Welcome & Covid in Fiction
This newsletter is free to the public, and appears infrequently due to my chronic illnesses. If you would like to support me, you can subscribe to my podcast's Patreon here. Although I'm on leave, this still helps. Otherwise, feel free to send me a couple bucks through Ko-fi.
Hello, friends and readers. I created this newsletter some time ago (initially, via Substack) in order to keep in touch with folks as Twitter became less reliable. I'm hoping to use it to post occasional updates and pieces about books, films, and pop culture more broadly.
Since contracting covid-19 last fall, I haven't had much energy to write or pitch stories. This newsletter will be a place to put down some of my thoughts when I have the energy to do so. At the moment, I am planning to focus mainly on books, since it's easier for me to read books than watch films, but I'm sure as Oscar season gets going I'll weigh in on some of the year's contenders.
If you want to hear my thoughts on some of this year's best books so far, you can listen to the most recent episode of Overinvested, in which my co-host Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and I discuss recent titles.
—
I thought I'd inaugurate this letter with some reflections on Madeline Miller's recent, bracing essay on long covid in the Washington Post and the subject of covid in publishing (and in Hollywood) more broadly. I don't plan to write about covid more or less than any other topic, but it has, of course, been on my mind a great deal during the past year, and I appreciated the candor with which Miller described her experience and called for action. She writes,
We desperately need access to informed care, new treatments, fast-tracked research, safe spaces and disability protections. We also need a basic grasp of the facts of long covid. How it can follow anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of infections. How infections accumulate risk. How it’s not anxiety or depression, though its punishing nature can contribute to both those things. How children can get it; a recent review puts it at 12 to 16 percent of cases. How long-haulers who are reinfected usually get worse. How as many as 23 million Americans have post-covid symptoms, with that number increasing daily.
All this is true, and immensely valuable for readers of the Post to hear. But I was perhaps even more affected by Miller describing being unable to write, even though I haven't read her books (they're on my list!): "Worst of all, I couldn’t concentrate enough to compose sentences. Writing had been my haven since I was 6. ... I kept looking through my pre-covid novel drafts, desperately trying to prod my sticky, limp brain forward."
Though Miller says she regained the ability to work, her story is not unique. As in all great disasters, covid has robbed us of current and future writers, artists, and other creative people; along with scientists, doctors, teachers, and all kinds of other people whose work could have a lasting effect on our lives.
This fact has not, however, been widely appreciated, largely because our government (here in America, at least), press, and other institutions are determined not to reckon with the casualties of the pandemic. One such institution is publishing, Miller's own industry. Recently, a trickle of books set during the pandemic have begun to be published, including Ann Patchett's recent release Tom Lake, and Caitlin Shetterly's Pete and Alice in Maine, which was published earlier this year. A number of thrillers have been set during the pandemic to make use of the locked-room setting of lockdown.
By and large, however, covid is not the central subject of these books: Pete and Alice in Maine, a bad book, focuses on a wealthy Manhattan family that moves to Maine during lockdown and focuses on the couple's marital problems rather than the virus, while Tom Lake (which I haven't yet read) uses the setting of lockdown as a frame for a mother to tell her children the story of her life. Last year, Elizabeth Strout published the most direct examination of the emotional strain of living through lockdown that I've read so far, Lucy by the Sea, but though that book has its strengths, it also focuses on a wealthy white couple who flee from New York to Maine. For the most part, books have steered away from dealing with the virus' toll on immunocompromised people and frontline workers. Miller's experience of long covid, and the inability to write, seems unlikely to appear in a novel soon, unless she writes it herself. Instead, I have read a large number of recently published books set, for no explicit reason, in 2017 or 2018.
Literary agents seem to be encouraging this avoidance, presumably because they (and editors) believe that books about covid will not sell. A couple years ago, FoxPrint Editorial ran a blog about whether to include the pandemic in manuscripts. At that time — admittedly, still during lockdown — the answer was "no." "I’ve been advising authors that I work with to set their manuscripts pre-2020," Chris Werner, a senior editor at Lake Union Publishing explained. "This makes for a far less complicated writing/editing experience because it allows authors to focus on the core story rather than trying to incorporate ever-changing details." This advice was probably sensible in 2021, when people — myself included — were not ready to read about an ongoing crisis.
By now, though, covid is deeply embedded in our society, whether the powers that be in the government, in publishing, or in Hollywood (where similar problems persist) like to admit it. Werner's suggestion that people set books pre-pandemic has borne out, with little indication that a trend of covid-era books will follow. I have heard agents giving similar advice to the above much more recently than early 2021, and giving it often. Now, authors, filmmakers, publishers, and film studios likely feel comfortable simply bypassing the subject altogether, since few people wear masks in public and the pandemic has been declared "over." (Even Miller's article appeared under the subject heading "Post-Pandemic.") That same blog post includes the following, surreal paragraph:
At some point, just as with 9/11, this global experience of pandemic is going to become a part of the collective culture that will undoubtedly be reflected in our literature. But just as many stories now make little specific reference to the Trade Towers falling and the radical shift in our society that followed, COVID-19 and quarantine may simply become part of the fabric of our fictional worlds—a thread in the tapestry, rather than a discrete swath of patchwork quilt.
Setting aside the bizarre impulse to compare 9/11 to covid, this hasn't really happened. Sometimes, a book or piece of media will casually mention covid, or lockdown, but if so, they tend to do so to push the subject aside (as did the first season of And Just Like That, which is set in a post-pandemic world). Media that seriously considers how people who have lost loved ones (sometimes several loved ones) to covid have tried to cope, or how people who have become disabled by the virus are surviving, is basically nonexistent, as far as I can tell. The best fictional representation of the experience of the pandemic that I've encountered so far was on The Good Fight, which depicted medical racism and a character with a form of long covid in its fifth season. By the next season, however, the topic had been dropped.
As someone who was disabled by covid, I find this immensely frustrating. Disabled people are vastly underrepresented in publishing and Hollywood to begin with, and being rendered invisible, especially when public policy directly affects your safety and benefits, is crushing. Even if a novel is unlikely to directly affect public policy, it can at least remind you that other people understand and share your experience. But though a single novel, film, or television show is highly unlikely to revolutionize American medical policy, those things can have an effect on how people think about illness. People often get health information from fictional media (a breakdown of studies on this topic can be found here), especially television. If our media simply pretends that covid and long covid don't exist, they will continue not to exist in the imaginations of readers and viewers, no matter how many people get infected, become chronically ill, or die.
—
Thanks to everyone for reading. In the coming weeks, I'll be sending out another post about a buzzy upcoming book by a popular author that propagates outdated ableist tropes. I hope you'll stick around to check it out.