Christie Louie Interviews Adrienne Celt

Adrienne Celt is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two previous novels: Invitation to a Bonfire, currently being adapted for TV by AMC, and The Daughters, which won 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Adrienne is also a cartoonist, and she publishes a weekly webcomic at LoveAmongtheLampreys.com.

From Fiction Editor Christie Louie: End of the World House (out tomorrow, April 19th) is a novel that explores a crisis of friendship amid a collapsing world. During a trip to the Louvre, in an era of great geopolitical and environmental decay, Bertie gets separated from her best friend Kate. She soon discovers that she’s stuck in a time loop, one that forces her to examine herself, her relationships, and her place in her crumbling world. Mysterious and elucidating, artful and comedic, End of the World House is a smart, engaging, and important read.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Adrienne Celt over email. We discussed craft, capitalism, and what it means to create art in the face of catastrophe.

CL: End of the World House is concerned with many themes, including friendship, art, and apocalypse. I’m interested in why you were drawn to these topics, and what led you to explore them together, as themes that exist in the context of each other?

Adrienne Celt: I tend to begin writing with a single idea—in this case, the idea of friends in a museum, written in a looping structure that would encode an element of suspense into the very architecture of the book. Once I started to explore that first image, the nature of Bertie and Kate's friendship; their (and especially Bertie's) thoughts about art; and the, as I call it, "slow apocalypse" setting that underpins it all arrived in layers.

I found myself thinking a lot about the concept of "stuckness" while working on this novel. Both in the sense of personal inertia (not wanting to make a change in your life) and other kinds of immobility that can be enforced by powers outside the self. The three themes you mentioned are all related, for me, to this concept: Bertie and Kate are stuck in the Louvre (literally), stuck in their friendship (because Bertie is so resistant to any kind of transformation, especially Kate's move), and stuck in lives that are subject to the very systems that created the apocalyptic problems both women are watching play out. 

CL: I want to ask you more about Bertie and Kate’s friendship. While that feeling of "stuckness" is palpable, we meet Bertie and Kate in motion, on their way to the Louvre. You capture two extremes of friendship in their walk to the museum: competitiveness, in the way "it wasn’t unusual for their walks to turn into unplanned races," and sameness, in the way "they slowed down and used each other as mirrors." A moment that felt similar to me was when Bertie thinks about Kate—"lovingly"—as her "best friend the bitch." You capture the complexities of close friendship so well—the longing, the tenderness, the resentment, the intense love. Can you talk about your approach to writing friendship? Do you find that friendship narratives differ from narratives about other types of relationships?

AC: Thank you! Yes, Bertie and Kate are so close, they experience a bit of the friendship smear effect, where you can't remember who did or said or thought something first: your traits become shared. And I think being competitive with one another is a natural response to that, because at least when you're in competition, you know you're two separate entities. 

Honestly, I'm not sure I do see writing a friendship as all that different from other relationships, at least when I'm writing about friends who are this intertwined. At a certain point, a deep friendship feels romantic, it carries a lot of the same baggage in terms of being possessive or fearing abandonment—which I think is even more the case when you became friends as teenagers, in a state of active formation. And it's also quite sisterly. You snipe at each other because you're comfortable together, and because you know one another so well. You forget that the other person is going to make choices that aren't about you, or that they might change in ways that you wouldn't choose or can't control.  

In terms of approach, I must admit I mined some of my own worst tendencies as a friend and dramatized them for Bertie and Kate. Notably, I can be a very possessive friend. I try to rein it in more than Bertie does, but I still feel it. I remember once, when I was living in Chicago, a close friend of mine got a grant to study in Morocco for the summer while she was working towards her PhD, and even though that was an objectively wonderful opportunity for her, I was mostly heartbroken at the idea she would be gone for several months. And I'm aware that's not a charming trait; as a human being I try to put a lid on it. Because although it comes from a place of love, it's pretty obviously controlling behavior. I tell all my friends that I want them to live in my pocket. It would be so wonderful for me, to have the people I love most so close to me all the time. But no one wants to live in a pocket.

CL: I’m the same way with wanting my friends as close as possible, but you’re right—no one wants to live in a pocket. Another structure in which (almost) no one wants to live is a time loop, but Bertie is in one: stuck in a day that keeps repeating itself. As the novel progresses, we learn more about how the loops work in Bertie’s world, and we see these loops in comparison to ordinary, everyday kinds of repetition. There’s the relatively innocuous repetition of trying to "re-create a perfect day" by "getting the same coffee, wearing the same sweater, hoarding totems and tokens against disaster"—and there’s the more insidious repetition of office work. Bertie is a cartoonist at a tech firm in Silicon Valley, tasked with drawing the company’s dinosaur mascot "in a thousand absurd situations." The driver for the shuttle Bertie takes from the office says about work culture: "if I could live my life again, I wouldn’t do it the way you all do. Over and over, always the same."

