We're now in this post-Roe v. Wade world … could you have imagined that that would have come to pass? Many people thought that that was settled business in the United States.

You see, that was the problem.

That people thought it was settled?

That people thought it was. I remember very, very keenly when Cider House was published, how many of my friends, good feminists, people that I had worked with in Planned Parenthood facilities. And people who knew my mother, who had been a nurse's aide and a family counsellor. Her principal job was trying to advise young, unmarried women and girls who were pregnant … both before Roe vs. Wade and after.

And I remember people whose politics I shared saying, "Well, it's nice, but it's kind of quaint that you've written this historical novel now that it's safe, now that abortion is available and is safe." And I remember saying, which caused some stress, "If you think it's safe, if you think it'll ever be safe, you might be part of the reason it isn't."

I didn't write it as history to say, look at this terrible time when this procedure was unsafe and illegal. Look what happened then. It was decisively written as a warning, as a way of saying, don't let this happen again.

That this could happen again.

And that this could happen again. And my brother and sisters, we talk frequently about my mother, who has since passed away, and perhaps this is only to comfort ourselves, but we say how glad we are that she didn't live to see the day when abortion rights went backward. Maybe because if she were alive, that would have killed her. Looking at the current administration in the United States, it is only one example of the sexually bigoted backwardness of my birth country.

The US is a collapsing empire livestreaming its own demise.

What is worth noting at this particular moment of US collapse though is how desperately US culture still does not, in general, understand how this moment was an inevitable culmination not a catastrophic abberation from another more likely path.

This is the mark of something that will truly collapse, a deep forgetting in the realm in which the collapse will happen. Even more oddly, christian religious extremists evangelicals and such in the US actually do understand this collapse is inevitable.. through a sort of "accidental" selfulfilling prophecy and religious mythmaking. It is a strange trick of history that more rational people are still by and large clinging to a less rational likely outcome of US politics than the cultists.