Adrienne Celt Asks, “What makes something meaningful?”

Ever since I first encountered Adrienne Celt’s work, I have been biding my time, waiting to find out how she does it. As a novelist, her range is remarkable—from lyrical Polish folklore to a jigsaw Nabokovian thriller to her newest book, End of the World House, a postapocalyptic museum time-loop story that came out this spring. Like the multiverse it inhabits, this novel is tough to dilute into a tagline, following narrative possibilities that branch off and weave together to create a web that spans continents and lifetimes yet still feels structurally satisfying. The central puzzle of the book is loads of fun, plumbing the philosophical depths of art theory, socioeconomic stratification, and even corporate branding. Celt invites the reader to be an active participant in Bertie’s quest to understand the mysteries of the Louvre, and there’s a meta element here that echoes Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, another masterpiece that asks much of its reader but offers a hefty reward. Celt is a blisteringly intelligent writer and was kind enough to answer my questions via email as I, like Bertie searching the museum, tried to unravel the brilliant threads of her book.

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Julia Fine: End of the World House is constantly asking, “What makes something meaningful?” be it art, an experience, a relationship. Is Mona Lisa a masterpiece because of its aesthetics or because of its curation? I love that you’re exploring the concept of ideation and curation in all these unexpected ways—from Silicon Valley “diversification” to exhibits at the Louvre to the multiverse. In this spirit, and from a craft perspective, how did you “curate” the fundamentals of this book?

Adrienne Celt: Everything began with Bertie and Kate at the museum. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use time loops to create plot momentum through structure (a weird challenge!) and that I wanted to use those loops to spin out different ideas about these two particular people, in this particular place. But after that, the level of curation versus inevitability becomes a little less clear.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the way that small, instinctive choices early on in the process of writing a novel can come to direct the focus of the entire book. Making Bertie a cartoonist, say, or putting her and Kate in/adjacent to the tech world—those ideas made sense because I have experience with both tech jobs and comics. But I didn’t make either of those choices initially with any understanding of how important they’d become to the themes or the plot.

That does speak to some of the book’s concerns about art curation and the attention economy: how the perception of a piece of art seems to gain in importance and gravity the more people pay attention to it; how we assume cream rises to the top and don’t think about the rest of the milk. And yet how arbitrary it often is, which pieces of art gain that attention—not because the so-called cream isn’t excellent, but because there’s so much good work that some of the actual cream will inevitably sink. Based on what? The zeitgeist, I guess. A few people speaking very loudly and everyone else sort of looking at what’s already been put in front of them. As humans, we have genuine tastes, but we also only have so much time to figure out what to apply them to.

And in a book, that’s true as well. Every choice you make cuts off a million more (in terms of plot, character, style, focus, structure, etc.), but the ones you make come to feel inevitable.

JF: Logistically, how did you then translate this idea into narrative architecture? I was taken with all the clues you left and the callbacks that provided a lovely sense of recognition as the plot fell together. For example, those women looking up at the museum from the courtyard, who we see from several different angles throughout the book. What was your process for overlaying all these different versions of Kate’s and Bertie’s lives in a way that invites the readers to move forward and also calls us back?

AC: One of the, shall we say, “spiritually adjacent” choices I made in the early drafts of this book was to bring in some details from my own life—more than I would normally—to create a bridge between the events of the book and my own experience of writing it. It was a weird decision, because it’s not necessarily important to a reader to know or understand that, but given that the book is concerned with the multiverse, it created a framework for me (the ability to choose things from my lived experience), while also making everything that happened while writing feel a little magical, like the book in all its various forms was a window into other lives I could have lived, and vice versa.

In addition, regarding the loops—once you include the idea of repetition, you inherently (at least to me) introduce the concept of variation too. Which made me ask myself, Where could you introduce small differences into a person’s life, or into the art market, or into an industry, and effect enormous change? Or even, Where could you introduce a tiny change (like the women in the courtyard) that implies larger changes are possible and may already be happening outside your own level of awareness?

In a practical sense, I was always thinking, Where can I direct the reader’s eye? Where can I offer little signposts that they will recognize, either in their similarity or in their slight—hopefully chilling—difference? A guiding principle for me in the writing process was that, even though the events of the day repeat, there had to be palpable character growth and change—an arc within the characters, even as they struggled against the lack of change without, which I think is something a lot of people can recognize from their own lives. The massive shifts take place on the inside, where we can access our dreams, our shifting desires, our memories, our priorities, our hearts.

