There’s a moment in this conversation that feels almost like a sigh. Two Canadians, now living in New York City, admit to each other that they think about home more than they expected. “What if I had just stayed in Calgary?” one asks, and the answer hangs in the air with a kind of longing that isn’t quite regret. Canada, they agree, is a little more chill. New York is the opposite: loud, expensive, relentless, the kind of city that rewards intensity and punishes hesitation. And yet here they are, two extremely un-chill people, thriving in the middle of it all. They laugh about it, but there’s something tender underneath. The life they’ve chosen is stressful, but it’s also full. They’re living their best lives, whatever that means, and they’re doing it far from the quieter country that shaped them. That tension—between the place that made you and the place you choose to become—runs through everything they discuss. It’s a conversation about books, but it’s also a conversation about identity, about the roads not taken, and about how the landscapes we come from never really leave us, even when we cross borders and build new lives in impossible cities.
That theme becomes concrete in the novel’s two central characters, Ari and Ibari. They grow up in different versions of the same country, and those versions shape them in profoundly different ways. Ari, for example, has what the author describes as a character flaw that isn’t quite a flaw: she’s drawn to crime. Not in a cartoonish, villainous way, but in a way that suggests she has a natural appetite for the forbidden, an instinct for the edges of society. In one version of the world, that interest takes her down a predictable path into actual criminality. In another, she channels the same energy into becoming a police officer. The difference isn’t in her core nature; it’s in the environment that receives her. That’s the quiet, unsettling insight at the heart of the discussion. People aren’t simply born one way or another. We are shaped by the worlds we inhabit, by the rules those worlds enforce, by the opportunities they offer or deny. The same human being, dropped into a different society, can become a lawbreaker or a lawkeeper. The distinction between good and evil, the conversation suggests, is sometimes less about personal morality and more about which direction the current happens to be flowing.
When asked whether the author would prefer to live in one of the two terrifying American futures depicted in the book, the answer is immediate and definitive: neither. Both are awful. One is chaotic, a world of instability and danger where nothing feels safe or certain. The other is a totalitarian police state, a world of order bought at the price of freedom and humanity. They are opposite failures, but they are failures all the same. And the author’s honest preference? Canada. It’s a joke, but it’s also not. There’s something refreshing about that candor. In a world of grand literary pronouncements, it’s human to just want to live somewhere peaceful, somewhere with public healthcare and reasonable politics and a general sense that the sky isn’t falling. But the author doesn’t stop at the joke. Instead, she pushes into a deeper idea: no version of a country lasts forever. That impermanence is both terrifying and hopeful. The totalitarian state won’t last, but neither will the chaos. History moves. Countries rise and fall. What feels permanent is always, eventually, temporary. That is the strange comfort buried in the darkness of the book. Even the worst worlds contain the seeds of their own transformation.
This is where the conversation opens up into something larger. In the author’s earlier novel, Sea of Tranquility, there’s a futuristic scene set in the year 2300, where a novelist travels on a book tour through a world that has settled into a kind of livable stability. There’s a Republic of California, an Atlantic Republic, a Kingdom of Deseret—a rearranged map of North America that seems strange but also, somehow, functional. The author admits that the two awful versions of the United States in the current book are, in a sense, the founding story of that later, more peaceful world. The chaos and the police state are not dead ends; they are chapters. They are the painful, messy prehistory out of which something else eventually emerges. That sense of deep time gives the conversation a bittersweet quality. It’s not about offering false hope or tidy resolutions. It’s about recognizing that the present moment, no matter how awful, is not the end of the story. The world will keep changing, often in ways we can’t predict, and that is both a warning and a promise.
Then there is the multiverse. The author’s fans have noticed that her books are connected, that characters and worlds drift from one novel to another, that nothing exists in isolation. The New Yorker even coined a phrase for it: “The Mandel Cinematic Universe.” It’s a flattering and slightly overwhelming thing to be associated with, the idea that behind all these separate stories lies a carefully planned, interconnected master narrative. But the author is charmingly honest about the truth. There is no master plan. She doesn’t sit down with a giant corkboard and a roll of red string, mapping out how every character will cross paths decades from now. Instead, the connections are more organic, more intuitive. She just likes the opportunity for connection. She has what she describes as an abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe, a desire to find the moments where books can be drawn together. Sometimes she simply falls in love with a particular character and wants to spend more time with that person. That’s not strategy; that’s affection. That’s the human impulse to revisit old friends, to see where they’ve ended up, to wonder what they were doing before you met them.
In the end, this conversation is really about the way storytelling helps us cope with a world that is too large and too confusing to fully understand. We build multiverses out of our own books because we want the chaos to make sense. We imagine characters choosing between crime and justice because we want to believe that our choices matter. We look back at the countries we left behind, and we wonder who we might have been if we had stayed. That wondering is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of depth. The author, with her no-plan plan, her two-Canadians-in-New-York perspective, her honest preference for a quieter life, reminds us that the best stories are not the ones with perfectly engineered plots. They are the ones that feel alive, that contain contradictions, that allow room for the unexpected. The Mandel Cinematic Universe isn’t great because it’s planned. It’s great because it’s human. It’s full of longing, imperfection, surprise, and the persistent, stubborn hope that even the darkest worlds might eventually find their way to something like peace. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. We don’t need a master plan. We just need to keep telling stories, keep making connections, and keep believing that the future, whatever it brings, will not be exactly like the present. That is the quiet, human heart of everything being said here.
