Quarantine Reads about Quarantine

It’s weird that the last couple of books I’ve picked up totally randomly are about pandemics. It’s weirder still that I didn’t immediately put them down and have found them quite readable. People keep telling me about “Sweet Tooth”, a show about a pandemic on Netflix, and I watched the trailer and was like “ahh, hell no..not right now.” but for some reason, a gritty medical novel about a nurse caring for pregnant women and or their newborns dying from the 1918 pandemic in Dublin during WWI and the Irish Black and Tan War? I’m like hell yes, that sounds like some great before bed reading.

Emma Donoghue took the last draft of this novel to her publishers in March 2020….I’m guessing she didn’t know what was coming yet. I wonder what day in March it was? but at any rate, it’s pretty weird that you’ve been working for two years on a novel about the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed more people than WWI and then you take it to your publisher and then this thing happens….I know I’m superstitious but I might never write another book again, or if I did, I would make damn sure and well it was about how all these governmental desires: to infringe on people’s right to vote, to dismantle the daily functioning of labor unions, to prioritize profit over health, to take away a woman’s right to choose, to annihilate free speech with militarized response to peaceful protests…all just fell away as if by magic and there were beautiful rainbow colored taco trucks filled with lesbians on every corner…

Speaking of lesbians, (spoiler alert) maybe I liked this book so much because I could tell the main character was queer even though there wasn’t any actual evidence of this until the very, very end…but there she is living with her brother who is psychologically disabled from the war and riding her bike every day through the dirty, pandemic infested streets of Dublin to make her way to the sick maternity ward of the hospital where ladies on the brink of giving birth are sick with the influenza and in three days she saves several lives by knowing all kinds of tricks that she has learned from midwifery.

I mean, I’m not trying to say I guessed she was a lesbian because she knows all about vaginas. Au contrair! I have lived most of my adult life as a lesbian and I still pretty much don’t know what a uterus is.

Maybe that’s why I like this book…because it’s so incredibly visceral and gritty about the ladies’ inner parts that I feel like I learned something about Science and my own body…although truth be told, after reading it, if I am asked to identify the parts in the photo above, I would have to say that this person surgically had their legs removed and reattached to their torso because all of the organs are in the wrong place, but this just shows that the statement, “I never got about a C- in a Science class because I just never had the right teacher,” is an outright lie.

I’m gonna tell you what, nobody has ever sold pregnancy to me as a desirable condition, and this book certainly validated my holding that position for 50 years.

I think the book is so readable because it only takes place over three days and a whole lot of dramatic things happen. I think this book is a little melodramatic and over the top in its plotting because it takes place over three days and a whole lot of dramatic things happen. But I read the whole thing, and I keep thinking about it and I expect I will remember it for years and years to come. I liked the main character a lot. Maybe that’s why it didn’t bother me to read a pandemic book at this time. I just focused on the nurse main character who is so amazing, and then you think…wow…there really are so many people out there who are like this, who have done this for the last 18 months, and instead of feeling traumatized, you feel hopeful because people like that really exist.