It’s a rare friendship that first kindles over Zoom. Meg and I met in an MFA workshop in the Fall of 2020, and we probably fell in love with each other’s novels first. Meg was beginning what would become Voyagers, about two friends who rise to low-level stardom after an (possible) alien encounter as children and reunite when Earth is (maybe) on the brink of first contact. Like my novel, Waiting on a Friend, which is about ghosts during the AIDS crisis and the woman who can see them, it’s really about longing for an estranged best friend. Our novels were released within weeks of each other this past Gemini season—twins! We got together to discuss loneliness, loss of control, and (apologies) how we ended our novels.
Natalie Adler
I think the first thing to talk about is how we were mutually invested in each other’s work: invested in the craft of it all, in the emotional ups and downs, and also in the characters who became our friends. So I want to talk a little bit about my love for Alex and Anna and Allen. I remember the version of the book where Ana and Alex were twins. I remember the iteration where Ana went missing. That was an early version where she also had a little bit more Hollywood fame. And I think from what you learned from all these versions of the book was that longing for Ana and the threat of losing Ana was really the core that you had to hang on to.
Meg Charlton
What an unsurprisingly insightful read of the evolution of this book. Because you were there from the very beginning. I think that for both of our books, it was a process of finding the heart within the hook that had brought us to the story originally. And then writing past that and beyond it. And for Voyagers, I think that the idea of yearning for someone in this way, not romantically, but in a way where this person has been the co-witness to one’s life, was the heart. I was interested in what it meant for Alex to have had Ana with him from his earliest days, to have been present with her for things that no one else has been present for, and for him to realize that he doesn’t really know how to live his life unwitnessed by her. The aliens are the hook in Voyagers, like the ghosts are in Waiting on a Friend. But the heart of my novel is the connection between these two very lonely people, who have been there for each other in a way that no one else has.
Natalie Adler
And in their loneliness, they come up with an imaginary friend, an alien, Allen. As the novel progresses, he takes on more of a life of his own, or let’s say, an agency outside of Alex and Ana.
Meg Charlton
Allen functions in the book as an inside joke or shibboleth for Alex and Ana. He’s a symbol of their closeness, this thing that is protected, that is just for them, that is not part of their public story. So he is on the one hand a fantasy of these creatures, these beings that might have taken them, and a comical, benign version of that. But it’s also, the fantasy, which is sort of the fantasy of all aliens, which is like: Someone’s looking out for us. Someone is out there. And that can be very frightening and played for horror. But it can also be something comforting, particularly for these two children who have been through so much so publicly. And Allen was just fun to write!
Natalie Adler
He’s almost in a workplace comedy.
Meg Charlton
Absolutely. Allen is also, I have to say, crucial to the ending. I had one reader who said he skipped the Allen sections and then didn’t get the ending. You can’t skip Allen!
Natalie Adler
You can’t! I guess we should say at the top that there are spoilers to follow, but I actually should we just spoil it? Should we fuck it up?
Meg Charlton
Yes! I have done so many conversations about this book and I’ve not been able to talk about the ending.
Natalie Adler
Because the way you pull it off is through Allen. By the end, we realize that he’s been part of a plan that crucially he himself did not even design. It was his supervisor at the Earth Studies Institute, which by the way, by the time this is up, we will hyperlink this for you to buy a hat.
Meg Charlton
Benefiting Dark Sky International.
Natalie Adler
Love that.
Meg Charlton
Thank you.
Natalie Adler
So Allen’s supervisor had this plan that basically like, what if you prepared a human for abduction? What if you implanted some memories early on so that when the moment comes, the person knows what’s happening to them. And that’s what happens to Alex. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see it. But then Alex sees it all very quickly. In the moment where he needs to know, he knows. He puts it together all at the very last minute. And it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s incredibly sad. And we have this moment where we realize the vantage point of telling, right?