You touched on this earlier, but I was wondering if you could talk more about your decision to write about time loops? How do you see Bertie’s extraordinary situation comparing to and differing from these more ordinary kinds of loops? To what extent is there possibility in loops and repetition—for Bertie, and for us?

AC: Initially it was a technical decision: writing this kind of repetition presented an interesting craft challenge. But the time loops pretty quickly revealed themselves to be rich in terms of thematic possibilities, so much so that I began to see them everywhere, both in the book and in my life. And in that way, I don't see the ordinary time loops as entirely separate from the metaphysical time loop Bertie experiences: the effects of all of them are cumulative for her, quite intentionally.

Workplace repetition, capitalist lifestyle repetition, was a very important one to me, which came to feel more urgent and relevant to Bertie's life as I wrote. The way she experiences that sameness is both terrible—the sort of nauseous blur of one day into the next, focused on production, focused on money—and soothing. There's a reason she can't quit her job, even though she feels stuck there: it's comforting, it provides for her life and, in a very real way, creates the possibilities of her life. That is equally true of the sci-fi time loop, which acts on her as a kind of numbing romance: you can fall in love with any kind of life, if it's yours. 

Think about being on a long car trip: when you're driving for eight, ten, twelve hours in a day, you spend a lot of time just aching to get out of the car. But when you pull up to the destination, isn't there a small part of you that rebels from the idea of unbuckling your seatbelt? Because change is hard, the moments of transition between two states are always uncomfortable. Birth, death, moving, marriage, childbirth, achieving a long-dreamed of ambition; these things are all very scary, even when they're longed-for and good. So many changes we need to make, on an individual level and as a society, we hold back from because we're afraid. And I wanted to explore the love we have for that fear, the way we cling to it, to the space that it makes us inhabit. 

But as for possibility—yes, sure, of course. Repetition isn't all bad. How else would we learn anything, except by trying and failing and then—as Beckett says—failing better? Bertie's art is based in repetition; my own art is. I revised this book so many times, I began to forget where one revision ended and another began. Plus, life is full of vital and necessary repetition: another word for a "loop" is a "cycle," in which the sun will rise again, spring will come again, the future makes use of the past to create the possibility of newness. The laws of the conservation of mass and energy demonstrate how deeply embedded cycles of repetition and reuse are in the fabric of our reality. 

I think the time loop finally helps Bertie confront all the other loops she's stuck in, in her life. Because the aggregate awareness of all those repetitions is so heavy in her mind, that it finally tilts her out of her equilibrium.

CL: I have one more question about the time loops. Craft-wise, what was it like to write time in this particular way? In my reading, it seems like Bertie has different memories or awarenesses depending on where she is in time. Were Bertie’s memories and awarenesses at every point intuitive to you, or did you have to plot or track this (and other details) in a more formal way?

AC: For the first draft or two, I let things unfold more intuitively. I had a sense of which little signposts I wanted to keep from day to day, and where I needed to allow things to get more chaotic for the sake of exploration. But as I revised, I definitely had to plot things out more carefully. It became a question of viewing the days less as "loops" and more as parallel universes, where things could be a little different, either based on the decisions Bertie (and/or Kate) made, based on the previous loops and their residual effect, or simply because it was a new space with its own minor variations. 

I'm a big fan of reverse outlining, which was very helpful. I had a series of notecards with the major plot beats laid out on them, which I could pin up on a bulletin board to get a bird's eye view of the book, and then I would print out the draft and leave a bunch of color-coordinated sticky note flags in the places I knew needed work. A lot of it was also, essentially, journaling: writing out what I intended and comparing that with what was there, so I could go back and revise with a greater sense of intention. Because everything was so densely interconnected, I needed more drafts than I did with previous books. I probably printed out the entire book seven or eight times, maybe more. But in the end, like most books, there's still a forward trajectory for the characters. They go back in time (or, if you will, sideways), but the reader still has to be aware of their arc moving forward. Keeping that in mind was always clarifying.

CL: Thank you so much for sharing that—it’s always so interesting to hear about other people’s processes! That was actually one of my biggest pleasures in reading End of the World House; Bertie is an artist at work on a graphic novel, and we are privileged to learn about her tools and rituals, and to sit with her while she creates. At one moment, while she’s working, you write, "She felt like she was floating again, but this time it was all warm. She was floating in nothing." At another moment, "The idea throbbed in her fingertips, racing through her mind and warming itself in the darkest corners."

