‘Tilt,’ an earthquake novel set in Portland by Emma Pattee, comes out Tuesday

Like most Portlanders, Emma Pattee is worried about “the really big one.”

That is, of course, a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake registering in the high 8 and even 9 range that could happen in 50 years, 100 years, or before you finish reading this sentence.

That earthquake, the one we are all dreading, is the event that kicks off Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” out Tuesday from Simon & Schuster, which spans a day in the life of a very pregnant woman navigating Portland in the wreckage of the quake.

Pattee, 34, grew up in Oregon and has lived in Portland, mostly, since high school. She’s also a journalist who covers climate science. So she has experienced the generalized, sometimes fatalistic, anxiety many Portlanders have about the possible earthquake.

In 2019, when she was pregnant, Pattee, like the protagonist of her novel, Annie, was shopping at IKEA when the building began to shake.

“It came to me,” she said Thursday, over coffee in a hopefully earthquake-safe building. “This is the book I’m going to write.”

A lot happened in the intervening years – Pattee had a baby, there was a pandemic, she had another baby. She protested police brutality. Saw continuous images of dead children in Gaza on social media.

All of these things are part of her novel, though not explicitly.

Explicitly it is the story of Annie, who is very pregnant and trying to buy a crib at IKEA when the earthquake changes her reality and sends her on an odyssey through a broken city.

Because it is so well-researched and so true to the attitudes and locations of Portland, the book, which is fast-paced and entertaining, will certainly be read differently by people inside and outside the city.

Reading this book in Arizona? You will sail through it in two days, recommend it to your book club, maybe wonder if it’s been optioned by a film studio.

Reading it in, say, Rose City Park? You might stay up late researching which schools are earthquake-safe, reminding your husband of your emergency meeting point, run to Safeway to replenish your emergency water supply.

Pattee acknowledges this.

So far, readers who aren’t from Portland find the book “thrilling,” she said. And people who are from here? “Sometimes those conversations have become more intense.”

It’s impossible to read the book in Portland without imagining yourself in it, since it takes place right here. And it is written with the realism of a journalist, in a way that might make you question going to IKEA ever again.

(“The good news is that IKEA is fully retrofitted,” Pattee said over email.)

And, while she didn’t initially write “Tilt” to shock people into preparedness, Pattee hopes that that might be one of its results.

Not just personal preparedness either, like water, food and meet-up locations, but city-wide preparedness, especially when it comes to the earthquake safety of Portland’s public schools.

A critical scene in the book takes place at a school, which is one of the only landmarks Pattee fictionalizes. Instead of setting the scene at a real, existing school, she moved it to Revolution Hall, a former school, in an effort to not freak her local parent readers out too much.

But her look into the safety of Portland’s public schools, many of which she said are still not capable of withstanding a major earthquake, has turned into a bigger project.

“What started as my fiction dream and my fiction project and my nightmare obsession really turned into, ‘Is it possible we could shift this issue?’” she said.

“This is an issue that has really clear solutions,” Pattee added. “There’s a lot of other states that have dealt with this.”

While she hopes her work makes people safer, Pattee also struggles with the emotional impact her book might have on people with kids in Portland.

She’s not wrong that it could hit hard.

The scene at the school is devastating. But it is earned. Pattee spoke to experts of all kinds and researched how these moments would play out and how they have played out.

Anyone with kids who reads that scene, who believes Pattee did her homework, will struggle to send their children to school the next day.

‘“I don’t want to make another parent scared,” Pattee said. “And also, the earthquake is coming.”

– Lizzy Acker covers life and culture and writes the advice column Why Tho? Reach her at 503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com.

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