In Emma Pattee’s debut novel Tilt (Simon & Schuster / Marysue Rucci Books, 2025), Annie is a playwright who has all but given up on her dreams, while her husband, Dom, is an actor who is very much still trying to make a career of his craft. Set over the course of one day, Annie is nine months pregnant and crib shopping at IKEA when a devastating earthquake hits. A geological inevitability for the Pacific Northwest, the Cascadia Earthquake proves to be “the Big One.” Separated from her husband, who she fears is dead, Annie must navigate the earthquake’s aftermath in search of him. Traversing Portland on foot, she reflects on the cracks in her marriage, her once-promising artistic life, and the uncertainty of motherhood. The novel raises questions about how steadfastly we should hold onto artistic dreams, and whether we should prioritize stability and income, especially if we are supporting a family. Described as “The Road meets Night Bitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting” by author Lydia Kielsing, Tilt was named one of Time’s “39 Most Anticipated Books of 2025.”
Pattee is a fiction writer and climate journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She’s written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
I spoke with Pattee over Zoom about inspiration in motherhood, overcoming self-doubt, and why writers should get less help with words on the page and more help learning to make decisions.
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The Rumpus: The novel opens with Annie, pregnant and shopping in a lavender linen romper, walking in “stiff little jerky motions like a stork,” with her distended belly like “a blimp exiting sideways out of [her] body.” As a mother of two, how did your experience of motherhood inform or inspire this book?
Emma Pattee: I came up with the idea for the book when I was pregnant. I was shopping for a crib at Ikea and the building started to shake. I had this moment where I thought, “It’s the earthquake!” It was a big truck dropping off IKEA furniture or something, but I thought, “What would I do if the earthquake was happening right now?”
I then wrote the book through the next five years while having a baby, getting pregnant again, and having a second baby, so every part of the book is informed with my experience of motherhood. I would say the kernel of inspiration—when I rewind to when I was pregnant—was that I felt so patronized as a pregnant person. Everybody kept telling me to “get ready,” but it seemed like what they meant were the most mundane, capitalist things, like, “Buy things!” and prepare your home. Nobody was talking about the soul rearranging of getting ready that I was really craving. Being pregnant, I wanted to run to every person and say, “I’m having a kid, and one day my kid is going to die, and I’m going to die, and how do you love something that is going to die?” I was holding something really existential, and everybody kept talking to me about cribs and strollers. It was the most disconnected, surreal experience.
Rumpus: In the acknowledgements section, you wrote about a promise you made to your son, Oliver, on the night of his birth: “[I will] do the thing, write the thing, not let my self-doubt keep me small.” How did your self-doubt, as a writer, come into play?
Pattee: I’m a person who has a lot of self-doubt and was coming from that space already. I was seven months pregnant and had this book idea, and everybody was like, “Emma, you’re seven months pregnant.” I’d never been able to finish a novel before. I had a Google drive full of half-finished novels. Even my writing coach told me, “You need to not think about your novel idea right now. You need to not pressure yourself to write a book. You need to focus on having a baby.” So I had this novel idea, but I didn’t do anything with it. I just had it and held it and felt incredibly frozen by self-doubt. I thought, “You’re not allowed to write a book that’s just about a woman walking. That’s not even a book. That doesn’t even make sense.”
Then I had my kid, and the birth was very high-drama but in a way that felt really empowering. I was supposed to have a home birth and had gotten whisked away to the hospital. I was incredibly feverish and had this intense feeling like I had touched the Life-Death Continuum. A few hours afterward, my kid was lying in his see-through crib next to me, and he blinked and was staring at me in silence. He had these huge eyes, and I thought, “Oh, I’m going to write that fucking book.” I knew it. I looked at that kid and was like, “I am not going to make you carry the weight of my disappointments, or my playing it small.”
I feel like a lot of us carry our parents’ disappointments, and they’re carrying their parents’ disappointments. Especially as women, there can be sort of a legacy of thwarted ambition for systemic and cultural reasons, patriarchal reasons. I felt like I’d touched death, and I was going to write the fucking book. The next day, my husband woke up, went to the hospital gift shop, bought a notebook, and brought it up to me. I ended up writing the first chapter in a postpartum fever dream when my kid was eight weeks old.
Rumpus: The protagonist narrates the novel to her unborn child, whom she addresses directly as Bean. Did that narrative choice limit what you felt you could write, or did it open up possibilities in some way?
