by JULIET WATERS

I have an easy time spotting Myla Goldberg in her hotel lobby, finishing up her e-mail. I figured I’d know her by her leg wear. Something like the horizontal bee striped tights she wore on the inside front cover of her first novel, Bee Season, or the flowered tights from the People magazine shoot, after the book became a bestseller.

Sure enough, there she is in bright purple corduroys with high tops, but she’d have to be wearing some pretty funky duds to distract me from the real attention grabber. “Check this out!” she says as she folds her computer into a sliver of a package that would make an index card feel fat. With the Hollywood option on Bee Season, released last week in the U.S as a movie starring Richard Gere, that computer probably isn’t way out of her budget. Still, this gleeful techno geek seems a far cry from the narrator of Wickett’s Remedy, her second novel, set during the great flu epidemic of 1918.

The epidemic killed more Americans in 10 months than all the 20th-century wars combined, though it seemed strangely absent from public consciousness until the current Avian flu crisis flooded the media. Goldberg had never heard of it herself until she read a New York Times article listing it as one of the five worst epidemics of all time. “Out of curiosity, I started reading about it. The more I read, the more I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is terrible.’ It was medieval in terms of its impact and virulence... I wanted to write about it because I wanted to explore the period, but I also wanted to explore how it is that we forget something like that.”

The frailty of memory in general is an important theme, but how an epidemic of that proportion gets virtually wiped out of the collective memory is still a mystery. “The simple answer people give for why that happened—which I actually don’t think is the big one—is that it was overshadowed by WWI. And yeah... WWI was happening at the time, but more importantly, attitudes towards sickness and death were very different in the first part of the 20th century than they are now. Sickness and death were taken as a matter of course. There were epidemics all the time, people died of yellow fever all the time, women died in childbirth, a lot of people didn’t grow up. But people didn’t dwell on it, the attitude was to just move on...”

And true enough, how many Montrealers know that at the turn of the last century we had an infant mortality rate second only to Calcutta? The elderly didn’t tend to fair too well either. But as Goldberg points out, “The funny thing with this flu is that it was mostly hitting people in their early 20s, people in the prime of their life.”

People like Lydia Kilkenny Wickett, a newlywed originally from South Boston, until she marries way up. Within a year of her marriage to a sensitive, quirky Boston medical student, Lydia is dealing with the grief of losing loved ones and volunteering as a nurse in a bizarre true-life medical trial on prisoners and draft dodgers.

Wickett’s Remedy is a compelling and surprisingly funny read, but it’s hard to see it as a movie. Goldberg, it turns out, is fiercely proud of this, despite the perks of a lucrative film option. “I’m a very oppositional person. Put a label on me and the first thing I’m going to try and do is shrug it off and show you how you’re wrong. So in a way I wouldn’t be surprised if part of me was like, ‘Okay, let’s see you try and turn this one into a movie.’” Since Bee Season, the movie, has been getting way more mixed reviews than Bee Season, the novel, Goldberg might be on the right track. Whether or not Wickett’s Remedy ever gets optioned, it’ll be a great bedside companion during flu season.

Wickett’s Remedy by Myla Goldberg,
Doubleday, hc, 326pp, $34.95