Emma Pattee on Imagining the Devastating Aftermath of the “Big One”

Speculation about the “big one” is common in California, where we’ve seen bridges and highways fall, houses burn and chaos reign after the Loma Prieta in San Francisco (1989), the Northridge in Los Angeles (1994), and dozens of smaller jolts. Emma Pattee imagines the impact of an anticipated 9.0 magnitude earthquake on the 700-mile Cascadia fault on the city of Portland in her breathtaking first novel, Tilt, and gives us a second by second, twenty-four-hour account of how it feels for Annie, who is thirty-two weeks pregnant and standing in the crib section at IKEA when the ground gives way.

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Jane Ciabattari: What inspired this first novel? What was your first inkling of its existence?

Emma Pattee: The idea for Tilt came to me when I was very pregnant, at IKEA, shopping for a crib. And the building started to shake. I was immediately terrified that it was the big earthquake and thought to myself, “How will I get home? What will I have to do to survive?”

It ended up being a big truck full of Swedish furniture which caused the building to shake. By the time I realized that, the idea for Tilt was fully formed in my mind.

JC: Did you always intend to have your narrator Annie be a mother-to-be about to give birth, which creates it’s a separate dramatic arc?

EP: Because of how the book idea came to me, the narrator was always going to be a pregnant woman. Pregnancy is this interesting intersection of extreme vulnerability and heightened savagery. A will to survive and protect.

JC: How has Tilt been influenced by your work as a climate journalist?

EP: I’m fascinated by the way we live under the shadow of something terrible which we know is coming, but we don’t know when, and we can never really prepare for it. So in this way, the Cascadia earthquake is a very apt analogy for climate change. And of course, reading about and reporting on climate disasters over the past five years has shown me, time and again, that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the official response is almost always outmatched. We will have to fend for ourselves and fend for each other. I wanted to explore what that community response actually looks like in real-time.

JC: You coined the term “climate shadow” to describe one person’s potential impact on climate change. Did that thinking have any part in your choice to write a novel telling the story of one woman’s experience of a historic earthquake?

EP: I started working on the book about two years before I came up with the concept of climate shadow, so I would say it was the opposite process. Annie is a woman who is stuck, she is frustrated by the way her life has turned out, and in many ways she suffers from apathy. The earthquake shakes her out of her apathy, gives her a chance to make different choices. To change her life. Spending years writing from Annie’s POV really forced me to think deeply about apathy, the enormous cost of climate apathy, and the choices we would make differently if we looked directly at the thing instead of looking away.

JC: Speculation about the “big one” is common in California, where I live. I was in San Francisco on the day of the Loma Prieta, and in a hotel on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles when the Northridge hit in the pre-dawn hours. What has your own earthquake experience been, living in Oregon, with the Cascadia potentially looming?

EP: I’ve been fascinated by the earthquake for years. It’s scientifically fascinating, it’s historically fascinating, and it’s psychologically fascinating. But it also really really scares me.

So it was very surprising to me to realize how many people in Portland laugh about the earthquake, or speculate that it’s overblown or dismiss the (very clear) scientific evidence. I’ve definitely become the mom at the playground that nobody wants to talk with!

JC: How did you go about researching the details of impact of the 9.2 earthquake that hits Portland in Tilt?

EP: There is so much known about how the city of Portland will be impacted by the Cascadia earthquake, which I thought would make my writing work so much easier, but in fact made it so much harder. In a moment where it would have been so convenient to just make something up, I had to stick closely to the facts and it really limited my artistic choices.

I relied a lot on a book called Full-Rip 9.0 by Sandi Daughton, and a book called The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley. I also used the [Kathryn Schulz] New Yorker article about the Big One that won the Pulitzer. I talked to geologists, seismic engineer, and first responders who were in Turkey and Kashmir directly after those earthquakes.

I also had the opportunity to attend a training day with the Portland NET team (we have the largest network of emergency volunteers in the country!) and see firsthand what a rescue scene might look like.

JC: Why limit the time frame of the novel to the first day after the earthquake?

EP: I chose to set Tilt in the immediate minutes and hours after the earthquake, because I wanted to show what happens before the emergency response, before the news articles, before anyone knows what’s going on, when it’s just humans turning to other humans, trying to survive. And as we just saw in LA, those moments are terrifying and confusing, and also there is incredible camaraderie and generosity.

JC: At what point did you decide to alternate the unfolding drama with back-story chapters telling Annie’s story, from dropping out during her freshman year at NYU seventeen years before, and returning to Portland, where her first play is produced, to meeting her husband, an actor, and making choices she has come to question?

EC: That choice was very late in the process. I had been working on the book for about three years, and agonizing over the best way to structure it. Then one night I woke up at 3 am and the alternating structure came to me.

JC: You make another telling creative decision: to focus on one woman’s journey across a devastated city to find her husband, focusing on only what she witnesses, and the others she interacts with.

EP: Tilt is really about having the chance to change your life. And it’s told in a stream-of-conciousness voice to Annie’s unborn child. So it always was going to be just one woman’s journey. Which was incredibly frustrating at times, because it meant that the reader can only know as much about the earthquake as Annie knows! And I’m sitting here, overflowing with random earthquake facts I’m dying to share with someone, and yet I have this main character who doesn’t know anything about what’s going on.

JC: In the aftermath of the quake, phones don’t work, so it’s impossible for Annie to tell where her husband is, or if he’s alive. That’s one of her biggest overarching questions. Did you consider a range of answers?

EP: Yes, there were many different versions of this book. I played with every possible outcome. Then I had this experience of hiking with my husband and my son in Lake Tahoe. My son was about a year old, and he was in a carrier on my husband’s back. A couple hours into the hike, we looked behind us, and a brown bear was following us on this narrow path.

Without even thinking, I told my husband to walk fast ahead with our son, and I would walk slower so that if the bear was going to attack anyone, he would attack me. And that no matter what, he shouldn’t try to save me but just get our son to safety. And my husband immediately agreed. Both of us knew that my life meant nothing compared to my son’s. And because it happened so fast, and we were both terrified and full of adrenaline, I knew it was authentic. We weren’t performing being protective parents. This wasn’t a moral decision. It was a biological one.

When I got home from that Tahoe trip, I had my answer to how I would end the book.

JC: How did you map out the journey Annie takes, from the rubble of the IKEA store to its parking lot and then through the devastated city? Did you consult earthquake preparedness documents?

EP: I spent hours on Google Maps, and then hours walking and biking the possible routes that Annie could take. I researched which roads would fare well, and which would be washed out due to liquefaction. I researched which bridges and overpasses would stand, and which would fall. Every street in the book is an actual street; every landmark is real. Every destruction point in the book is what experts say is going to happen during the earthquake. So, it is as factually accurate as a book about something that hasn’t happened yet can be.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

EP: Right now, I have some investigative journalism pieces I’ve put off for far too long, so I’ll be turning my attention to those. I am also working on another Oregon novel but the themes have not made themselves clear to me yet.

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Tilt by Emma Pattee is available from Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.