It’s uncommon for musicians to want to discuss their romantic relationships in interviews. The best-selling author of Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and this year’s The Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel, insist on it though.
Ms. Mandel posted a request on social media over the weekend asking for assistance in updating her marital status on her Wikipedia page.
She was listed as married in the user-edited online encyclopedia, although she is not because her divorce from her spouse was finalized in November.
But when the Canadian author attempted to change the page, she got into a somewhat “Kafkaesque” predicament.
“As it turns out, Wikipedia doesn’t truly consider you to be an authority on your own life. You do require an additional source, “She spoke to the BBC.
“When I spoke to the editor over there, and, and got that information, I just struck this brick wall,” the author said.
It could take months before she corrected the record because interviews often follow a publication schedule and the paperback edition of The Sea of Tranquility isn’t expected until April.
This past weekend, she resorted to social media to see if any journalists were interested in speaking with her about her marital status. Both Slate and the BBC were more than delighted to lend their help. She has now fixed everything on her Wikipedia page.
Ms. Mandel is in excellent company; in 2012, novelist Philip Roth penned an open letter to Wikipedia in the New Yorker to correct an error about the real-life person who served as the inspiration for one of his novels.
Her novels frequently focus on the daily rhythms of catastrophic occurrences, whether they are pandemics, time travel, Ponzi scams, or even celebrity themselves. The episode sounds like the kind of strange mundanity that could have happened to a character in one of her novels.
Olive Llewellyn, a fictionalized version of Ms. Mandel, is a novelist whose book on a pandemic is released just before the epidemic really breaks out in The Sea of Tranquility.
Similar circumstances befell Ms. Mandel, whose 2014 novel Station Eleven—about the pandemic-induced near-extinction of humanity—became a bestseller once more during the height of Covid-19 and was turned into a lauded HBO Max series.
She stated that it was “such a bizarre existential moment” and that this is why she decided to write about her experiences.
“I don’t think I made any predictions. Despite how terrible they are, pandemics are a fact of life. However, it was also quite fascinating and bizarre to have spent so much time discussing and traveling for a book on pandemics, and then all of a sudden, it was the actual thing, forcing you to juxtapose truth with fiction.”
She also used some of the peculiar encounters she had while on tour to create Olive in Station Eleven.
“It’s amazing 90% of the time, but 1% does build up if you participate in hundreds of events. I kind of wanted to write about a bunch of sort of surrealism tour moments.”
Her recent run-ins with internet red tape would make for interesting material for her upcoming book.
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