Last December, as the yet unidentified Coronavirus began causing deadly pneumonia in Wuhan, I spent every minute away from my mothering duties reading Meg Elison's Road to Nowhere trilogy. Starting with the Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison not only explores what happens when a deadly virus decimates the world’s population. Her virus of choice targets especially women and children. She explores what would happen if women became the world’s scarcest resource, and what roles queer and trans folks could play when women are all but gone. This is feminist pandemic literature at its best.
After losing myself in the world of the Unnamed Midwife, it was surreal to wake up one day and find out that we were living through a real-life pandemic. Fresh out of Elison’s dystopian scenario, my mind raced ahead. Through what chain of events would the Coronavirus bring societies and government to their knees? When would the food supply chains break down, the grids crash, the famine start? When would we begin scavenging for food and raiding our neighbors’ pantries, trying not to touch the decomposing bodies?
Wait, we're not there yet. Phew, what a relief.
Before you tell me that I must be a masochist to read this kind of literature, let me confess: I am an environmentalist. Since my nature-loving conscience was born twenty years ago I’ve been lugging my environmental grief around like a backpack full of rocks. Working with the Extinction Rebellion movement, I’ve spent the last 18 months trying to wake up humanity to the horrors of the climate crisis that is upon us. I wish it were all a hoax, but despite the denialism, there is zero doubt that western industrial civilization has entered its endgame.
This is scary stuff. Denial is a natural response. People seem surprised by the current pandemic. They long to return to “normal.” But anybody who's been paying attention knows that normal is soon to be extinct, along with the 200 species of plants and animals that go extinct every day and the mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s climate mostly stable and capable of supporting life for billions of years.
Alarms have been sounding for the past five decades. Burning fossil fuels heats the globe. We are destroying nature. Yet the train of industrial capitalism has done nothing but accelerate. Then the Coronavirus pandemic pumped the brakes.
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My existence is deeply marked by cognitive dissonance. I am a fat, middle-aged woman going about my business, carting my 3-year-old daughter along. My life is made up of household chores, parenting and seeing clients in my counseling/astrology practice. Writing and meditation are done on stolen time.
My little family leads a comfortable life and we are vastly privileged to live within our means. My husband loves his chaplain job at our local hospital, and we live in a small town with great weather, low pollution, relatively low levels of violence and no city chaos. Here, nature is still strong, and you can immerse yourself in her by going a short distance to the beach or the forest.
But when you know what I know, you carry a silent burden. The way humanity is organized is increasingly unstable and fragile. Not only are the natural disasters and public health emergencies going to line up like the unremitting waves of the ocean, one after the other, sometimes in a lull, sometimes on a terrifying roll. These crises will tug harder at the frayed and fragile fabric of society.
The recent protests for racial justice and civil rights for Black, Indigenous and people of color have brought up an array of feelings: grief for the ongoing murder of brown people, anger that white people haven't done more sooner, but ultimately relief. Everyone can finally see that violence and racism are a feature, not a bug of capitalism; that modern countries are invariably shaped by colonization, genocide and slavery. In so starkly revealing injustice and forcing everyone to pause and reflect, the Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to the greatest civil rights movement in history.
The problems are far from over. Something’s got to give, and what’s giving is the climate. Its unraveling was set in motion long ago. Even if this quarantine became eternal and we sharply cut our emissions right now, we will still be roasted in the next few decades by the fossil fuel emissions we produced in the past five. Despite the quarantine’s effect on lowering emissions, we are still on track to have the hottest summer ever recorded.
Is this depressing you? I can feel the heaviness as I write. The thing is, I am never free of this grief, no matter how hard I giggle with my little girl while playing ball or hide-and-seek, writing cards to her friends plastered with too many stickers, or making homemade strawberry popsicles. No matter how light my heart is around my child who gets to live in one of the most beautiful remaining forests of the world, it is also heavy with the knowledge that we are heading for collapse.
While some people pine for the Disneylands and cruise ship vacations the pandemic took away, I say, kiss it all goodbye. There’s not enough Earth for everyone to have an American Dream. You think you've lost so much? Get ready to lose much more.
It was in this, my usual morose state of mind, that I read Meg Elison's pandemic trilogy. Her take on the end of this world is intense, painful and violent. She dishes out the truth starkly but sends smart, endearing and scrappy protagonists to hold you by the hand. We can't help but be charmed and follow. I clung to Ina, then Edda (Eddie) and Flora. I cried when I ran out of trilogy, but these amazing characters live on in my imagination.
