But that couldn\u2019t be, right?<\/p>\n
\u201cI added a terrace to the side of the house, but it\u2019s absolutely the street,\u201d says Mandel, confirming my suspicions with a laugh when asked about the party scene\u2019s setting. \u201cI was thinking of that house when I wrote the book \u2026 Definitely by the third revision or so, that was kind of their house.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter they\u2019d read the galley, they were like, \u2018\u2026Is this our house?\u2019\u201d says Mandel, who\u2019d sent Korn and her wife an advance copy. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Well, it\u2019s not not your house.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Korn confirmed this via email. \u201cI noticed that the titular party itself actually felt very familiar, too \u2014 my wife and I throw an annual garden party at our home in Silver Lake with our friend Lauren Cerand, who is a literary publicist,\u201d she wrote in part. \u201cEmily has always attended.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the house is not exactly mine, since we lack both a side balcony and a portal to another dimension, it\u2019s similar enough that it feels like she planted a little gift for me,\u201d Korn wrote. \u201cSuch is the joy of befriending one of your favorite authors!\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more<\/a><\/p>\n While none of this is essential to a reader\u2019s understanding or enjoyment of \u201cExit Party,\u201d a real-life doppelganger to an event in the novel is just the kind of uncanny twist that Mandel excels at in her fiction. Her novels often include a triggering incident viewed from changing perspectives, with each new look offering fresh revelations. The entwined narratives of \u201cExit Party,\u201d which moves from L.A. to Paris, Greece and other less-glamorous locales, will appeal to readers of her previous novels, \u201cSea of Tranquility,\u201d \u201cThe Glass Hotel\u201d and \u201cStation Eleven.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the book\u2019s earliest supporters, novelist Ann Patchett<\/a>, praised \u201cExit Party\u201d a full six months before it came out.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Exit Party\u2019 is magnificent, and especially if you are a person L.A. born,\u201d said Patchett, who mentioned the novel during an interview earlier this year. \u201cOh my god, it\u2019s so good.\u201d<\/p>\n Set in the year 2031 after a civil war has splintered the once-united states, \u201cExit Party\u201d combines rich, literary writing with the white-knuckled grip of a thriller, along with moments of humor. If the novel reads like Mandel is blending imaginative genre storytelling with serious fiction, well, she\u2019s not not doing that.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like this book is speculative fiction, but it\u2019s also literary fiction, and I\u2019d love for it to be thought of as not just sci-fi, but sci-fi and also something else,\u201d she says. \u201cI see it as literary fiction with a speculative edge.\u201d<\/p>\n In a discussion that aimed to avoid \u201cExit Party\u201d spoilers, Mandel spoke via Zoom from New York City about the book, ghosts, her dance background, literary violence, doubles and more. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Q. There are many ways one could describe \u201cExit Party.\u201d We\u2019re both trying to avoid spoilers, but how do you describe it?<\/p>\n I have found this book to be pretty resistant to the elevator pitch, but the way I\u2019ve been trying to frame it lately is that it\u2019s a story about crime and resilience, about who you\u2019re going to be in difficult times \u2014 what kind of person you\u2019re going to be \u2014 what kind of person you\u2019re going to be at the end of the world, <\/p>\n Q. Can you talk a little about how someone\u2019s world might come to an end?<\/p>\n Absolutely, our personal worlds end all the time. Consider the death of a loved one; countries end on a fairly regular basis. How many people alive in the world were born in, say, the former Yugoslavia or the former Czechoslovakia? These arrangements generally don\u2019t last forever.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s something I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot over the past 10 years, really since the first Trump administration. After he was elected for the first time, the thing that everybody said to each other was, \u201cLook, nothing lasts forever,\u201d and they meant that in a comforting way. But look, I wrote \u201cStation Eleven.\u201d The way my proclivities go, I heard that and thought, that\u2019s both positive and negative.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s nice to think that the worst moment coming to an end. But on the other hand, of course, entire societies end, too, or shift into something completely unrecognizable. So I see my political anxieties around that idea playing a really big part in this book.<\/p>\n Q. This novel feels very contemporary, even though portions are set five years in the future. Was there a particular triggering event that inspired it?