Pattee: When the idea came to me, it came exactly as that: her talking to her baby. So it didn’t even feel like a choice, it just was. The idea was really about stream-of-consciousness. That was the technique I was trying to play with. I had read Ducks, Newburyport [by Lucy Ellmann] and this incredible book called Amnesty [by Aravind Adiga], and I was fascinated with stream-of-consciousness books. It was exciting because it was a challenge I really struggled with.
I have a science background, and as I learned more and more about the earthquake, there was so much science I wanted to bring in. It became agonizing that I could only write what Annie knows about the earthquake and what she can see, which is very little. Many times, I said to my editor, “Well, maybe she’s walking with an earthquake expert, and as they walk, the earthquake expert can tell her all about what’s happening.” Nobody went for that. It just killed me, the amount of fascinating information I learned that I could not put in the book, because the book is limited by Annie’s scope.
Rumpus: What is one piece of information you wish you could have put in the book?
Pattee: Portland is intersected by two rivers, the Willamette River and the Columbia River. Most people work on one side and live on the other, or their kids go to school on one side and they work on the other. A lot of people here talk about the earthquake in terms of the rivers. You want to make sure that there’s always one parent on the same riverside as the kid in case the earthquake hits, so you’re never separated. But there are also a lot of interesting plans about how to get inflatables going across the river. When the earthquake happens, I believe there will be kayaks out, canoes out, people trying to swim across. There will be people boating people back and forth. I think that speaks to the communal DIY spirit in Portland.
Rumpus: This book unfolds in a dual-timeline narrative: one unfolds in the present, with Annie navigating her way through the aftermath of the earthquake, and the second timeline reveals the backstory of Annie’s relationship with her husband and her life before pregnancy. Was the structure meant to reflect parallel fault lines? How did you decide on this?
Pattee: That [decision] came very late, probably a few weeks before my book went out on submission. I probably wrote the book five times with different structures. For most of the book’s life, it existed as a timestamp structure, and it was this fragmented thing in ten- or twenty-minute increments. For a while, it existed as a pedometer structure, with [Annie’s] Fitbit tracking her steps. I was getting a little panicked. I had set this date for when I needed to send it to my agent, and I could not figure out the structure. My writing coach told me I wasn’t allowed to write. She said, “Take two weeks and you cannot write it all,” which was really challenging when I was up against this deadline. She said to spend that two weeks trying to get clarity and make a decision about the structure. I was so frustrated by this advice and frustrated to be wasting my time. I felt like I was spending day after day and not getting anywhere. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night with this structure in my mind, and I immediately knew.
For me, when I think about the craft element of this book and my journey as a writer, so much of it has been about learning how to make decisions. I think with novice writers—myself as a novice writer—there is a belief that things come as inspiration. I think when you get into the work of writing a book, which involves hundreds and hundreds of big and small decisions that impact all the other decisions, a lot of us are unprepared for that. That’s why it’s really hard. What we perceive as “hard,” to rewrite or edit a book, is actually just that we are struggling so much with the decision-making process because it’s not something that’s getting taught. For me, learning how to make decisions as a writer was huge. My writing coach really showed me that when you have big decisions around your book, you need to take a little space from the writing—and make a little space in your mind—so that the answer can bubble up.
Rumpus: What other help did you receive from your writing coach?
Pattee: I got my agent in sort of a Cinderella story. She got the first chapter of my novel through a writing teacher of mine and offered me representation based on the first chapter. I wasn’t looking for an agent. I was pregnant with my second kid, and I was actually about to shelve this book. My agent gave me this list of edits, and she was like, “How fast can you give me these edits?” I’d just had the second baby and felt completely lost.
So, I reached out to this local writer named Margaret Malone. My second kid was probably six weeks old, in his little car seat. I show up all sweaty and sit down with this woman. I show her this long list of edits my agent has requested, and I’m like, “I have to do this. I’m running out of money. I just had a baby. Can you help me?” She said, “Yeah, let’s do this.” She held my hand and guided me through. It’s funny, she never read the book. If I could go back in time and speak to writers just starting out, I would tell them to get less help with the words on the page and get more help with your sensibility as a writer, the way you make decisions, and whatever story you’re telling yourself that’s keeping you blocked. We don’t get a lot of coaching help. We get way too much writing feedback. For me, a lesson of this book was to completely stop going to workshops. I stopped getting any feedback on the book. I realized that it was becoming a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen situation. And that is my process now: I don’t get feedback, and I don’t do workshops. I’m much less interested in getting any feedback on my work and much more interested in learning. How am I making decisions? Why am I making that decision? What am I trying to show here? What are the things I’m weak at as a writer and stronger at as a writer? How can I improve the things I’m weaker at?