Meg Charlton
I think that there’s lots of valid interpretations of the ending. One is that Allen is literally coming exactly as written. And the other is that Allen is still a projection of a kind that Alex is using to comprehend what is happening to him, and that Allen could have been implanted too. That it was a frame that could have been given to him to allow him to feel okay about being taken. And then, of course, it could be an interpretation that he just made Allen up no matter what. I wanted the ending to feel alien in a way, like to have it feel resolved, but still mysterious. I didn’t want to write a book that was completely ambiguous in the ending, and I also didn’t want to write a book where all of the mystery was gone, because that’s what’s the most interesting to me. I really wanted to write a book about someone who believes that something has thrown their life off course and then comes to the realization that this was the only course they were ever going to be on. There was no alternative. Because I think that the belief that it’s all on us, if only we had made some other choice, then everything would have been better and different is a really punishing way to live. I think the truer and kinder way to live is to realize that the world is out of our control, and that our lives are much more out of our control than we believe, and that very often, the consequences of our actions are not the ones we intend.
The epigraph to the book is a quote from Aspects of the Novel, which is a book I love by EM Forster: “So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.” In a lot of ways, Voyagers is a book, like Waiting on a Friend, about accepting death and accepting mystery. We all move toward this unknowable future and we all go there alone. No matter how close we are with someone, there can be no final witness to our lives but ourselves.
Natalie Adler
At this last read, I knew what was going to happen, but I still found new things to wonder at. I have to ask: was Major Williams in on all of this?
Meg Charlton
I think he was.
Natalie Adler
Major Williams is the army guy who is tasked with hearing Alex and Ana’s stories after they return from being “abducted,” and he comes out and says, I believe these two kids, and then he retracts it. And this is based on what happened with Roswell. So an occasion for the telling of the book is that Major Williams writes Alex—and crucially, not Ana—a note saying, I think that this did harm to you, and I want to make amends. So they go to meet him, and that’s where it’s revealed that Alex is the one who forces the story a little bit. Maybe Ana embellished, but, like, Alex was really the one who had the memories.
After they talk, Major Williams says he’s going to go take a nap, and suggests they go for a walk up on that ridge and see if it stirs up any memories, which is what Alex does. But then he and Anna get separated, and he’s alone on that ridge, and that’s where he realizes what happened to him, which is that he has the memory of getting abducted, which is about to happen right now. So did Major Williams orchestrate the whole thing?
Meg Charlton
Part of the book that I was excited about was the never-ending paranoia of conspiracy theories. One of the things I find so interesting about ufology as a culture is that it needs the validation of government and ex-government officials, and those figures carry an incredible amount of weight, which makes sense because there is this craving for disclosure, for information that the government has concealed the extent of their knowledge of these incidents. And yet, the government also is the source of the mistrust in the first place. So these governmental figures occupy this really fascinating dual role as both disseminators of misinformation and deception and sort of the ultimate word on the truth. And that was something I wanted to think about with Major Williams and their relationship. I wanted to leave open for the reader a feeling of, How far does this go?
The way that this sort of military industrial complex intertwines with paranormal research is an area of great fascination to me. And there is so much overlap, not just in encouraging people who see something weird in the sky to believe in aliens, like, oh, better for them to think it’s a UFO than that it’s like a surveillance drone. But if you think about the Cold War studies into ESP and, you know, the ESP—
Natalie Adler
Yes! One of my characters has done postdoctoral research at the Duke Parapsychology Lab, which was a real thing.
Meg Charlton
Exactly! I think that your novel also looks at how this “fringe” is either preyed upon or metabolized by or commodified by these hegemonic forces, and the way that people’s lives are affected by that, not just on this systemic level, but on a day-to-day personal level.
Natalie Adler
The “bad guys” in my novel, Manhattan Remediation, are basically ghost cops, right? They’re a small business that’s basically doing urban cleansing. Some people call on them because they’re actually haunted. But by and large, they’re more like vibes based. They’re like, if you feel uncomfortable in your home, we are gonna help you. Because the people who are moving into these apartments in the East Village are people who are not comfortable with the presence of others as much. They want the cool vibes, but they don’t want to feel like they’re living somewhere someone else has lived before.
