MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The opening chapters of Emma Pattee's debut novel introduce us to Annie. Now, Annie is massively pregnant - 37 weeks. She's shopping at Ikea in Portland, Oregon, trying to wrestle a baby crib off the rack, when everything starts to shake. It's an earthquake - the big one. The lights go out. Phone lines go down. Her car keys are lost, and so she starts to walk. The novel is titled "Tilt," and Emma Pattee is here now. Hey.
EMMA PATTEE: Hi. It's great to be here.
KELLY: I gather the initial inspiration, at least, was you - that when you were very pregnant, you went shopping for a crib at the Portland Ikea, and the ground started to shake?
PATTEE: Yeah, I - you know, I was so scared of the earthquake at that point, that as soon as the building started to shake, I thought, oh, it's the big one. It was not the big one. It was...
KELLY: Phew.
PATTEE: ... A large truck...
KELLY: Yeah.
PATTEE: ...Coming by. But as soon as I realized that it wasn't, the idea for the book was almost fully formed in my mind.
KELLY: It was all like, well, what if, and what would you do?
PATTEE: Absolutely. And the idea of the walk home - that I would have no choice but to walk, even massively pregnant.
KELLY: Wow. Just to reiterate, your protagonist, Annie, she is crib shopping at 37 weeks, and even she concedes that this is an errand she should have gotten done a lot earlier. Introduce us a little bit more fully to Annie, your main character, because she is deeply ambivalent about a lot of things, including the fact that she's pregnant.
PATTEE: Yeah, you know, Annie, I think, is very stuck, and I think she's also having what I consider to be sort of a millennial experience of, I thought that my 30s would look different than this. I thought my life was going to turn out different than it did, and I feel a sense of disappointment and missed potential that I cannot shake. And that is sort of getting in the way of me being able to even appreciate what I do have or what is still possible.
KELLY: Do you think that's really unique to millennials? I'm a Gen Xer, and I felt that. And I'm not sure it's unique to my 30s either.
(LAUGHTER)
PATTEE: You know, the more people who read this book, the more it becomes clear that it is not unique to millennials. You know, I think what I wanted to show was kind of the ways in which Annie's sort of artistic ambition ran into some really real roadblocks, like the recession, like what has happened in Portland with changing prices and the tech boom. You know, Annie's life has been really impacted by the pandemic, and her life is once again being impacted by a force completely outside of her control. But I definitely appreciate the pushback because it has become clear to me that I think everyone has a little bit of this feeling and that there's a universality to Annie's story.
KELLY: I had in my head, as I read this, I kept thinking of the classics, of ancient Greek epics. On the one hand, you couldn't be farther removed. This is set in modern day. You're on the West Coast of the United States. You're at an Ikea, for God's sake. On the other hand, you have this epic odyssey and this fight for survival, and without giving anything away, Annie pulls off feats of superhuman strength as the plot unfolds.
PATTEE: Yes, I was very interested sort of structurally in the idea of an epic quest and a journey - at one point, early on writing this, was looking at the way that "Don Quixote" is structured - somebody who is on a journey, and they don't exactly know what they're going to encounter. But they end up somewhere geographically different than where they started but also changed in a way that can never be undone.
KELLY: That's interesting. Explain that a little bit more fully, changing in a way that can never be undone.
PATTEE: Well, I think I started to become really interested in this idea of shock points. Like, these moments in your life where everything gets rattled and you all of a sudden can see things clearly. And I became really interested in stories people would tell about after 9/11. You know, a lot of people on 9/11 were not maybe in life-or-death situations but felt completely rattled and still had to walk home, and it took hours. And I have met many people who told me, oh, on that walk, I realized I was going to get divorced. On that walk, I decided I was done working that job. It gave this moment where you can make a different decision, and that's what I wanted to give to Annie. You know, she is so disappointed in her life. She's disappointed by her ambitions. She feels completely isolated and has kind of lost the awe, the incredible kind of beauty of being alive, and I wanted to give her the chance to change her life.
KELLY: So at the center of the book, again, is an earthquake. And I read that you wanted to be absolutely as scientifically accurate about how you wrote it as possible - about the severity of the shaking and what the exact impact on the failure of the power grid might be. I'm curious why. It's fiction. You could just make it all up.
PATTEE: Well, so, yeah, here in the Pacific Northwest, we're waiting on this massive earthquake, and scientists predict that there's a 37% chance it will happen in the next 50 years and that when it does, it'll be one of the worst natural disasters in the recorded history of North America. So at night, when I'm lying in bed, you know, that plays out. That plays out in my mind, and I wrote this book because I was starting to crack living with the fear of this. And I think I wanted to know, well, what would really happen? I wanted to resolve my own anxiety and in doing so have now made many, many other people very anxious.
(LAUGHTER)
PATTEE: But, sorry for that. No. And truly, actually, I hear from a lot of people that the book has relieved their earthquake anxiety and has really grounded their fears in a reality. So it was very important to me that the book be scientifically accurate. And I did research sort of every element, not only of the earthquake but also of how it would impact the city of Portland, of the bridges. Even - I pulled the building plans for the Ikea building. So I tried to make every element of this book as much like a nonfiction book as I could. Having said that, it is a fiction book, and this is an earthquake that has not yet happened.
KELLY: And why on that? - because you are - you're a climate journalist. Why not write a nonfiction book about the big one? Why write a novel?
PATTEE: Well, there's been an incredible nonfiction book already written about the earthquake and one that I relied on heavily. It's called "Rip 9.0" (ph) By Sandi Doughton, but a nonfiction book cannot imagine the future. You really do need fiction for that. And because I am a climate journalist, I was so interested in the idea of what it feels like to live under the shadow of something coming that is so big, you can't even imagine it. And everyone keeps telling you to get prepared, but how do you prepare for that? And we have these busy lives. We have kids to pick up. We have groceries. We have, you know, political disasters unfolding. What does it really mean to prepare?
KELLY: That's a great point. Like, what was Annie supposed to do other than walk around with, I don't know, a backpack on every day with bottled water and backup cell phone and...
PATTEE: Never leave her house.
KELLY: Sure.
PATTEE: Exactly. Like, when I started writing this book, I think I had so much anger about the people in my life and the people I was meeting who didn't care about climate change and who weren't mobilizing around climate change. And writing this book and getting to really understand Annie, I really found compassion for the parts of our brain that just cannot grapple with things that are this large and this terrifying.
KELLY: Emma Pattee - her utterly gripping new novel is "Tilt." Thank you.
PATTEE: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
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