We don't read pandemic or dystopian literature just to entertain ourselves. We read it to imagine the things we cannot seem to grasp: the collapse, and most importantly the survival. The seductive idea I find at the heart of Meg Elison’s Road to Nowhere trilogy—which I also found in Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—is that maybe I can survive too. And maybe, just maybe, my survivor friends and I could create a better incipient society when the dust settles.
So call me a masochist for trying to imagine our horrible near-future. I am also trying to imagine a less horrendous aftermath. Above everything else, I pray that it's not a failure of imagination that stops us from creating a livable future on an inhabitable planet. And imagination is something Meg Elison has in spades.
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Meg Elison’s first novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife won the Philip K. Dick Award and has sold more than fifty thousand copies. She recently published Big Girl, a fabulous collection of stories and short pieces, and her YA novel, Find Layla, will be released on September 1st. What follows is the interview Meg graciously gave me on day 51 of this pandemic quarantine.
MM.-Your bio says you “write like you’re running out of time.” What do you mean by that?
ME.-It’s an outright theft from Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton. Hamilton and Lin Manuel both lived around infectious disease, difficult conditions and people who died far too young. They didn't expect the luxury of old age to give them time to write. They needed to write as much and as fast as they could ‘cause that might be all the time they’d get. I’ve outlived all my own predictions of when I would die, so I don't have the luxury of expecting old age to give me the time to do this. If I’m going to do it, it has to be now.
MM.-Did you always plan for this story to be a trilogy, and when you wrote it, did you imagine that a viral pandemic was just around the corner?
ME.-I didn't originally write it as a trilogy. I wrote the first book as a stand alone and realized it had the potential to keep going like for a century in story time, so I went back and wrote the frame tale that begins the first book just to see what would happen. It was a big gamble and I'm glad it worked out.
I didn't fully anticipate a pandemic. Since Midwife was published I’ve been associated with a number of different outbreaks like the Zika virus, because it was so deadly to pregnant people in particular. But anyone who has any knowledge of world history knows that there will be pandemics and they are always one of the greatest threats to our safety and civilization. There are examples all over the world of how pandemics slow down progress and public works, and disrupt communities. You don't have to look far: the 1908s with the AIDS crisis, 1918 with the Spanish Flu. It's easy to look like a psychic when you write about a pandemic. Then the next one happens and everybody says, “Aha! You knew!”
MM.-Are you finding yourself in the spotlight again?
ME.-I don't root for bad things to happen, but when they do, like reproductive freedoms being rolled back in many states, and people say, “This reminded me of your book.” I say, “I'm glad you found my work, but what a terrible time to be alive.”
I wanted to write about a pandemic because in my research I became keenly aware of a gender asymmetrical quality to whether people take it seriously, or whether the right kind of aid is disbursed. Those asymmetric qualities were not only problems of policy but problems of biology. In college I learned that almost all of our medical research was conducted on men only, and there are enough differences in our physiology that it’s a great detriment to women. We’re seeing the results in heart disease, in crash test dummies, in so many places where women’s bodies are not considered. I started reading about diseases more likely to affect women, and to affect them more harshly. Auto-immune disorders and inflammations of all kinds—hemorrhagic fevers being the most extreme form of inflammation—are much worse for women than they are for men.
I got wrapped up in this idea of, what if it was in every way an asymmetric apocalypse? What if it was much too big for us to get a hold of? It was irresistible.
MM.-And what riskier time to hemorrhage than giving birth? One idea I got from your book is that if women are so scarce, they are coveted by violent men, but also incredibly precious.
ME.-I started reading about gender parity, and how that affects almost everything. Evolutionary research indicates you can reduce the population of men down to one out of every hundred people and not affect the birth rate at all. But if you decrease the amount of women by half you severely affect the birth rate because the ability to be pregnant and give birth is very different than the ability to impregnate. I read about societies that have an extreme gender disparity for reasons of self-selective abortion and sometimes female infanticide and even a small degree of disparity, a 1.1 to 1 or 1.2 to 1 ratio of men to women leads to an increase in the crime rate. Not just in violent crime but all crime. A fundamental balance is upset.
MM.-Did you have an initial agenda about that when writing this book?
ME.-It’s definitely an agenda that comes out of my boundless rage. The more I realized how deeply unfair things were, the more enraged I became. I had a couple of friends doing grad work at the time in birth trauma. I learned how many people suffer birth trauma and how disconnected from the human experience medicalized birth has become. It was just another layer of fury for my feminism when I was a bit younger. You can't remake the world, you can remake a little part of it and you can definitely do good work, but if you are a novelist, you can be God.