And this is happening in a moment in New York where, you know, there’s a moment where Renata says something like, you know, most stuff that we think of as conspiracy actually happens in plain sight. Like redlining is actually called redlining because city planners took a red marker and drew it around neighborhoods that they wanted to segregate, right? So that’s like what you’re talking about too. There’s an aspect of the conspiracy that is happening in plain sight that they don’t even have enough respect for the people to hide. So Renata wants to find out, is this just a small business? Is the government involved? And what she realizes is that it’s actually very simple. The social safety net’s crumbling, the socialist dream of New York is starting to fall apart, the city’s been abandoned by the government. And part of why the city transforms in the ’80s is because the city’s been sitting on this foreclosed housing stock for the longest time. It needs to get back on the tax roll to start making money. They want to start making money again. It can’t just keep being like the drop-dead years of New York. So landlords are getting crazy tax breaks. Big business is getting crazy tax breaks. They’re the ones who are getting the social safety net that the people of the city used to get. So, Renata and her friends are living in this moment where they know that things are changing really rapidly, but they also know that there’s something unnatural about it. Like, something really deliberate is happening to these neighborhoods.
Meg Charlton
The thing that’s so interesting about so many conspiracies is that they are not sustained by one central figure, but by many people acting in their own short-term interests. Both of our books are about the deflating reveal of a conspiracy, which is ultimately that it’s usually just someone who’s like, I’m just trying to get ahead. I’m just doing what I’m told. Waiting on a Friend is about resisting those forces by making them visible, and confronting them.
Natalie Adler
We spent a lot of time thinking about what to call Manhattan Remediation, because we knew the name needed to be vague and euphemistic, like, what do they do, exactly? But what they’re actually doing is that they are remediating psychic material, which is to say that they’re trapping ghosts and incarcerating them. And so Renata comes to the realization that it’s not merely like jailing the ghosts, they’re putting them in solitary. They are stored in these individual, columbarium style boxes and she doesn’t quite know how to free them. Fortunately, one character in the novel, the guy who is the true believer, and also the one who is interested in science, will explain to her how it works: the boxes are Faraday cages, which is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic fields.
I decided that the way Renata was going to shut these guys down was by bringing the party to them. ‘Cause there couldn’t be some grand orchestrated plan to get them to shut down. It would have to be just something chaotic with the whole group, like throwing a party in the warehouse where the ghosts are held and like maybe somehow the ghosts will break out. And I was like, yes, this is perfect. It’s so the ethos of the novel. It’s like DIY, it’s punk, like it’s really working. They’re all going to take the bus there. It’s civic-minded. But then I realized like at the very last minute while copy-ending—
Meg Charlton
Reader, this was a crisis point.
Natalie Adler
This was a crisis point. I realized the boxes, the Faraday cages, are physical. They’re not electronic. So turning them off or short circuiting them isn’t going to work. So that’s when I laid on the floor and I was like, Meg, I ruined the book. It doesn’t work. What am I going to do?
Meg Charlton
But she didn’t ruin the book. Instead, she called my brother.
Natalie Adler
That’s right. I spoke to Kevin Charlton.
Meg Charlton
My brother was initially trained as an aerospace engineer, and he worked for NASA. He was a literal rocket scientist. And who I always turn to for math and science questions, and who Natalie turned to for figuring out how ghost technology might be fact checked.
Natalie Adler
So we figured out that the boxes that contain the ghosts are made of a metal mesh. They’re not designed to be opened again. You would have to damage them physically. And so what happens is, or what Kevin helped us realize had to happen, is that the shorting the circuit of overloading it with electricity damages the metal of the cages. It melts them such that it’s not a closed circuit anymore, and the ghosts can escape. So the plan that I had made up did work. I just had to adjust why it was working. And that was this huge relief.
Meg Charlton
While we’re talking about endings, the ending to Voyagers is almost word for word the ending that I wrote before I even knew how I would get there, that I sent to all of you in fall of 2020. Except, now, the perspective has flipped of how and when it’s taking place and to whom. And I do think that books know their own endings. They’re contained within them. And very often, if you’re sort of trying to figure out the ending, I really think it’s not about adding something but about discovering something that it’s already present within everything you’ve written.
Natalie Adler
And that certainly, I feel like, was the case for both of us.
FICTION
Voyagers
By Natalie Adler
Harper
Published June 16, 2026