JF: Without spoiling for those who haven’t yet read, I’d love to talk a little bit about decision-making and commitment in this novel. Kate and Bertie are foils throughout the book in how they process both the literal end (or beginning of the end) of the world and the end of the possibilities of their youth. We all get to an age where we’ve cut ourselves off from the majority of our possible futures, be it by choosing a romantic partner, taking a job, etc. It seemed to me that Bertie and Kate are right on the cusp of mid-adulthood—they aren’t the hot young things anymore, and their futures are theoretically and quite literally narrowing as environmental disaster and social unrest sweeps the globe. Everything is uncertain yet inevitable—which reminds me a bit of Aristotle’s call for a dramatic ending that’s surprising but also the only way things could have happened.

Ultimately your main characters deal with this stress in different ways, and I couldn’t help reading the end of the book as a sort of allegory for how we, as a society, respond to and move forward in “unprecedented times.” As you said, writing is decision-making, and it makes sense that the novel ultimately makes the choice to move forward, however uncertain or inevitable the future might be. But you also have a character who would rather sit in possibility and makes a drastic decision on behalf of this reluctance to commit. How do you see this functioning in relation to the other themes of the book? Did you know early on that you’d reach this dichotomy?

AC: There’s very little in our lives that we can control. We’re always being directed and restricted by structural forces that are beyond us, and this is extra true for Bertie and Kate. For one thing, they’re literally trapped in a time loop—but they also struggle with a heightened version of the pressures most of us face, like working in a system that they know perpetuates inequality because they’re powerless to really change it.

The book’s disposition toward answers and certainty reflects this: In the end, we have a certain understanding of what happened, and we see the characters make a certain set of choices, but we don’t really know how those choices will shake out. Because in life? We never know.

“Stuckness” is one of the book’s major themes, in my mind—in the sense of inertia, stasis, clinging to a certain version of the past. What I hope comes across by the end of the book is that there’s a difference between being stuck and finding possibility in the place where you are. And a big part of that difference lies in your perceptions and your choices.

JF: Different as they are, the great romance of this book is between Bertie and Kate. Why write about two friends under these particular conditions, as opposed to a different kind of relationship?

AC: The force of love in a friendship—especially one that begins at a young age, as Bertie and Kate’s does—is so intense and so intimate that it’s a form of loving the self. By which I mean you commit yourself to another person so completely that pieces of them become pieces of you, and vice versa.

But the truth is that most friendships—even ones that have that ego-constructing power—end up being subservient to pretty much everything else in a person’s life. Jobs, romantic attachments, family, etc.—almost no one moves cities to be with a friend, and we frequently move away from them. So what happens to all that emotion?

I don’t think we have a good vocabulary for dealing with the love and loss that deep friendship entails in our society. There are more and more books being written about it, but as an actual lived experience, we’re just expected to suck it up. And that is so human, and so devastating—it was a natural topic to write about.

Bertie also does not, I think, recognize how much she’s turned her friendship with Kate into a crutch, and that’s interesting to me. She doesn’t quite see that she is “loving herself” by loving Kate, because she’s not looking at Kate most of the time: She’s looking at the projection of Kate that comes from within herself. And that’s emblematic of a lot of the ways in which Bertie is unable to move forward in her life.

There’s a difference between being stuck and finding possibility in the place where you are.

JF: There’s a lot here that is absolutely heartbreaking, but I laughed out loud so many times. Did you consciously employ humor while writing? And relatedly—how did you manage to end an end-of-the-world novel on a hopeful note?

AC: I’m so glad you found it funny! I think my own approach to life in dark times is to employ gallows humor whenever possible, and that’s also a characteristic of life on the internet, which is a big part of the book. The laughter makes the tears go down easier, you know?

But it also swings back toward your question about writing friendships. Although the book is written in a third-person voice that’s very close to Bertie’s point of view, it’s also naturally reflective of their shared voice—almost their collective voice, because of how much they formed their identities in conversation with one another. And the tenor of their friendship is one of bitchy, honest, sisterly love.

For Bertie and Kate, but also for me—and, I think, many people—making jokes is a punchy way to soften the pain of being alive. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism in the moment when you do it, but when writing a novel about people dealing with that pain, I’m interested in showing and exploring the mechanism.

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