Books That Built Me: Station Eleven

Before 2025, it was 2016.

I wrote in my last post that I feel a bit like I'm living in limbo, and that it wasn't the first time I've felt like this. The last time was in 2016. I'd just stepped out of four intense years working at an early-stage tech startup with the sort of wide-eyed blinking that happens when you leave a nightclub and it’s suddenly morning. My long term relationship had just ended, the UK had just voted for Brexit, I was burned out, and I had no real idea what to do with myself.

I picked up Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

It was one of those books that landed in my life at exactly the right time. A story about a world after collapse, yes, but also a story about art, memory, survival, and what we hold onto when everything else falls away. It didn’t feel like dystopia. It felt like a kind of strange, glittering truth. One that saw me, soothed me, and maybe even gave me permission to start again.

There’s a quote from Jeevan, one of the characters in the book, that burrowed its way under my skin and never left:

“First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

I think about that a lot.

Because yes, I want to be seen. And yes, I want to be remembered. And no, I don’t think that makes me vain or dramatic or impossible. I think it makes me human.

What Station Eleven does so beautifully is hold space for that kind of humanity. Not just in the big, emotional arcs, but in the quiet, strange, absurd little moments too. A comic book passed from hand to hand. A museum of everyday objects. A line from Shakespeare echoing across a broken world: “Survival is insufficient.”

It was also the first book I’d read in ages that didn’t seem to care about fitting into a neat genre box. It wasn’t really sci-fi. But it wasn’t not sci-fi either. It had queer characters, humour, grief, art, storytelling, theatre: so many of the same elements I was beginning to explore in my own writing. And it didn’t apologise for the messiness. It celebrated it.

That was a gift. That was a green light.

And of course, after 2020, Station Eleven hit different. I remember when lockdown first started and we were all confused and scared and pretending banana bread was going to save us. This was the first book that came to mind. Not because I thought we were about to descend into post-apocalyptic caravan parks, but because it had already taught me how fragile and strange the world can feel when the rules stop applying.

I clearly wasn’t alone in that. The book got adapted for screen by HBO in 2021 with Mackenzie Davis, who I absolutely adore as an actress, and a whole new wave of people started reading it for the first time. Watching that happen was weirdly comforting. Like we’d all been handed the same torch in a power cut and were trying to figure out where the edges of the room were again.

Now, in 2025, the COVID-19 pandemic feels both recent and impossibly distant. Life’s mostly back to normal. People still cough all over you on the underground. Deliveroo drivers still roam the streets like it’s a musical number from West Side Story. Well, if West Side Story was set in Zone 3 and everyone wore hi-vis. But something of the pandemic definitely still lingers.

I think Station Eleven reminds me that we’re never really guaranteed the old normal. That even when things do return to some kind of familiar rhythm, we’re changed. Quietly. Subtly. Like gold seams in a cracked pot. Like the feeling of stepping back into your home and knowing it’s the same, but you’re not.

More than anything, this book taught me to keep looking for the light in the cracks. The things worth carrying forward. The art worth making even when no one’s watching. The weird, beautiful resilience of people who keep telling stories — not just to survive, but to matter.

I think we all want that, really. To matter. To leave a mark. To make someone feel a little less alone in the dark. And for me this book did exactly that.

Station Eleven was one of the books that built me. I can't wait to share more with you next time.