Two new novels explore a world where technology has even greater access to our minds
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The thoughts and images and memories you have, although they sort of exist in the safety of your brain, they

They are actually quite vulnerable. We've got two sci-fi-ish books today that are about that vulnerability being exploited. In a bit, author Leila Lalami has a new novel about your dreams being recorded and sold to advertisers. But first, Audrey Lee is an author out with her debut novel, a psychological thriller titled The Mechanics of Memory.

It's about a woman who enters a treatment facility for her mental health where she is given a VR headset and, well, it wouldn't be a very good psychological thriller if everything turned out fine and dandy, now would it? Lee talks to here now, Scott Tong, after the break.

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Pull up a memory for me. Maybe one of your best moments as a kid, or the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you. Easy, right? A memory is a memory is a memory. Well, I'm sure you've heard it's more complicated, that recollections can be manipulated by bias or time or stress.

Or perhaps by technology? That is a question at the center of the novel The Mechanics of Memory. It's a psychological thriller by Audrey Lee. And here's a clip from the audiobook. This is where the main character is in a mental institution and she is forced to wear a virtual reality headset, pushing a bunch of images at her.

Then there was a click, and the image was replaced with Luke's home at night. Black smoke rising out from the roof like a cartoon. Scarlet flames churning from windows and massive plumes. Click. A house in the daytime, blackened in places, surrounded by piles of ash. Windows missing. Click. An ambulance. Click.

The Mechanics of Memory is a finalist for this year's Edgar Allan Poe Awards, given to the best mystery fiction, nonfiction, and television writing from 2024. And the author, Audrey Lee, joins us. Audrey Lee, this is a great book. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good to have you. Full disclosure, you and I, we go back to dirt. Our dads grew up together. But your mystery novel is up for this year's Edgar Award for Best First Novel in

What is the essential mystery here? The essential mystery in this book is, well, there's quite a few. It's multilayered. But my protagonist cannot remember her last year. And so the mystery weaving through this book is, what does she remember? Is what she remembers true? And can she rely on anything she thought was true?

Well, let's play a little bit more of the audiobook because it gets at what you're talking about. Because it starts with, as you're saying, this, where am I? How did I get here? Right beginning of the book. And your main character's name is Hope. She finds herself in the psychiatric institution, the Wilder Sanctuary.

Way too perfect, right? The place smells too good. Food is way too healthy. Let's take a listen to some more. Burgers at Wilder were, not surprisingly, extremely disappointing. Hope wanted a real cheeseburger served in a red basket on waxed paper, grease and chili dripping off the sides. The burger on her plate this afternoon was a black bean and quinoa concoction served with turkey bacon and avocado puree on whole grain buns, kale chips on the side.

It was like community theater on a plate, passable in content, but slightly tragic in execution. Slightly tragic in execution. No shade to community theater. None taken. Wilder Sanctuary, as you describe, it's too perfect. But how does Hope start to discover what's going on behind the curtain?

So, at Wilder, Hope is participating in these questionable treatments, including with VR, but all kinds of...

treatments turned on end. And as she participates, she starts to remember pieces of her life, but she's also told things that she isn't sure is true. So as she progresses through the VR, she begins to get some clues that maybe what she's being told isn't reality. Yeah. And then there are a bunch of other characters with her who are kind of

Are they kind of in the same situation as Hope, going through the same I think I'm discovering something process? So the Wilder Sanctuary has two groups of people. One group is full of A-list celebrities who are detoxing for various reasons, as A-list celebrities might do. But there's a whole other group, and they call themselves the Wilder Weirdos, and that's who Hope...

be friends, and they're all in there for various different ailments and mental health issues, but they all sort of share in common that they can't remember parts of their lives. We're talking to Audrey Lee, the author of the psychological thriller novel, The Mechanics of Memory. What I find fascinating, Audrey, is your use of technology in this book, right? Naturally, you live in Northern California.

And you have a lot of fun describing Hope with this virtual reality headset on. Here's another piece of the audiobook. Hope held out her arms and gave her avatar the once-over. Jeans and black boots. Black fingerless gloves. White tank top. Motorcycle jacket.

