Myla Goldberg

photo credit: Getty

Myla Goldberg grew up in Laurel, Maryland, escaping to Ohio to attend Oberlin College. Her best-selling first novel, Bee Season, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000. It has been adapted to film and widely translated. Her second novel Wickett's Remedy grew out of her fascination with the 1918 influenza epidemic. Her third novel, The False Friend, concerns a woman trying to untangle a 20-year-old memory and explores the complexities of moral judgment, the fallibility of memory, and the adults that children become. Myla's short stories have appeared in Harpers and Failbetter, among other places. Her book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Bookforum. In addition to her novels, she has written an essay collection and a children's book. She sings and plays accordion and banjo in the Brooklyn art-punk band, The Walking Hellos. She writes and teaches in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, Jason Little, and their two daughters. MylaGoldberg.com Twitter Facebook

From an interview by Sarah Anne Johnson

Wickett's Remedy is set in 1918 in South Boston during the influenza epidemic. What interested you about writing a historical novel, particularly about this subject?

I wasn't interested in writing a historical novel. The subject grabbed me by the neck and I had to follow it. I had finished Bee Season and it wasn't out yet. It was that in-between year when you're done but you're just waiting. I knew I was ready to launch into something else but I didn't know what it was going to be. I was reading an article in the Times that listed the five worst epidemics of all time and the 1918 influenza epidemic was on that list, and I'd never heard of it before. There was a whole spate of nonfiction books about it that came out after this, but they hadn't come out yet, and I was floored that I'd never heard of this. The more research I did—the fact that this major thing had happened and then had been effectively erased—the more I realized that I absolutely had to write about it.

I became aware of the fragility of memory, both individual and collective. There are examples everywhere, but this is the one that made me realize that we are a species who forgets some of the most important, horrible, terrible things, and I wanted to talk about that.