Bertie also experiences creative blocks, large and small. I was particularly struck by this passage: "Bertie was supposed to be working on a graphic novel, too, on her own time, but these days she rarely had the energy. Not because of her job so much as the malaise that lay over everything. Politics, global war, world hunger, just—everything."

My next question for you is two-fold: first, I’m curious about what making art feels like to you. Is it sensory, the way Bertie feels ideas in her fingertips? Or perhaps it’s more emotional, or more cerebral, or that "floating in nothing" sensation? You are a writer and a cartoonist: do the two modes of creating feel different to you?  

Second, I’m wondering if you could speak to the experience of creating art in the face of crisis and suffering. Bertie struggles to find the energy; she seems to wrestle with questions about whether her work matters. Where does the energy come from, for you? How do you view the role of art in such a tumultuous world?

AC: Something I did with this book, which I've never done before, was make illustrations—pen and ink sketches, and also full watercolor paintings—of scenes from the book as I went. Not systematically; I don't have a whole graphic novel saved up. But when I felt stuck in my revisions, I'd use those illustrations as a way to keep my head in the world of the book, and add a layer to my understanding of it. Which is one way to say: usually the impulse to write and the impulse to draw feel very different, but in this case, they got muddled. 

Drawing cartoons is, in general, a very different creative space for me, because less of the process is cerebral. Once I come up with an idea and a rough sketch, I'm working in a fine motor skills capacity, instead of continually trying to imagine new images and events, as I do when I'm writing fiction. Both processes are enriching and exhausting in their own ways, so they make good trade-offs: if I'm a little burned out on one art form, I turn to the other for a while. In terms of physical or emotional sensations, though, I wonder. I wrote that about Bertie, so maybe I feel it too? But what comes to mind for me, in a good writing or a good art day, is more of a manic high. Sort of like I'm scrambling to get up on a surfboard while a really good wave is cresting; if I don't get my balance in time I might miss it, but when I do, the feeling is a rush and a balm and a glory.  

I think a lot of people are struggling now to decide whether or not their work matters, because it seems like an extravagance when the world is falling to pieces. But I think that sets up a false choice: that you are either helping the world through activism, or you're hurting things. Or maybe that we should all express our ethics through appropriate depression. There is, in my opinion, also a case to be made for living beautifully. I don't think it really does anyone any favors if we jettison our best pursuits to sit in a chair contemplating futility. You have to react to the world you are given with your best self: in my case, that self comes through my art; End of the World House is exactly the shape of my feelings about our crumbling reality from 2017 to 2022.  

And of course, I donate what I can too, in terms of time and money. I vote. But ultimately, when the world around me seems strange and uncomfortable, that's what gives me energy to write. (Which is its own privilege: I know most people don't experience depression out of an excess of ethics. So I like to use what I've got.)

CL: I’m interested in the crumbling reality of Bertie’s world. Things like climate crises, wars, and border closures are described with such specificity, down to the food shortages created and the widespread disuse of cars. How did you come to imagine and shape the details of Bertie’s world? Were there any other works or texts that influenced you, or that you see End of the World House relating to (or differing from) in a meaningful way?

AC: Honestly, the text I referred to was the world around me. That sounds pretentious as hell, but it's the truth: I looked at the news and made some logical extrapolations. Wildfires, massive storms, hyper-capitalist tech bros, political strongmen: these were all things we had already. 

It has been unsettling to watch various nightmares unfold, having written them into the book. I had finished a number of drafts before Covid hit, so the spooky emptiness of New York City and the early-quarantine fears of scarcity rang a familiar bell for me, though I didn't specifically imagine a pandemic as the source. And now the war in Ukraine is playing out a different side of things, the way that a single man can destroy so many lives for his own egotistical whim.

That said, I also thought of the world ending, in this book, as a kind of motif: it puts logistical pressure on Bertie and Kate, but it's also an illustration of their interiors. Losing your best friend feels like the end of the world. So does learning you've been lied to, or that you're not quite the person you thought you were; that your life is different than you believed it to be. And all that is no less true if the world is actually falling apart around you: the people in your life still matter, maybe even more so. In that way, I guess one thing I thought about was the Lars von Trier film Melancholia: in that movie, Kirsten Dunst's character suffers from a crippling depression, and when she realizes the Earth is going to be destroyed by another planet, it actually alleviates some of her pain, because her exterior reality is finally coming into alignment with her interior sense. The enormity, the near-silliness of that set piece (a rogue planet! Whatever that means!) is actually what makes it effective. Because I think we spend a lot of our lives convincing ourselves that our pain isn't real, or isn't painful. And so when we actually face it, it feels gargantuan. 