It had been an eternity since she'd worn actual clothes, so it was nice to show up clad like a badass. Even if that badass was Joan Jett, circa 1984. Another Gen X alert, right? You're dating you and me here, Audrey Lee, with these references. Yes, for sure. Without giving too much away, tell us a little about who or what is behind this virtual reality therapy.

Wow, that's hard to do without giving too much away. But the creator of the VR headset is another patient at Wilder. And I guess tell us a little bit of how they, you know, peel away a little bit more over time. When do they really start to see something of, okay, this is what's happening to you and me?

So around the midpoint of the book, the sort of ragtag group at Wilder of these Wilder weirdos begins to suspect that there's other things going on at Wilder. And so they pull a little heist of their own and with the help of the person who designed the whole VR, hack into the system to figure out what's really going on. And a fascinating broader question you're asking in this book is,

is our memories and whether they can be manipulated. In the course of researching this book, what did you learn, Audrey, about how malleable potentially our recollections can be? So the idea for this book actually began with an NPR interview I listened to with a woman named Dr. Julia Shaw, who wrote a book called The Memory Illusion. And she's a cognitive psychiatrist and she

has done years and years of research on how easily memories are manipulated just because of our human desire to conform to social pressure, to belong, to please other people. And the more I delved into this, the more mind-blowing it became how...

our memories are just completely unreliable. We think one thing, we repeat it to ourselves, we tell ourselves the same thing over and over again, whether or not it's true. So after doing all this research, I thought, wow, you could do something really, really bad with this ability to manipulate someone's mind. Yeah. I'm curious. So now that you've

You know, done this research, you've written this book. Do you think about your memories a little differently now? I definitely do. I mean, partly in this book, I wanted to tease out who we are if we don't have our memories. I mean, memory, that's our identity. Who are we if we don't have it? And I definitely think about that a lot. But also, I'm 52, so I can't remember what I had for breakfast. Yeah.

All right, I want to play one last passage. It goes to what you were talking about. This is when Hope and two other patients in this institution, Quinn and Carter, hack into the computer system, start to discover these files revealing a bit of the dark truth. Here it is. We don't have time to open all of these, Quinn said, eyeing the clock. 7-0-8. Carter removed his glasses and pulled the right earpiece from the frame. At the end protruded what looked like a tiny silver key.

He wiggled it free, then inserted it into the laptop. What is that? Hope asked. It's a thumb drive, Carter said. In your glasses? Quinn asked, giving Carter's shoulder a squeeze. Best spy ever. Audrey Lee, you clearly have a lot of fun writing this, you know, with your odes to the 1980s and all that. Writing-wise, how did you balance the fun with the psycho thriller part of the novel?

Overall, The Mechanics of Memory is a pretty dark novel. It's talking about, you know, manipulating people's minds. You're stuck in a claustrophobic institution. No matter how beautiful it is, you're still trapped. It covers a lot of dark subject matter. And so I absolutely enjoyed the parts where there was a little comic relief in some of the characters, in some of the

possibly snarky dialogue in a lot of 80s and 90s references, because that was my time. It's a fun read. It's a great read. It's a dark read. All of those things. We've been talking to Audrey Lee. Her novel is The Mechanics of Memory, and it's been nominated for an Edgar Award. Audrey, great to talk to you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

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I don't like how much my phone knows about me. It spooks me when it's kind of like, hey, you should buy those pants you've been looking at, or hey, remember to pay your water bill. Author Leila Lalami pushes those fears to the next level in her novel, The Dream Hotel. And she talks to NPR's Emily Kwong about the surveillance state we all live in with these devices. Here's Emily.

Do you remember your dreams? I don't. But in The Dream Hotel, a new book by Pulitzer finalist Leila Lalami, dreams are surveilled through special implants designed to help people get a good night of sleep. But that data is also sold to the government and the results are life altering.

Laila Lalami joins me now. Welcome to All Things Considered. Thank you for having me. Talk about the character who's at the heart of the Dream Hotel. How did she come to you? And what is the world she's living in? Right. So my character's name is Sarah Hussain. She's a historian by training, but she works for the Getty Museum as an archivist. She's a very busy mom of twin toddlers. And she has what is by all accounts a very ordinary life.

