“Why is the pandemic mentioned so much in Dweller?”–Media Literacy and Real-World Consequences

The primary relief I have at the audiobooks no longer being freely available but now requiring purchase is that they are more likely to be read by the people who are truly interested and therefore the right audience (even if it amounts to *checks notes* six people) instead of those just grabbing it because it’s free.

Buried amongst all the whining about “wokeness” (seriously, do you hear yourselves) was the “I would’ve liked this better if the pandemic wasn’t mentioned so much.”

The book takes place in 2020.

The book is written in first person.

The book’s protagonist is immunocompromised with an autoimmune disease.*

<insert “I don’t know what I expected” gif>

This is not hidden information–this is right in the text. One doesn’t even need think hard to figure it out. The jacket copy says “amidst the 2020 pandemic” because that is the premise: Norah has nowhere to go, cannot sell the house, and is extremely isolated because it is 2020.

There were no vaccines. No antivirals. Hospitals were overwhelmed; sirens went by constantly and patients were stacked in hallways. And Norah, as explicitly stated in the text, is at high risk. Not only of COVID-19 but, if she did pick up the virus, she would have to stop taking her immunosuppressants to fight it and then risk a relapse of her disease (this has, in fact, happened to a friend of mine).

Do you know how complicated things become when you relapse? Did you know that the previous medications that worked to control your immune system might not work anymore? That it can take a year or more of trying to treat it before you’re moved to a different therapy, which means a year or more of irreversible damage being done to your body as your own immune system attacks you? (ASK ME HOW I KNOW) It’s not a “maybe I die or maybe I don’t” situation for many people–it’s a “maybe I die or maybe I have my remission set back and I’ll be so sick I’ll wish I was dead” and if you’ve never had your body turn on you before, you cannot understand what a threat that is.

If a single woman like her gets sick, she also has no one. No one to look after her pets. No one to check in on her. She could get sick and die in her house in a new town where she barely knows anyone and no one would know. This is a very real and valid fear for single people.

Repeating, again: the book is written in first-person POV.

Norah is going to approach every interaction with a new person with these factors in mind. Because as the “virtue signal” crowd do not seem to understand: I am not, as a writer, trying to “virtue signal” things, I am merely writing the character as she exists. This is her personality.

I have written a number of books in first person; they are each shaped by the character I’m writing, from the structure to the voice to the pacing. I realize there is a tendency for shitty inexperienced writers to use first person without understanding point-of-view and what it means and treat it as bland, and readers might be accustomed to that, but I am not one of them; if I land on a story needing to be told that way, then it’s going to reflect the character very closely. First-person means intimacy with the POV–you get their thoughts, their views, and how they approach the world; what they notice and what they don’t mention are all part of character-building.**

This is why, in contrast to Norah, Thea in Watcher–which takes place only a year after Dweller–is less concerned about getting sick and more overwhelmed with suddenly being around people at her surprise party, since she has tremendous social anxiety and has been isolated for eighteen months. ***

Dweller is from Norah’s point of view so she’s going to acknowledge masking and social distancing because this is what it’s like to be in her head.

She’s also going to worry about her cats because they are her priority.

She’s going to worry about money because she’s a freelancer who is broke during a time when a lot of jobs had uncertainty.

All of this is authentic to her character and the story. This is in the text.

“I don’t need to be reminded over and over”–don’t you? Because I’m pretty sure folks do, in fact, need to be reminded, because I don’t see much difference between people complaining about it in a book and people complaining now when they’re reminded that others still need to mask because of risks to themselves or loved ones.****

There are very few things I take personally but this is one of them–because I have to explain this over and over to people.

I am sick. I am on two immunosuppressants. I am isolated, still, because there is no one I can trust to take simple precautions.

I am single and if I even get the flu I would have no one to help me–three of my cats need medicating (one every eight hours), and if something happens to me, they have no one who can do this for them. I am the sole provider for my household and if I get a virus that can cause cognitive damage, I’ll no longer be able to work since I’m a writer and require my brain.

And I am surrounded by people who are “tired of it”, from strangers who have harassed me while I’m grocery shopping to waiting for bloodwork at the hospital around unmasked people who are clearly sick to family members who make snarky remarks instead of offering to rapid test so I can be included at holiday dinners. People who would rather I disappear than see me going about my business in a mask because it makes them feel a certain way.

I don’t care when people don’t like my books or anyone else’s. I do care about attitudes that affect real lives in the real world, whether they be ones that promote transphobia, racism, sexism, or, yes, complaining that some people care about masking and precautions. I care that as a society, people have memory-holed 2020 and act like it didn’t happen, while I have to worry that going past people hacking in the aisles at the pharmacy when I pick up medication is going to unravel the delicate balance of my health and my entire life. I care that no one seems to think about other people.

If we don’t talk about 2020, if we don’t talk about airborne viruses and the basic public health measures denied to us by our governments, if we don’t talk about the challenges chronically ill people live with, even in fiction, then how do we talk about it in real life? Without talking about trauma, nothing will change. Nothing will get better. Nothing is learned from all that loss. That is literally the thrust of the book.

Norah’s mentions of pandemic living in that book represent a fraction of the mental calculations people like her–and like me, like friends of mine, like many readers–actually go through on a daily basis. There are, in fact, plenty of people who think I didn’t go far enough with it. And if being reminded of what 2020 was like and what 2025 continues to be like for many of us ruins your escape, imagine what the rest of us are living with.

…anyway, it’s currently on sale. Buy my book if you’re not scandalized by paper plates and people who are conscious of incurable airborne viruses.

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* While it’s not named, some of you might be able to read between the lines and have an idea.

** Truly, this is killing me. There’s been this rash of whining that Livi’s inconsistent as a character because she makes bad decisions in Solomon’s Seal that don’t prioritize her daughter even though she claims her daughter is the most important thing to her. Yes, because she is not a great mom! She’s a young woman who had to grow up too fast with no good parental role models. She’s doing her best. It’s better than her parents were but it’s still not great. She tells you her daughter is the most important thing to her, and it’s probably true, but she’s never really thought about what that means in terms of her own actions. It’s in the fifth book, dealing with her own mom and having a mental health breakdown, that she really starts to understand she’s not very good at this either. This is literally part of her character arc.

I’m dismayed at the number of people who do not understand a story filtered through a character’s perspective is perhaps not telling you objective truth and/or part of their arc.

*** This is also why Waverly, whose books are set right now in 2024/2025, goes from not thinking about it a whole lot in The Killing Beach to obsessively worrying about air filtration later on–someone she loves is at risk with a heart condition and that changes her entire perspective. Her obsessive tendencies and anxiety means she thinks about it 10x more than even Norah does–that’s her character.

People are different. This is reflected in books. If you want every character to act exactly one way, maybe fiction is not for you.

**** Also because despite spending the first couple of chapters establishing the situation, there is still whining “Why didn’t she just leave the house?” Because “has no savings and cannot just sell the house given the real estate situation while everyone is dying of a novel virus” apparently wasn’t clear. 🙃