Journalist, playwright, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright discusses his latest novel, "The End of October," which offers an eerie portent to the COVID-19 pandemic we face today.
A virus starts in Asia, quickly growing into a global pandemic that throws the U.S. and the world into a state of chaos. Sound familiar? It's actually the plot of "The End of October," the new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright. We talk to Wright about the creative impetus for the novel, what he learned about pandemics in his meticulous research, and how it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic we currently face.
Wright is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," "God Save Texas," and "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief," for which he co-produced HBO's Emmy award-winning documentary adaptation.
[Podcast introduction with theme music in the background]
President Lyndon Baines Johnson: So it's all here, the story of our time—with the bark off.
Mark Updegrove: That was President Lyndon Baines Johnson upon the dedication of his presidential library in 1971. Since then, the library has played host to the biggest names and best minds of our day, who have helped to tell the story of our times through candid, revealing conversations—with the bark off.
This podcast delivers them straight to you. Welcome to “With the Bark Off.” I'm your host, Mark Updegrove.
This conversation features journalist, playwright, musician, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright whose latest novel, “The End of October,” offers an eerie prescience to the COVID-19 pandemic we face today.
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Mark Updegrove: Larry Wright, welcome to the program.
Lawrence Wright: Well, thank you for having me, Mark.
Mark Updegrove: You’re, you’re getting some incredible press for “The End of October.” Congratulations. Uh, talk about what led you to this project?
Lawrence Wright: Well it actually started a decade ago Mark as a projective screenplay. Uh, Ridley Scott had read the Cormac McCarthy novel “The Road,” this post-apocalyptic novel where a father and son are wandering through the ruins of civilization, and so Ridley’s question to me was—well, what happened? I mean, what force or event was so powerful that it could cause civilization to just break apart? And, uh, you know, I considered, uh, nuclear war of course, uh, but what really came to mind very quickly is, as a young reporter, I was living in Atlanta and I did several stories out of the Center for Disease Control, and I was so enchanted by the ingenuity and the courage of the people who were— whose careers were involved in public health. You know and— listen...I would rather be in a war zone than a hot zone [laughter] of a disease like Ebola or something like that. But, uh, you know, these were like intellectual swash buckler's and they really captured my imagination and respect, so I decided that the force that I would, you know, uh, enlist in the, in what was then the screenplay was a pandemic. Honestly, I hadn't figured out the whole story and Ridley went off and made other movies and years went by, but it, I was always, uh, it was always in my mind that, that there was a real story there. And, so I finally decided, uh, in 2017 that I would write it as a novel. But this time instead of trying to make it, uh, so cinematic, uh, I would, I would do the research that I needed to do, it, which I hadn't really fully done the first time around and really dive into it and understand how these events would naturally evolve and then the story came out [inaudible] that.
Mark Updegrove: So this, this book imagines a pandemic called “Kongoli Influenza” that starts in Asia and spreads virulently through the United States and you see all kinds of, uh, breakdowns as a consequence of this. This is remarkably prescient. Uh, so, eh, one of my favorite quotes is from Harry Truman who said "the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know," uhm, and similarly you write of your prescient work"what may seem like prophecy is actually the fruit of research. As a writer, I've always been more surprised by reality than imagination, so I try, uh, to see how science, history, and human experience come together. What, what did the process of, uh, writing this book look like? What, what – what was your creative impetus, uh, for the flu you developed the, this whole scene that plays out in the novel?
