your diehards, your fans, really glom onto, which is you pull from previous works and you bring people and worlds into your new work, and that continues with Exit Party.

You’ve talked about it as a multiverse, a cinematic universe. The New Yorker called it, quote, “The Mandel Cinematic Universe,” which I think is pretty incredible. Is there a master plan here, or is it just ad hoc as inspiration strikes?

I wish I could say I had the kind of brain that could hold an entire multiverse. I should just say yes, but, uh, no. There is no plan. That’s the baseline for individual books when I start them, but also for The Mandel-verse, as some people have also called it. I don’t have any kind of master plan that I’m working towards. I just like the opportunities for connection. I guess I have some abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe, you know? I like finding the moments when books can be drawn together, or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character, and I want to spend more time with that person.