Don’t Cure Me, the debut novel by Catherine Foulkrod, follows a young woman navigating a world where illness determines every aspect of life, from social status to where people are allowed to live. As doctors race toward a medical breakthrough and society reduces human worth to blood-test numbers, a group of outsiders begins to challenge the very foundations of the system. Inspired by the history of the autoimmune disorder thrombocytopenia, the novel examines illness, surveillance, gender, and the violence of measuring human value.
Don’t Cure Me will be published on January 26, 2027 by McSweeney’s and is available for preorder now.
Catherine Foulkrod is a writer based in Naples, Italy. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Bookforum, Forever Magazine, El Malpensante, and exhibition catalogs for Thomas Dane Gallery and Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin. She is also the co-founder and director of The Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature of the Arts.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Don’t Cure Me, designed by Daniele Catellano, along with a Q&A with Foulkrod about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
While writing, I wasn’t thinking about the cover at all, though I did have very vivid images of the novel’s world in my mind, the architecture and landscaping, textures and light, the odd visual sensibility of things often being in extreme closeup but simultaneously alienating and removed. Also I was doing a lot of research in old medical handbooks, which are full of amazing diagrams and slides, and I was constantly looking up what certain cells actually looked like, or what the actual needles used in various procedures in the book were like, or searching for photos of the bruises and red spots that are symptoms of ITP—the blood disorder that is at the center of the book. So I had a ton of scientific imagery that was source material for the writing.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The design process with the team at McSweeney’s was very involved. They sent me an initial questionnaire asking about the specific settings and objects in the book, any moods or vibes I had in mind, and if there was anything I felt strongly about NOT depicting (a question I deeply appreciated—I remember writing something like “please, no realistic images of people on my cover”). I also sent them images of bone marrow slides, which I found gorgeous in their own right, just the organic forms and the colors of the smears. And I sent images of some paintings by Cecily Brown, whose work I love, that I felt evoked some of the deeper themes in the book.
McSweeney’s very talented designers, Justin Carder and Sunra Thompson, came back to me with a ton of ideas that ranged from the very minimal to utterly maximalist. We brainstormed a lot in a very fun and free way. McSweeney’s really encourages thinking about the book as a physical 3-D object and the different ways you can play with that. At one point they proposed an actual like squishy blood bag as a cover, and there were some cool ideas with layered cut outs. Eventually we decided on doing something inspired by the bone marrow slides and Justin and Sunra recommended the designer/illustrator Daniele Castellano, who has both a background in the sciences and painting, and is known for creating spectacular and unsettling worlds.
And as for the paintings of Cecily Brown, we didn’t discard that idea. Instead, my editor Rita Bullwinkel decided to publish them alongside an excerpt of my novel in the upcoming McSweeney’s Issue 84, which will be out this November. I’m absolutely thrilled with the layouts I’ve seen and how the pairing of the text and those paintings brings out totally different aspects of the book.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I had been unconvinced with some early iterations of the cover, which I think is very normal in these kinds of processes, so I was a bit nervous. But then we flipped the color palette from dark blacks and purples into more fleshy pinks and bruised yellows, and they came back to me with Daniele’s stunning illustration that masterly captures the slide-like feel––it’s fluid and transparent qualities––and my nervousness immediately dissipated. I was amazed by the strong impact it had on me. Also, the font was a wonderful surprise that I totally wasn’t expecting.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
This cover to me is a bit of a litmus test for the reader, like are you willing to step into this world? It’s not a book for the squeamish, I guess, and you get that from the cover. On the one hand, this cover is quite literal. I sent it to a friend who knew nothing about the actual contents of the novel and asked him what he thought. He said, it feels like “a story about a battle with a medical or diagnostic condition…” and is “distinctly visceral or ‘lab slide’ like,” which is kind of spot-on. Or I had another friend who read the book but hadn’t seen the cover, and she likened parts of it to the films of Cronenberg, and this cover gives that a bit. But then on the other hand, this cover is also very beautiful. And I think the “lab slide” qualities also reveal how this novel is not just a simple world that you enter, it’s a world experienced through a very particular observational lens that questions scientific “objectivity” and gives space to the unreliability and messiness of subjective experience. And the font to me elegantly shows the sci-fi element, but in a toned-down way. Like this isn’t a classic sci-fi book. The genre is just a vehicle or container for an allegory, and at its core, the book is (hopefully) doing something much more subtle and poetic.