When We Fell In Love - Emily St. John Mandel

Jason Rice: Emily St. John Mandel; I ignored her first novel for a long time. Then I saw an advertisement for it in the New York Times Book Review, and someplace else, I just can’t remember where. What was all the fuss about, I thought. Mother of God was I blown away, Last Night In Montreal will chase you around the room at night and follow behind you as you go through your day. Its story is urgent and vital, to the point where you can’t really think about anything else until you finish it. Everyone I’ve recommended this book to has called me on the phone to rave about it. Here is her contribution to our ongoing WWFiL series:

Emily St. John Mandel:

I.

It’s difficult, looking back, to pinpoint the book that made me a reader. I’ve been thinking about the question for a number of days.

I was raised in a household where reading mattered. There were a lot of things we didn’t have when I was a kid, including a television or even consistently running water—this was rural British Columbia, an island on the coast—but we did have books, in increasingly spectacular numbers. At first just a wall of bookshelves in the living room, with encyclopedias and dictionaries spilling out into the hallway; later, the books accumulated in number til they demanded their own room. The book room wasn’t a particularly hospitable place—an addition to the house, chilly in winter, with a population of delicate spiders—but I could linger there for hours.

I was homeschooled as a child, and we made up the curriculum as we went along: there were not-quite-daily math lessons, the occasional science experiment, sporadic random activities that I find somewhat difficult to classify in retrospect (walks on beaches with marine biologists, building yurts with felt-makers), and every so often a spelling bee. These activities hardly added up to a packed school week. I had a lot of time on my hands. It wasn’t unusual for me to read all day.

Which one of these countless books made me a reader? I think I have to go back to the very beginning: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s possible that I’m giving this book a bit too much credit, simply because it was the first real book I ever read; I struggled to learn to read, labouring through the primary readers by sheer force of will long after other kids my age were reading fluently. I remember the day when it finally clicked: a shock of understanding when I was seven years old, a sudden ease. I finished the primary readers and went straight to Treasure Island.

I’m not sure if I ever even finished it. But it captivated me and made me want to read every book I could get my hands on, and it’s stayed with me in a way that few books from childhood have. I’m left with faint images, filtered down through distant memory and through the imperfect understanding of a seven-year-old. A small boat drifting under a vast sky. A young boy—or was it his mother?—fainting under a stone bridge in the rain. A pirate making his way down the deck of a ship. Impressions of storms, of ocean and light.

Seven was, of course, a very long time ago. It’s entirely possible that none of these things are actually in the book. I’m sometimes tempted to pick the book up again, but I never have—I don’t want to overwrite these dream-like shreds of story with a new set of sharper images.

II.

Writing is a compulsion, and it always has been. Even during the part of my life when I was pursuing a career in contemporary dance, going to dance classes every day and working for choreographers, I had to carry pens and paper with me everywhere I went or I’d start taking notes on coffeeshop napkins.

Was there any book in particular that made me into a writer? You’d think this would be easier than the “which book made you a reader?” question, but I’ve been writing for most of my life. When I was a kid, there was a long period when one of the requirements of our haphazard curriculum was that I write something every day. It didn’t have to be long or especially profound, and I can’t say I was exactly a literary prodigy—if the surviving notebooks are any indication, my preferred subjects seem to have been cats, pickles, and daffodils—but the content didn’t matter: all that mattered was that I write something, anything, and hand it in to my mother. By eleven I was writing a fantasy epic, which sprawled over a hundred handwritten pages before I abandoned it. I showed it to no one. I doubt it still exists.

But there’s a vast difference between feeling compelled to write and understanding, even beyond the sheer mechanics of narrative and plot, the possibilities of what a novel can be; and then, after that, a difference between having that glimmer of understanding and being sufficiently moved by it to start thinking of writing as your vocation. When we meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions is always “so, what do you do?”—and I think the answer to the question of what books made me a writer exists somewhere in the period of time in my early twenties when I gradually went from responding to that question with “I’m a dancer. I also write a bit,” to “I’m a writer. I also dance,” to the undefinable point where I stopped mentioning dance altogether. The books I remember most clearly from that period of my life are Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch.

The linear simplicity of Madame Bovary, the beautiful writing and tightly drawn characters drew me in. I find the descriptions in that book to be somewhat magical. I was fascinated by Invisible Cities, by the notion of a book conveying its impression, for lack of a better word—it doesn’t seem like a story, exactly—through a series of vignettes. And Hopscotch, with its freewheeling digressions and broken love affairs and strange two-books-in-one structure, its lost artists and obsession with jazz music and portraits of Paris and of Buenos Aires, is still the book I jump to first when presented with one of those theoretical “if you could only take one book with you to a desert island…” scenarios.