On Knowing the End: A Guest Post by Olivie Blake
I’m sure we all have things we’d like to say to our past selves. For example, I’d love to tell my past self that lilac pleather is… certainly a look (hi, I came of age in the aughts). But if I had an opportunity to sit down with the self who was about to self-publish The Atlas Six for an audience of none, I think I might keep my mouth shut.
The truth is, even though I’m the version of myself finishing out this trilogy—even though I’m the version who knows the ending, and can therefore tell my pantser past self how her exploration of power, culpability, and complicity eventually lands; even though I’m the version who has seen her name on the New York Times bestseller list, something my past self is far too practical to even dream—even though I’m the version who knows about the pandemic!!—I’d hate to rob her of the creative conviction that comes from not knowing the end.
Because when I first sat down to write this trilogy, I wasn’t trying to sell a book, but to tell a story I thought only I wanted. To interrogate my sociopolitical frustrations and undress my millennial ennui while satisfying my shipper heart and my pulp-fiction brain. To subvert certain fantasy archetypes with six unreliable narrators that felt deceptively Villainous or Chosen, and endless plausible pairings in service to prolonged narrative sleight of hand. To introduce a world of highly individualized moral ambiguity—a claustrophobic pigeonhole of academia ruled by ambition and self-interest—only to widen the scope and recontextualize the stakes. To understand what the world actually means when it is more than just an idea to be destroyed, ruled, or saved. And to keep a promise to my physics teacher husband about making science sexy.
In many ways, I envy my past self. Not her stress about paying the bills or her sense that time is running out, but the way her creativity is passion uncompromised by fear. The version of me who sits here now is lucky, and though I am grateful every day for the readers and booksellers who felt genuine love for the labyrinthine thought exercise I set to paper, I am conscious, always, not to take any of it for granted, which is a different weight to carry around. Similar to the ways motherhood changed me, gratitude means I am no longer fearless. And I am grateful that my past self never stopped to ask if her story was important, or if it mattered enough to tell, or if it would succeed by any industry metric, because it meant that she could be brave.
So I guess if I had to tell my past self one thing, it would be what I tell all my selves, and you, too, if you want it: Keep going. That faith in your chest lives there for a reason.
The end will come regardless, so you might as well be in love now.
