Emily St. John Mandel Calls for Help to Get Divorced on Wikipedia
Photo credit Jo Ramsay
It doesn’t matter what your lived truth is—it’s only real if a verified news outlet reports it.
As Emily St. John Mandel learned in December, the only way to make changes to a Wikipedia page is to source and cite. The best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel amused many with her plea on Twitter to be interviewed so that she could get her recent divorce on the record.
With the paperback edition of The Sea of Tranquility not out until April, she had a choice: wait months to update her relationship status online, or put a call out to anyone and everyone to interview her as soon as possible.
“All I want for Christmas is for a journalist writing a story for publication … to ask me if I’m still married,” Mandel tweeted. And by some Christmas miracle, she got her wish when Slate came to the rescue and published “A Totally Normal Interview With Author Emily St. John Mandel.”
The article starts out innocently enough with Dan Kois asking, “So, are you doing anything exciting for the holidays?” before veering into delightfully bizarre territory: “The showrunner of Station Eleven, Patrick Somerville, recently promised—in response to a number of series vanishing off streaming platforms—that if the show ever disappeared he would ‘purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave desert and just play it on loop, projected on a rock, forever.’ Is that the optimal viewing experience for Station Eleven?”
To this, Mandel responded with a short and appropriate, “Yes.” However, the Slate interview soon gets to the point:
So, are you married these days?
No.
Really! So you can confirm here in Slate dot com that you are not just, like, spending some time away, but are literally d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d.
Literally! [...]
Now in a new relationship, Mandel had felt strange about her girlfriend’s friends looking her up and seeing on Wikipedia that she was still married.
"It turns out, you're not actually the expert on your own life as far as Wikipedia is concerned. You do need a secondary source," she told the BBC.
Not only is it a humorously public way to declare a split, but it’s funny that in the world of objective journalistic reporting, that you yourself are not an objective source on your life.
Jo Ramsay
is a Canadian media and publishing enthusiast who works as a literary assistant at P.S. Literary Agency as well as the editorial director of Shrapnel Magazine. She’s worked in publishing for over six years at places such as Simon and Schuster, Arsenal Pulp Press, PRISM International, Greystone Books, and This Magazine. She’s lived in Canada, the UK, and Japan.