<\/p>\n To be honest, it was hard to stay ahead of the news cycle in writing this.\u00a0There was no single precipitating event for me. The starting points for the book were twofold. There was the character Ari, who was actually the villain of a small-press book that I published way back in 2010 called \u201cThe Singer\u2019s Gun,\u201d where she was Arya.\u00a0She was the unambiguous villain of that book, but I\u2019d found myself thinking of her ever since: What would that character be like at the other end of a very long prison sentence? How might she change? So I found that individual character compelling.\u00a0<\/p>\n The political aspects of the book, which I would say are less important than character but they are important, really came out of the natural anxiety I feel every time I read the news. It\u2019s more pronounced now, but it was certainly in play by the spring of 2022, which is when I started writing this book.\u00a0<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to have a wildly advanced speculative imagination to look at the moment that we\u2019re in \u2014 the incredible division in this country \u2014 and just extrapolate that forward by a few terrible steps.\u00a0<\/p>\n Q. I was rereading your books, and in some ways, it seems like a new novel sprouts from an idea in the previous one but taken in a new direction. In \u201cSea of Tranquility,\u201d a character refers to time travel as \u201ca security problem,\u201d and issues of security play a role in \u201cExit Party.\u201d Are you sometimes left with lingering ideas that lead you directly into the next one?\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s interesting. As I think about this, I\u2019ve never seen them as following directly one upon the other, but there is definitely a thing where you\u2019re thinking about a set of ideas for the marathon period of time that it takes to write a novel \u2014 that two and a half or three or four years or whatever it is \u2014 and then you get to the end, and the story\u2019s finished. But those ideas are still there, so I think on some subconscious level that is possible. That one kind of comes out of another, and another, and another.\u00a0<\/p>\n For me, the links between novels usually come down to an attachment to particular characters. The one that comes up all the time is the way the character Miranda is in \u201cStation Eleven\u201d and then \u201cThe Glass Hotel.\u201d And for me, it was that I found her really compelling. I just wanted to spend more time with that character and just develop her more fully in the context of a different story.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes I just have this desire to pull books together. I\u2019ll have written some small detail in a long-ago book, like this electronica group called Baltica that appears in \u201cThe Lola Quartet.\u201d It\u2019s a tiny plot point. It\u2019s not even a plot point; it\u2019s just the music she likes. And then when I needed a group of musicians in \u201cThe Glass Hotel,\u201d I was like, \u201cOh, I did this already. I can bring them in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s such a chaotic world. There\u2019s something satisfying to me in that sense of order and thinking that perhaps these books could be connected in some small way.<\/p>\n Q. There\u2019s a painting mentioned in \u201cExit Party\u201d that appeared in another one of your novels, and I wonder how you came to include it in this one.\u00a0<\/p>\n The painters are ported in from \u201cThe Glass Hotel,\u201d and it\u2019s probably a good moment to mention that I don\u2019t actually write sequels or trilogies. You can definitely read these books in any order, but there were a couple of things at play here.\u00a0<\/p>\n One is just that from a purely technical perspective, I find that when you have a novel that has a lot of characters, a lot of different points of view, maybe multiple timelines, it can be really helpful to have at least one object act as a kind of clean throughline through the book. <\/p>\n So it\u2019s a painting in \u201cExit Party.\u201d Or the \u201cDoctor Eleven\u201d graphic novel in \u201cStation Eleven\u201d is another example of that. I think it just helps to tie the whole house of cards together, you know, not to mix metaphors too badly. It just keeps it a little more stable.<\/p>\n 45 new books publishing in September 2026 to read and add to your TBR list<\/a><\/p>\n Q. Art, theater, dance and the arts are recurring elements of your books.<\/p>\n I do find myself drawn generally to writing about art. I think that our relationship to works of art can be really interesting and really important. And you know, I\u2019ve always loved the idea that five people could read the same book and have completely different relationships with it, and come away with completely different ideas of what the book was about, and that maybe the same could be true with all works of art, like the way that multiple characters in \u201cExit Party\u201d have a relationship with this particular painting, \u201cSwan Dive.