Debutiful

In 2022 and 2023, writers I interviewed (as part of a part-time gig) were always quick to assure me that their book was not a “COVID novel.” I understood why. Nobody wanted to be reminded of the months they’d spent locked up alone in their homes, of wiping down delivery box surfaces, of the endless sirens that’d ripped through the silence.

I’d written a version of my debut novel, Westward Women, before the pandemic. But I rewrote it after 2020. As a result, it is in many ways a “COVID novel.” In it, a mysterious infection prompts women to migrate westward toward the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1973. Rather than trying to trace the contagion back to a patient zero or find its biological cause (or cure), the book follows three women caught up in the country’s anxious riptide of response to something they cannot fully understand. It’s a book interested in the ways certain groups of people (because of their gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.) are more at risk of catching contagions; the way people seem to get sick and better (or not) without much rhyme or reason, breeding rumored sources of danger or salvation; and the way that attempts at quarantining can make one long so deeply for movement, for people, for connection, for change that it feels physical. The book is an expression of what I came to realize in the wake of our own pandemic: that contagions are not just biological, but social.

My novel is not alone in its interest in the social, rather than biological, implications of contagion. In fact, rather than thinking of books post-2020 as “COVID novels,” I’d suggest we think about them as joining a long lineage of “social contagion novels,” or novels that thoughtfully, controversially, and often thrillingly engage with the social aspects of the communication of something nominally unwanted from one person to another.