And then one day she's returning home from a conference abroad when she is pulled aside because her dreams indicate that she will soon commit a crime. Her actual while she's asleep dreams. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And so the character came to me a few years ago. I had written a version of this book that took place in a tech company and it wasn't going anywhere. But then one day I had this idea of this woman who,

stepping out of her room, having this implant that gets checked by this mysterious attendant to make sure she hasn't tampered with it. And I kind of just followed that character page by page and got to know her a little bit, got to know her relationship with her family, with her husband, with her children, the kind of life she had and how everything sort of unravels

through this encounter with agents from the Risk Assessment Administration. So it was great fun to kind of get to follow her as she comes face-to-face with the surveillance state. And you're very careful to write that the women at the center of this book are being retained, not detained. What is the difference and why is it relevant to your story?

Yes. So again, because this book investigates the world of dreams, the most private part of ourselves, and looks at what might happen when data collection penetrates it, we're now, you know, firmly in the territory of intentions, right? Where people might get

I don't know, apprehended on a street because of speech crimes or thought crimes were already at that level. So it seemed the next level would be, what if it is this world of the imagination? And was that inspired by your own dreaming or how did that come to you? Yeah.

Did you have a dream about this book? I don't know. No, no. It came to me because I had overslept one morning and I reached for my phone first thing to look at the time. And I saw a Google notification that said, if you leave right now, you will make it to the name of my yoga studio at 728. Wow.

And I had never told, you know, obviously Google what day of the week or what time of day or even that I went to yoga. But obviously the company had followed my movements and learned my habits. And so I was understandably disturbed by that. I think by design, obviously.

surveillance technology is meant to be invisible. Yes, we know that our devices collect data about us, but all of that data collection is meant to be seamless and invisible. And that Google notification was kind of a moment where the curtains parted and I got a glimpse of just how granular the data that they collect can be.

And I remember I turned to my husband and I said, you know, pretty soon the only privacy any of us will have left will be in our dreams.

And of course, being a novelist, I thought, well, wait, what if someday that actually does happen, that we continue on this trend of using technologies for every single thing that we do? Why not, you know, sleep aids that help you sleep, but also collect data about you in your sleep? So there's just this bit of writing from the book that I can't stop thinking about. It's page 306. You write...

Sarah, she, wants to be free. And what is freedom if not resting of the self from the gaze of others, including her own? Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it. It isn't meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety. Now that this book is out in the world, what do you want people to take away from that message?

Well, I think what I would want, first of all, is for people to just be moved by this character and her journey from this person who feels herself to be at a remove from the surveillance state to a person who's very much implicated in it and by it.

to be moved by that journey, to feel that if a character like that can manage to find a way out, then surely we too have the power to figure out our own ways to free them. And I think, you know, particularly because this is a book about surveillance, to have it be a warning. You know, sometimes we accept

so much of that surveillance into our lives and don't question the end, the end result of it, you know, where this is all going, what it is doing to our relationships, what it is doing to our society, and most importantly, what it's doing to our sense of selves. If you are continually behaving in certain ways because you're trying to avoid, I don't know, you know, having,

from strangers online or you're trying to avoid the gaze of the camera or you're trying to avoid, you know, then you have lost your sense of freedom. Yeah. Have you yourself changed how you live and your relationship to technology since writing this book? This is the question that has come up so much. Ah, clearly on everyone's minds. Yes, yes, yes.

I would say that I have spent the last 10 years thinking about this book. I actually started writing it in 2014. So I've been thinking about technology very carefully over the last 10 years. And it has been very sobering to watch how it has woven itself into every part of our lives. And it is true that I have begun the process of trying to untether myself

from as many of these apps as possible. So I've been on a journey to kind of remove, you know, I take it as a challenge. I try to live with as few of them as possible. But also I'm now, my new thing that I've begun doing is to try to reduce

the amount of time I spend online at all, you know, to decrease it. There is, life is meant to be lived offline. Well, I've enjoyed talking to you through good old-fashioned conversation. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Leila Lawalami, Dream Hotel is available now wherever books are sold. Thank you so much for having me.

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A., member FDIC.

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