A Conversation with Lauren Stienstra, author of The Beauty of the End
In this provocative work of speculative fiction, two sisters navigate the complex moral terrain of reproductive ethics, individual freedoms, and society’s duty to a future facing imminent extinction.
What if there was a biological clock for extinction in every living creature’s DNA and there are only four generations left for human beings? In her thought-provoking debut, Lauren Stienstra examines this shocking situation. Twin sisters Charlie and Maggie Tannehill decide to join the Mendelia, a government-run human husbandry program that designs embryos in the hope that a particular combination of genes will lead to a mutation that can save humanity. Charlie and Maggie struggle with the ethical implications but part ways when they it’s time to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice. The Beauty of the End draws on Stienstra’s experience as a public health scientist and crisis management consultant in its portrayal of life teetering on the edge.
In your book, society is pursuing a scientific breakthrough and the stakes for humanity are existential. You placed a scientific pursuit at the heart of this story, what drove that choice?
I’ve loved science since I was a small child—I actually put my elementary school science teacher in my acknowledgments! As we’ve known for decades, there’s an immense amount of power in science—there’s a reason people use it to make fantastic medicine, devastating weapons, and all sorts of other delights and tragedies—but it’s not the answer to everything. Science, and its results, are raw material: essential for making something new, but not a solution on its own. In the novel, a lot of people expect science to produce a miracle: is some of this confidence misplaced? Absolutely. But does science get us closer to where we want to be? That’s an “absolutely,” too. Generally, though, I think people expect scientific discovery to produce some kind of holy grail for the world’s most complex problems, when any real solution is going to take so much more than that—not only good science, but good policy, good communication, good leadership, good ethics. In my novel, I wanted science to be an insufficient answer so that the rest of these elements could be more thoroughly explored.
You have worked in public health and emergency response for over 20 years. How has your professional experience informed your writing?
In the past two decades, I’ve helped local, state, and federal governments respond to everything from H1N1 influenza to the Ebola and COVID-19 viruses. I’ve also served in a variety of roles: from the back of an ambulance to private congressional offices, assisting private citizens in making choices about their personal medical care and also governors with decisions that affect everyone in their state.
This range of experiences has really given me visibility into the scope and impact of health-related decision-making—and there’s a lot of tension. How do we make decisions about what’s right for us, as individuals? How valid is our own personal morality in the context of greater society? At what point do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? These are the questions that have been driving headlines in recent years. Debates are raging about vaccination, abortion, and all sorts of other health-related crises, and for many, it’s quite distressing. No matter their opinion, these people feel like “the other side” just doesn’t understand their point of view or their values.
Thankfully, there’s a growing body of research that suggests an unsung technique may help build empathy across large political, social, and emotional divides—and that’s reading fiction. I can only hope that this story causes people to stop and think because that introspection might help us all understand each other better and heal our fragmented communities.
Your characters Charlie and Maggie are Marshallese. Tell us about why you chose to tell this story through characters with a deep connection to the Marshall Islands.
A major part of the story involves the characters studying DNA for mutations and other unusual sequences. Human DNA isn’t monolithic—which is to say that different populations carry variations in their DNA at different rates. I, like one of my characters, am a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene, which is 25 times more frequent in those of Western European descent. While I was writing this book, I researched other populations with unusual genetic profiles and came across Melanesia, which has a high incidence of archaic Denisovan sequences. I’ve also had the great privilege of traveling to some of the Pacific Islands and have fallen in love with the location and the people. I had already envisioned this story taking place partly in the Marshall Islands when my research turned up something I didn’t expect.
As I was sifting through scientific articles about ancestral DNA in the South Pacific, I also started turning up investigative journalism about how Marshallese children were being trafficked in the mainland U.S. via fraudulent adoption proceedings—as recently as 2018. As I discuss in the book, in the Marshall Islands, it is not uncommon for parents to place their child outside the home during periods when the family cannot provide support—but these arrangements are understood to be temporary. When the parents are on better financial and emotional footing, the child is returned. It’s a beautiful, supportive system. But these assumptions were manipulated by deceitful adoption brokers who facilitated permanent adoptions to turn a profit. At least one person has been convicted for a crime that affected dozens of families. Many of the children will never be returned.
This was heartbreaking to read. But the longer I sat with this story, the more I realized that it resonated with so many things I wanted to explore in my work: the meaning of biological and found families, the loss of children, both as individuals and as a biological function, and the struggles and responsibilities of parenthood. When I started writing this book, it was important to me that it be as factually correct as possible on a scientific level, but after uncovering the Marshallese adoption fraud, I felt like the story could be much more authentic on an emotional level, too. I can only hope that elevating this story, that I draw awareness to it—for the sake of the separated families, and to prevent such tragedies in the future.
Who is Charlie Tannehill, at her core?
Oh, Charlie. A wallflower by nature: reserved, risk-averse, and incredibly, incredibly reasonable. I wanted to write a story about someone like Charlie because the brasher, more daring heroes are always getting the attention! All jokes aside, I think Charlie’s careful, introspective persona makes her relatable to so many people. In real life, while dauntless characters like Maggie may get all the headlines, they aren’t that common. This isn’t a bad thing—there are so, so many heroines who’ve used their strength, courage, and moxie to tell truths and break barriers—but it’s important to realize they aren’t the average. And while we hold them up as aspirations, if everyone behaved like them, then heroics couldn’t be—their achievements wouldn’t be special. But people like Charlie make important contributions, too. By telling the story from her perspective, I hope to emphasize the contributions of the more reluctant and take some pressure off the notion that everyone needs to be a hero to act heroically.
