Ever since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve been eager to read novels that explore what COVID was, and continues to be like. At the time, writers joked incessantly about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during an episode of plague in Renaissance England. How would we all use our time? Would we be writing masterpieces? Would the COVID pandemic generate a new, thrilling era of artistic production? Would everyone be writing a pandemic novel?
Seems like: no. Understandably, most people did not write incredible novels in 2020 and 2021, when they were busy homeschooling their kids, or trying not to go crazy while living in isolation, or barely surviving while working on the front lines. Less understandably, to my mind, as soon as the COVID vaccine hit, creative interest in the experience of living through a pandemic evaporated.
This became a personal issue for me because I was at high risk for complications from COVID, and in the fall of 2022, I got the virus and then developed Long COVID, as I’d both predicted and feared. I wanted to see my experience reflected in fiction, but I also wanted to see other people’s experiences: people on the front lines, in hospitals and in grocery stores. People who’d lost loved ones to COVID. Where were those books? For the most part, instead of writing about the pandemic, writers—and readers—seemed eager to move on, pretending that COVID hadn’t happened and wasn’t still a serious issue.