CL: One of the ways Bertie’s interior world-ending feeling converges with her exterior reality is in her idea for the End of the World House: a countryside place for two best friends to spend their final days. At one point, Bertie imagines this set-up as a "buddy comedy," which made me think of the wonderfully-sharp comedic moments throughout this novel (like Bertie's conversation with the drunk tech VIPs at the time-themed party, or Susan's tendency to make absurd comments during meetings). How do you see humor and satire working in End of the World House. 

AC: The only way for the absurd reality of the tech world to land, or for Bertie and Kate's friendship to feel authentic, was to welcome the natural humor of those situations. Close friends banter as much as they bicker; and Silicon Valley was a successful TV show for a reason. I think the funniest scenes in the book (at least, the funniest to me) are actually the most naturalistic ones, though I'm not sure it will appear that way from the outside. If you've never worked in tech, that level of casual opulence can be hard to believe, but it's very real.  The first year I worked at a tech company the other trainees and I were always laughing uneasily, because we were being almost smothered by perks. Once, for a Christmas bonus, they handed each of us a thousand dollars in cash (tax free, because they'd paid the taxes on it), and made us count it in front of them, twice. While we were all together, at an office mixer.

And what's especially interesting to me in that dynamic is how many people are able to get used to it, and come to see it as a normal, base-level existence. Not everyone! But some people, especially if they lack the perspective of having worked in another industry. You don't have to riff much to turn it into comedy; you just have to be willing to observe.

I will say, I've been pleasantly surprised by how funny readers have been finding the book. Because I find it funny, but you never know how your own sense of gallows humor will work for other people.

CL: I was really interested in the choice to give the metaphysical "inconstancy" Bertie experiences a taste (in this case, a metallic one). What led you to that idea? Were there any sensory experiences (like taste) that you paid particular attention to as you wrote this book, or that you find especially interesting as a writer?

AC: I try to be attuned to sensory experience as a writer in general, and it made sense to me that the interruption of space-time would trigger some level of animal awareness. An indication that Bertie and Kate have approached—or perhaps crossed—a threshold. 

There are, for instance, sounds that we register below the level of conscious awareness (anyone who likes ghost stories will know about this: it's called infrasound) and which can make people sick, or even hallucinate. Or, think of the concept of "vibes," as in a person who gives off bad vibes, so you stay away from them, even if they haven't done anything wrong, because there is something in their pheromones or microexpressions that indicates danger. A lot of people describe the air preceding an electrical storm as smelling or tasting like ozone, and that was a little bit on my mind here too: some massive natural phenomenon that causes a shift in the atmosphere, with perceptual consequences, but maybe not ones that are immediately visible or easy to put your finger on.

So for Bertie, and for the reader, that taste is a harbinger. We don't need to know precisely where it comes from, just that it is a sign of things to come.

CL: I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but I found it to be emotionally satisfying, surprising, and powerful. How do you approach writing endings? Was the ending to this novel something you knew from the start, or did it develop later on. 

AC: Oh wow, thank you for saying so. That means a lot to me. I guess it kind of depends how you look at the ending: I rewrote the specifics of it many, many times, almost more than I revised any other part of the book. The exact details of the ending as it is now are actually different (and, I hope, better) than they were when I sold the novel, which felt kind of late in the game to be changing something so important. But the sensibility of that moment—the emotional arc between Bertie and Kate, especially—was something I always had in mind, so in a way all those extremely varied revisions were attempts to communicate the same thing. 

I had a professor in graduate school who said you can't write the beginning of your book until you know the end, which sounds like really daunting advice until you discover that your understanding of both will change as you go, and that's normal and fine: they just change together. I had an idea about the book's ending, its overall shape, which made it possible for me to begin, and that wasn't wrong; I struggled for a long time with the mechanics of how to achieve that effect, making pretty dramatic changes, and I wasn't wrong to do that either.

There's a tension between the beginning and end of a book that keeps them in conversation as you write and revise. It's a kind of natural boundary or constraint: if you know you start here, and end here, you can experiment limitlessly within those parameters—but it's a more manageable form of "limitlessness" than when you just have a blank page. Instead, it's like a God's eye view of a human life, if you believe in free will: you have a birth and a death that are assured, but the rest is going to include some surprises.

Christie Louie is a writer from the Bronx, New York. She is a second-year fiction student in the MFA program at ASU, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.