MM.-You can remake the world in your mind. Did you choose Ina’s name based on the iconic and revolutionary midwife, Ina May Gaskin?
ME.-Yes. I read a bunch of her books when I was learning about midwifery. It was eye-opening. A society that reveres midwives would have a few heroes, and Ina May Gaskin would definitely be among them.
MM.- My grandma was a country midwife in the 1930s in the wilds of northern Mexico. She delivered thousands of babies without formal training. Another reason I was really touched by your protagonist.
ME.-There’s a field guide for midwives with experience in the field but no medical education. They have incredible amounts of knowledge, they just don't have the same vocabulary. They measure dilation by the width of their fingers instead of by centimeters. They describe the position of the fetus in the womb without technical terminology. It helped me describe a society of lay midwives.
MM.-It seems to me that Ina is a bridge between the old knowledge and the new.
ME.- In more than one way. She has the country midwife knowledge and a nursing degree and the combination of the two is incredibly powerful.
MM.-You are writing about a world after the collapse of Western civilization where the equipment is not all there, but they still had remnants of prior knowledge because they had books.
ME.-Indeed, and people don't forget things like germ theory or how important it is to sterilize your equipment. As much as skill loss would be a problem for that society, I thought, what would be the things they would definitely hold onto? A sterile field for operation was one.
MM.-How much do you love reading about really plutonian, scorpionic, dark, scary stuff?
ME.-Anything with that description is my favorite. I grew up reading horror for the most part: H.P Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King. I grew up seeking out chthonic shit, and I'm actually surprised my debut novel was not horror. People say it's close enough.
MM.- Does your tolerance threshold for violence or horror ever vary?
ME.-Yes. When I've experienced violence in my own life, I want to seek it out less. For example the recent video of Ahmaud Arbery being shot while jogging, makes it very difficult for me to tolerate gunshots. But I also had an early exposure to intense violence and that set my parameters wider than the average person.
MM.- What was your childhood like?
ME.-I grew up very poor with abusive parents. I still don't understand a non-violent relationship between parent and child, and can’t relate to people whose parents like them. I lived in the kind of neighborhoods very poor people live in. Before I turned ten I saw a murder in progress, I witnessed the immediate result of a number of murders and was in the middle of large-scale police raids. My perspective was very different from that of most of my classmates at Berkeley.
MM.-Tell me about your motivation for exploring queer and trans themes.
ME.-I am queer. I mostly dated women when I was younger and I assumed I'd marry a woman, but heteronormativity is a hell of a drug, so I did marry a man. But our circle of friends is extremely queer. I can go days without seeing a straight person. I live in a communal household of all queer people, everybody’s poly(amorous), and a lot of my friends and people very close to me are trans. I wanted to explode notions of gender. I’ve gotten the best fan mail from people who are still figuring out who they are, from people whose grandkids are coming out as nonbinary, and from people who are recognizing themselves in fiction in a way that they never have before. In everything I write I want to include people who are in my real life, which is overwhelmingly queer.
MM.-I deeply appreciate queer culture for teaching me a lot about anti-oppression work, and as a woman of color I've found the most solidarity in my queer friends.
ME.-The queer community intersects in so many wonderful ways with other marginalized identities. It’s where I learned how to make peace with my body, accept being fat, how to deal with being poor and construct my language around that. It is the first and best place I have felt safe.
MM.-Tell me about your choice to include Mormon characters in your trilogy and whether that is part of your heritage.
ME.-When I wondered who would make it through a pandemic, I knew Mormons have the resources in place.
MM.-They have six months’ worth of food in their pantries.
ME.-Often two years' worth. I did not grow up LDS although my husband John and several close friends did. John was a devout Mormon born in the covenant. He did a mission in Argentina, which is why he is fluent in Spanish. He would not be who he is without that background but he's no longer involved. I find the LDS church both compelling and irritating. It is anti-feminist, it´s really grappled to do right by its queer members. I chose to write Mormon characters because I was looking for something specifically and peculiarly American. When I was researching prepper culture and the reasons and ways people prepare for the Apocalypse—gathering resources, storing water and food—John would point out, “Yeah, my parents did that. Of course we had a fifty gallon drum of flour.” As a religious subculture, Mormons are seldom portrayed and sometimes sensationalized. I wanted to write about them from a deep understanding, but still as an outsider.
If you truly know a community you will find things to love in it, even if their beliefs are antithetical to yours: how good they are with their children, or how strong their community is in the face of hunger. They have a working knowledge of their scripture that many Christian sects don't cultivate in their young people. I found a lot to love in Mormons.
MM.-What a great setup for exploring all the colors of the queer rainbow. Put diverse survivors in a fictional terrarium and see what happens.