\u201d I like the idea that it\u2019s important to them for very different reasons and different degrees and in different ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s something interesting to me and kind of moving in the way a work of art moves through time, and it goes on to have this whole life well beyond what the artist could ever have expected or imagined. There\u2019s something kind of beautiful in that to me.<\/p>\n Q. \u201cExit Party\u201d isn\u2019t an especially violent book, but you engage with violence more than the other novels. Does that seem like an accurate assessment?<\/p>\n My philosophy around violence has always been that you can really just hint at it or suggest it, and that can be at least as effective as spelling it out. So yeah, I would say that I went a little bit further in this book, and I guess I\u2019d say it just felt like what the story demanded.<\/p>\n Q. You know, one thing I don\u2019t think gets mentioned enough is that your books are funny.\u00a0<\/p>\n The book doesn\u2019t feel realistic if there\u2019s no humor in it, which is maybe a strange thing to say about a book whose subject matter is objectively a little bleak.\u00a0<\/p>\n But I think it\u2019s that potential bleakness that makes the humor so important. I feel like very serious topics have to be dealt with with the lightest possible touch. If you can\u2019t bring in little moments of light, then a) it\u2019s relentless and nobody wants to read that, and I don\u2019t want to write it. and b) it doesn\u2019t feel real, because we do bring humor to everything. Gallows humor is famous for a reason.<\/p>\n Q. That\u2019s true. My siblings and I could still find things to laugh about even as we cared for our dying parents. It was like connecting with the joy that existed when our loved ones were here.<\/p>\n That\u2019s really nice. My dad died a few years ago, and I find myself thinking humor was the legacy. He had this real instinct for finding the thing that was funny in any given, totally banal day-to-day scenario. And I\u2019ve tried to pass that on to my daughter because it\u2019s a fun thing to have.<\/p>\n Q. One of the characters is a dancer, and you trained as a dancer. I\u2019m curious about how you see these connected.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a line that I\u2019ve played probably way too many times on stage for laughs about how your worst day as a writer is so much better than your worst day as a dancer. You can make it funny, but it is objectively true. A bad review sucks, but that\u2019s not as bad as being in an audition with 200 other women competing for one job, dressed in skin-tight clothes with a number pinned to your chest. That\u2019s dehumanizing.<\/p>\n But on a more serious note, there\u2019s something about how incredibly difficult dance is that I think makes you a more disciplined person. So having been a dancer, that background, I think, does make me a more disciplined writer, and probably would have made me a more disciplined anything \u2014 a more disciplined lawyer, a more disciplined engineer, whatever the next thing was going to be. <\/p>\n I find the two forms pretty different, though. I much prefer writing.<\/p>\n Q. Doubles appear throughout your work, and I wonder how you approach showing two different sides of a character or an environment.<\/p>\n This would not be a surprise if you read \u201cThe Glass Hotel,\u201d but I\u2019m fascinated by that idea of the counterlife that I got into in that book, which is the life you didn\u2019t live. How different would you be? What would the similarities be? <\/p>\n It\u2019s an interesting thought experiment for me, partly because my current life feels a little bit improbable. I don\u2019t have a high school diploma. My only real post-secondary education is in contemporary dance, so in a way, my counter lives, like the life where maybe I stayed in Canada and continued dancing and never began writing novels, almost feels more plausible than the life I\u2019m actually living. This could have ended up so differently.<\/p>\n What\u2019s different in this book is thinking about the counter-life of the state, and maybe in any country, it\u2019s pretty easy to look back at its history and find the inflection point where a country went down one path instead of another. And then, within a very short span of time, it becomes a different country than what it could have been. Not to talk in circles around the most recent federal election, but here we are.<\/p>\n That was definitely part of the project of \u201cExit Party,\u201d thinking about what different versions of the United States could look like. We are so influenced by our surroundings, by environment, by the people around us, so if you or I had grown up in different versions of our countries, we would be somewhat different people. That does shape a person\u2019s character. So it was interesting to think of doubling in that context.<\/p>\n![\"Palm](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-1469990016.jpg\")
Palm trees in Sunset Boulevard at sundown, Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California (Getty Images)<\/p>\n