This being said, to properly understand Charlie, you need to understand Maggie, too. I wanted to feature twins in my story to emphasize the concept of duality; the idea that something can be two things at once. I’m going to pivot back to the fundamentals of science here: if you recall your high school physics, you might remember that light can behave both as a wave and as a particle, even though these states shouldn’t coexist. It’s a paradox—just like I can love my kids unconditionally and also rage at them for leaving their dirty laundry on the floor for the 341st day in a row. In Charlie’s case, she starts the novel knowing exactly what she wants and she’s fairly rigid about it: she wants the normal life she was promised before the Limit and a close connection with her twin sister, and she certainly doesn’t want to have children—reasonable, considering the reality of her adoption. On the other hand, Maggie’s behavior confounds her: Charlie has a hard time understanding how someone could be so self-assured, so bold.
Unfortunately, the future Charlie wants is going to demand more and more of her. Things don’t go as planned: her job is changed, she’s separated from her sister, and the work with the Mendelia is a lot more ethically complicated than she originally understands. This requires Charlie to change and grow, and most importantly, to learn to take risks. This is something that comes easily to her sister, but Charlie must learn by rote. When Charlie embraces this, however, and she starts behaving more and more like her sister, she realizes just how much she’s able to accomplish. And just like Maggie, Charlie comes to understand the thrill—and addiction—of success. In the end, Charlie finds her happiness when she isn’t too shy, but isn’t too eager. She can maintain the best parts of herself while also bringing in the best parts of her sister. She develops confidence in herself to push past her natural limits, and when she does, she opens up a world of satisfaction for herself.
How did the COVID-19 crisis impact your writing?
One of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about for this novel was how to properly scope the global reaction to an existential threat to humanity. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a powerful analog—and based on my role working with governors at the time, I got to see a lot of that firsthand. Somewhat paradoxically, even though the pandemic was one of the deadliest events in our lifetime, the urgency that most people felt at the onset of the disease fell away in a matter of weeks. Scientific research shows that it’s difficult for most people to sustain such high levels of vigilance for such long periods. The body and the mind normalize certain things—even existential threats—and this can cause a puzzling underreaction to very serious hazards. Ergo, the global reaction described in the book follows a similar pattern to that seen in the pandemic: a period of panic, followed by acceptance and adjustment—with some adaptations feeling particularly bizarre. Those are the details that I think people find most interesting: behaviors and reactions that seem especially strange on their face but are especially reasonable in the context of the crisis.
In your book, the Mendelia is a scientific organization seeking to beat The Limit by incentivizing certain types of reproduction to seek a genetic breakthrough. How did you come up with this concept?
Ever since its publication in 2013, I’ve been fascinated by a study whose results have been dubbed “the mouse paradigm.” The researchers leading this work developed a thought experiment—which means no actual mice were harmed in this research—in which they gave their human subjects a “mouse” and told these subjects to either to protect its life or trade it away from some sum of money. The results astonished me: when offered no money, almost every subject chose to preserve the life of the mouse. This is to say that no one thought it was okay to kill the mouse for free; there was near universal agreement that the small “life” they held in their hands was worth more than $0. It was, as some of the subjects described, an issue of morality. But when offered $10, some subjects changed their minds. As that value increased, so did the number of subjects who turned over the life of their hypothetical mouse. This, of course, is an illustration of something that many know anecdotally: that everyone has a price. The study is more nuanced than this, but one of the major takeaways is that economic thinking and market pressures can erode moral values. And that’s something The Beauty of the End invites the reader to consider.
You’ve mentioned you see a connection between your book’s themes and the staggering challenges of climate change. Can you elaborate?
Like climate change, this book conceives of a species-ending disaster whose consequences will only be fully realized several generations into the future. Like climate change, this book suggests that the people of the present might have to make sacrifices in order to preserve a world for their children, grandchildren, and beyond. And while many people are incredibly willing to make extreme sacrifices for themselves, their children, their neighbors—sometimes even strangers—how far into the future does that goodwill extend? How much inconvenience and pain are we willing to endure in the present to protect a population we’ll never meet? Selflessness, I think, is easier when you have an immediate sense of its good. It’s so much harder to feel gratification when you, personally, may never see the effects of your sacrifices. And when we’re talking about climate change and other existential threats, I think it’s important to realize how hard—but necessary—present sacrifices may be.
The allegory of climate change extends into other aspects of the story as well, especially the ways in which we consider the responsibilities of individuals and institutions. For instance, asking Jane Doe to recycle her cans and bottles is often thought of as “rearranging the deck chairs” in comparison to the more substantive changes the energy industry needs to make. In the book, women around the world are asked to alter their reproductive choices in hopes of a chance mutation. While the vast majority will see no joy in their sacrifice, because it won’t produce the change that solves the Limit. Just like individual recycling, it can feel frustratingly futile—but it’s important that they keep trying. As Charlie learns at the end of the book, you can never tell if the change you make is the one that changes the world.
What is the meaning behind the book’s title, The Beauty of the End?
That the most beautiful things in our lives can be fleeting—and some gain their beauty because of it. To quote Joni Mitchell, “Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?” Humanity is beautiful. Children are beautiful. Their future could be too. I hope we don’t have to lose all of them in a crisis like the one in my book to realize this.
What’s next for you?
As a scientist-turned-policy wonk, I didn’t think necessarily think “fiction writing” would be a part of my life, and now I’m excited to see what might come of it. I particularly enjoy writing speculative fiction because it allows readers to deconstruct social norms in a safe space—an alternate reality—and really dig into questions about life, identity, motivation, and other greater truths.