Rumpus: What else can you tell us about your writing process?
Pattee: I write every day, three pages a day. I’m trying to work up to five pages a day. Three pages a day is four hundred and fifty words, and five is seven hundred words. I write by hand—that’s incredibly important. I just need a little bit more creative play space, which handwriting gives me. At that pace, I think it takes me about six-to-nine months to finish a draft. I put it aside for six weeks, then read it all in one sitting. I make a list of edits that I’m going to do for the next round. Then, I just start over. I do the same thing all over again. Any new material, I handwrite. If I need a new chapter, I’m going to write it by hand. I just keep doing that twenty times. With the earthquake book, and with the book I’m working on now, the process really was about twenty drafts.
I learned another lesson the hard way: I was judging Tilt on the first draft, the second draft, the third draft. I thought, “This kind of is bad . . . this book sucks. Maybe I shouldn’t keep working on it.” I didn’t understand that a book in its third draft is not the book. It would have blown my mind if someone would have said, “You will write fifteen more drafts of this book, and everything in this third draft will not exist in the published book. So what does it matter whether it’s good or not? It’s not even the book.” I didn’t understand that. I was reading something that seemed bad, and I was wanting to give up on it because it was bad.
Rumpus: A recurring theme in the book is the tension between the desire to make art and the need to make money. Were you grappling with these ideas as you wrote the book, or have you grappled with them before?
Emma: I got a degree in writing and graduated with all my writer friends into a recession. It struck me how hard it is to want something, and then to see that it’s not sustainable. I think this is a very millennial experience to be told, “Yeah, you want to do ballet? Of course you can.” “You want to go to the Olympics? Oh my gosh, yes. Follow your dreams!” My parents were these hippie, starving-artist, intellectual types. I don’t know why my parents didn’t really grasp that you literally have to pay bills, so that was something I wanted to write about. How do you give up a dream?
The pain of Annie trying to give up her dream was something I wanted to examine. Especially this marriage between someone who hasn’t given up their dream—but it’s not taking off—and someone who has given up on the dream but kind of hasn’t, and is bitter, is still unhappy. And the friction between the two of them.
Rumpus: In addition to writing novels, you’re a climate journalist. Can you talk a little bit about how that work influenced this book?
Pattee: When I started working on climate change, I was really naive. I thought, “Oh, I’ll be the person that can stop the climate crisis through journalism.” And I also was really angry about how much apathy there was around me—not climate denial but climate apathy. People that absolutely think there is climate change and want it to stop and are totally environmentalists, theoretically. They’re just completely apathetic to what’s happening.
Through my work as a climate journalist—interviewing a lot of scientists, researchers, and sociologists—I really came to understand that our brains are very efficient at keeping us cognitively safe. It is not a personal failing to look away from the climate crisis, it’s a biological response. I found, through my reporting, an enormous compassion for humans, and I really started to understand humans less as this intellectual species and much more as animals with consciousness. I found great compassion in that. At the same time, I gave up hope that my journalism was going to solve the climate crisis. In this sense, the earthquake is an allegory for something very bad that we know is coming. Everybody who lives in the Pacific Northwest knows this earthquake is coming, and you know you should be more prepared than you are, and you’re still not prepared.
How do you prepare for something you cannot face? You cannot look at it directly because your brain truly will not let you. To look at it directly would be to feel fear and despair that you cannot hold. That was really what I wanted to talk about in the book. For me, it was a reckoning, a coming to terms with this part of our species that is endearing and also likely a reason we will risk our entire species in the climate crisis.
Rumpus: What is one thing that you hope readers will take away from your book?
Pattee: I think what I’m writing about and what I tried to capture is a shock point. It’s the moment when everything changes and you see your life clearly. You’re broken out of the modern-day noise—capitalism, consumerism—and you can see your life really clearly, and you can see yourself clearly. Those moments are priceless, even if they come at really scary times for a lot of us. I want people to be able to have that moment through Annie. To feel like, “If my whole life was turned on its head tomorrow, what would I change?” To have the chance to get that shock of perspective. That’s the thing I hope people will take from it.
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Author photograph by Heather Campbell
