BUZZ BOOK: Novel that predicted the pandemic
The new novel “Doctors and Friends” (Berkley), out now, by former ER doctor Kimmery Martin, focuses on a group of female friends from medical school. The pals are on a trip to Spain when a strange new virus begins rapidly spreading across the globe, upending daily life as they know it. No, not that virus. The introduction page to the book actually has a note to the reader: “The writing of this novel preceded COVID-19 and therefore there is no mention of the real-life pandemic.” We talked to Martin about having your fiction come to life.
You wrote a novel about a pandemic — and then a pandemic happened.
It’s been very surreal. I’ve always had a fascination with infectious diseases, and I had to do a lot of research during a part of my career in ER medicine. It’s obvious in hindsight, but infectious disease doctors have been sounding the drum for a long time that a pandemic is going to come, and how prepared are we? I had intended it as a cautionary tale.
You’ve left the ER, but you’re still a doctor. When do you have time to write?
During the pandemic, I volunteered in vaccine clinics. I had a great job offer a few years ago. I live in Charlotte, NC. The business district had an allergy clinic, and they wanted an ER doctor on site. I got this job where I could be in a room doing nothing. They warned me I would be bored. But it gave me time to finish my novel and work normal hours.
I am struck by how much you predicted.
SARS and MERS were wake-up calls. When I started writing this book, I had the virus as a form of super flu, like 1918. But then I decided to make up a virus, so I crowdsourced a bunch of total nerds at the CDC. There are big online groups of female doctors, and for the purpose of fiction, it had to be terrifying without everyone dying. With COVID-19, what was a big surprise [for the medical community] was how weird it turned out to be — all these different body parts affected in different ways.