I sometimes wonder what it might be like to have a conversation with my favourite creators. What if, by circumstance, I end up with a lot of time alone with Emily St. John Mandel or Kat Edmonson or any of my other artist heroes?

Several thoughts later, I think no. You’ll mess it up badly and it’ll be awkward.

The intervening thoughts:

So I’m in the backseat of an UberPool coming back from downtown. Two minutes later the driver stops by the curb and Emily St. John Mandel steps through the opposite door and sits next to me. I’m reading Sea of Tranquility again and I steal a glance at my fellow passenger, and another glance because you can’t be dreaming this, right? and finally ask, “Pardon me, but you wouldn’t happen to be Emily St. John Mandel, would you?”

(I don’t think it would happen the other way around. Consider: I’m too enthralled by Sea of Tranquility to look up, but she glances at me and sees a very familiar book jacket resting on my lap. Does she think, hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I revealed myself to be the author of that book? “Hey, I couldn’t help but notice, but that’s my book you’re reading!” Or does she go in for a bit of plainclothes investigation? “How’s the book you’re reading? Is it a good book?”

No. The real Emily St. John Mandel recounted that she once saw a stranger reading Station Eleven on some sort of public transport. She declined to interfere.)

Emily continues to stare at her phone with deliberation. She did not plan on being noticed. Then she says, “Yes. That is me.”

What do I say now?

“I’m a huge fan! I absolutely adore your work.”

Very true, but as far as praise goes it’s banal.

“Thank you so much for your work. I’ve read all of your novels. They’ve helped me through difficult times.”

She’s heard it a million times. She’ll probably say “thank you” out of professional politeness.

“You have such a way with words. Your writing is so eloquent. The way you weave your nonlinear plots together is virtuosic.”

All deeply felt, but she knows book-jacket superlatives. I don’t want to waste her time. What can I say that she hasn’t heard from thousands of interviewers on book tours, pleasantries exchanged over countless handshake lines, repetitive and occasionally condescending questions from the audience?

“So I have a fan theory. Hear me out, but in my headcanon, Lilia marries Anton. At the end of Last Night in Montreal, Lilia’s living in Italy and has an Italian husband. At the end of The Singer’s Gun, Anton has created a new life for himself in Italy. Can you see where I’m going? And I know you’re not averse to crossovers between your works.”

No. Don’t go with that. Even if it’s an original observation, it’s a very surface-level, unliterary observation. Nothing about the human condition, and I doubt she wants to hear “fan theory” and “headcanon” and “crossovers” from the stranger in the UberPool while she’s texting her partner her ETA.

In Sea of Tranquility, Olive Llewellyn is an author on a book tour to support her best-selling pandemic novel. She is, quite transparently, a stand-in for Emily St. John Mandel herself. And on her book tour she has to interact with a lot of people with grace and professionalism, which is an altogether trying experience. Other authors and their neuroses, endless book signing lines, “less of a question, more of a comment” questions from audience members. But what sends her into alarm and despair and tears is a “fun thing for our audience” at a mystery festival. The generic “mystery”-flavoured questions her interviewer has prepared give no indication that she wants to talk about the questions Olive has grappled with in her craft.

(Joe Hill, in a “questions from the audience” section while interviewing his father Stephen King: “Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck, or one hundred duck-sized horses?” Dude, I just read them. I just read them. I mean, I didn’t come up with this shit.)

When you become a best-selling author, you have to deal with the kind of shit that best-selling authors have to deal with. I don’t want to make it any worse for Emily St. John Mandel.

(“Once I wrote an essay about me meeting you in an UberPool. And now here we are! Isn’t life funny? Sorry, I just thought I’d let you know.”)

Possibly I’ll just keep it very short. “Pardon me, but are you Emily St. John Mandel?”

“Yes. That is me.”

“I adore your work, and I just wanted to say thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad to hear it.”

And then we sit in our own silences for the next twenty minutes before I get off.

Silences become awkward very quickly. Maybe I’ll just avoid initiating the conversation altogether. Maybe it’ll just be me with a book and my private epiphany that my favourite author is sitting next to me, and Emily with her phone and her private epiphany that the stranger sitting next to her is reading her book, and that’s it.

Yep, that’s how it will go.