It’s been a little stressful, but others have it far worse. I’m hoping it will be safe enough to travel back to New York soon, but it looks like I might be stuck in place for a while longer yet. I usually live in New York, which I’ve called home for the last seven years, but the pandemic being what it is, I came to Berlin a few months ago to be in the same city as my boyfriend. Hi Madeleine! Thanks so much for taking the time out to chat with me! Where are you writing from, and how are you holding up? It’s about a state of perpetual emergency, “broken up and punctuated by the sudden calm tones we were forced to adopt every time we recited the script.”īelow, I speak with the author about the beginnings of her debut novel, the process of fusing real climactic events into fiction, and emergency as a structuring principle. But The Inland Sea is more than a book about climate change-it’s a masterful and relatable study of grief, loneliness, disquiet, and what it means to be a woman trying to hold herself together in a world that’s constantly falling apart. All the while, she untangles herself from her own personal disasters, secreting money away to leave for America, where things will hopefully be different. Our unnamed narrator spends her days fielding emergency calls at Triple Zero, connecting people to police, the fire department, and the ambulance. The Inland Sea (Catapult, 2021) tells the story of a young woman searching for her own convictions in a year of escalating emergency. Madeleine Watts’ debut novel takes place in 2013-a year of similar-scale catastrophe in Australia: floods, tropical storms, rising water-levels, fires everywhere. The questions arrive slowly, then in quick succession: Are we safe? What future could one have in this country? Are we drinking too much? How could he do that? As we begin to steady ourselves in another year rife with unsteady circumstances, a parallel urgency emerges within.
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