ME.-That pressure of people trapped together and grinding against each other was incredibly compelling to me. I couldn't get enough of that, and the weirder and the more alien they are to each other, the better.
MM.- When the world falls apart, you don't tell us what the government did or when the airports stopped working. You give us the day to day details of survival. If this were a movie, you put the movie camera on the shoulder of one character, you stay right there. How did you go about building this world?
ME.-I put myself in my characters’ position and imagined what the immediate difficulties would be. I looked at it as a series of problems to be solved and obstacles to be overcome. It took shape easily and occasionally surprised me with things I didn't plan. I pictured what happens when you can't drive or walk across a bridge to get to the other side of a river. There are boats. Do you know how to drive a boat?
MM.-You have such a great imagination. Did your research happen before or during the writing?
ME.-I did a fair amount before because I needed to make sure that my idea would work. Was there a disease more likely to kill women than men? As I wrote I encountered problems with which I didn't have any experience: What is the likelihood of getting sick drinking unfiltered rainwater? Would monoculture crops bounce back if they stopped being tended? What cross-pollinates and what doesn’t? How long does it take to grow potatoes and would your kids die of starvation while you wait?
MM.-How did the original idea come to you?
ME.-Sitting in school during finals I was thinking, “How often do pandemic lit and post-apocalyptic sci-fi books have a female protagonist?” I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Everyone says, “write the book you want to read,” and that was it. I had my last final 11 am on a Tuesday. That afternoon I sat down with my laptop and wrote the first thirteen thousand words.
MM.-You were ready. Have you always known this much about survivalism?
ME.-Yes and no. Certain parts of survivalism are just life under poverty, things I know how to do because I haven't had the luxury to have others do them for me. Doing laundry without a washing machine; how to critically evaluate expired canned goods and make the best possible version of a dish without the right ingredients. I was not familiar with deep food storage, tactical gear, the best knife for somebody who’s alone in the wilderness, whether it´s possible for an untrained person to steal a boat and learn how to drive it, how difficult is it to care for yourself with a fever.
MM.-Did you learn to shoot guns at a shooting range?
ME.-I grew up with guns. That was familiar to me. Since my father was in the military and your standard issue redneck is obsessed with guns, that part was taken care of.
MM.-How hard was it to write the violence? Rape scenes and selling slaves?
ME.-As a child well versed in violence I was suspicious of authors who kept violence at arm’s length and were afraid to engage with it. On the other end, I’ve encountered books where sexual violence was too detailed, too up close and definitely eroticized for the reader. I learned to write in the middle: what was actually happening and what the person who experienced it would be willing to say about it. From my own trauma and having people open up to me about theirs, I learned to listen carefully to what they say or don't say. Trying to guess what the listener thinks of them is part of the experience of revelation. I wanted to write it exactly as I've known it, in a way that includes my experience but doesn't make it a sport.
MM.-What are your favorite pandemic or dystopian books?
ME.-Children of Men by PD James, also a reproductive pandemic, and Stephen King’s The Stand, were deeply influential to me. I really admire The Stand because it gets into the nitty gritty work it would take to recover from a pandemic. Things I've never seen any other author consider, like the fact that the city of people that forms after the plague has a body disposal committee to contain the public health threat. When the power gets turned back on, every TV, radio, light switch, every blender in the city that was left running gets turned back on. King also talks about collateral die-off, people who didn´t die of the plague but died of the immediate lack of services. Someone dies of appendicitis during the pandemic because they didn't have access to a hospital. It's brilliant and woven seamlessly into the story.
There's also Starhawk. I love The Fifth Sacred Thing, it is my favorite book of all time. It follows an eco-feminist utopian city.
MM.- I love The Fifth Sacred Thing too!
ME.- I moved to San Francisco because of The Fifth Sacred Thing. It's not 1967 and it's not 2067, but I'm glad I'm here. It’s a good place to ride out the end of the world. When I think of wild plants I can eat, when I think of the amount of rainfall. We could be worse off.
MM.-We can live here without having to heat our homes. It’s a little pocket where we have no snow, tornadoes or hurricanes. Don't tell anyone.
ME.-I know, if the word gets out… We could live here without power for the rest of our lives, not a problem.
MM.- How much do you think we prepare for life through literature?
ME.-Almost everything I decided about who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live I learned from books. Books are essential for people whose parents are very different from them, or are not very good role models. If you are the only queer person you know, your friends are in books. I learned everything: practical skills, my manners, my cosmology, from books. Books created and deepened my capacity for empathy. I am made of books in every possible sense.