Lawrence Wright: Well I, you know I, for one thing I –I wanted to educate myself, so of course, I always start by reading everything I can that seems pertinent in a lot of it was histories of pandemics and 1918 was especially on my mind. In fact, uh, the template for this particular disease that I invented, uh, runs the same course as the 1918 flu. Uh, I even made a calendar on my, uh, my computer, uh, and I set the year as 2020, just [laughter] a coincidence that I didn't expect to have come true. Uh, where the disease happens, and, it comes in around February and uh, and then, uh, you know, it, it— it spreads around the world. Uhm, I went to talk to scientists in, at the National Institutes of Health, uh, I, uh went to Fort Dietrich which used to be the head for, you know, where a bio warfare was done, uh, but is now, uh, very important, uh, research center for, uh, public health, and uh, and I talked, you know, scientists at major drug companies, uh, some of whom are overseeing the vaccine production right now, I mean many of my sources are, uh, on the front lines of COVID at this very moment.
Uh, it's not just medicine, you know, I mean, or not just human medicine. For instance, there's a lot in there about animals and animal experimentation, and I spent a good deal of time talking to veterinary epidemiologists. Uh, there's a submarine [laughter] involved. Uh, I, uh, I went to Kings Bay, Georgia where we keep these nuclear submarines, and I had the best time, they took me around on a, on a— one of these gigantic submarines, I had no idea they were so big. They hold 24, uh, nuclear missiles— uh, you know, I mean, uh, missiles that are nucl— armed with, uh, nuclear bombs, uh, each of them 40 feet tall, if you can imagine this all crammed into a submarine, and they were doing some kind of test when I was there, and uhm, one of the [laughter]— they were, one of the guys said, “well, would you like to pull the trigger [laughter]?” [laughter] this, this is a test, isn't it? I mean, we’re— I'm not going to blow up the world, and so I push the button, uh, and we're all still, still here to talk about it.
Mark Updegrove: Talk about intrepid research.
Lawrence Wright: Oh I had a, honestly, this is a –I know this is a grim subject and, and the novel is in many respects very bleak, but the experience I had in writing it was tremendous fun. I was so enlightened, and, by so many of the people that I met, uh, and people love to talk about what they do. And, uh, you know, when I was talking to these, uh, experts about what would happen if something like 1918 flu, uh, appeared in our society, uh, how prepared would we be? You know, would we be any better off than our ancestors? And this was a question they had all been thinking about their entire careers and finally someone came along and ask the question, so they were very helpful.
Mark Updegrove: What do you think the answer to that question is as, as you've seen what's happened with COVID-19?
Lawrence Wright: Well you know the, the idea of making a virus— a vaccine, uh, you know, its— we have not progressed so far on that front. You know, we’re still talking about a year or a year and a half to make a vaccine, which is way too long, and there's no certainty that we will make a vaccine that would be effective. Uh, they tried with SARS, and they had the unfortunate consequences in some cases of making the infection worse, uh, so you know, this is a, you know, there's a reason we need to do human trials it’s, it’s— it’s chancy. Uh, the other thing is, you know, we're still using quarantine, which is something that was in invented in Italy in the 14th century because the plague, you know, it's still one of the major tools in the toolbox, but there aren't very many tools. Uh, our science is far more, you know, sophisticated. Uh, than it has... you know, I mean it's constantly getting into a new level, but we still have not been able to solve the problem of countering a brand-new virus that we've never seen before.
Mark Updegrove: It, it’s funny because it, it seems like we get over a major disease by, by, uh, uh, developing a vaccine, and, uhm, then we think we're invulnerable. You've, you’ve written, or actually you've said in a recent interview “after terrible devastation , he siege is lifted and people go back to something like their normal lives, but while we tend to remember wars, we tend to forget diseases and, and the, their ravages.”
Why do we have such a short collective memory as it relates to pandemic disease?
Lawrence Wright: That’s a really fascinating question. You know, the 1918 flu, uh, you know, you know, I mean, the estimates are so loose they say between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, American statistics are, are a lot better 675,000 Americans killed by the Spanish flu in 1918. That is more than all the soldiers who died in all the wars America was involved in in, in the 20th century World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan; more people died of that, uh, and yet, the 1918 flu was essentially flushed out of the living memory and, uh, and it, it was true too of the, of the Black Death. Uh, people didn't speak of it, it and that killed, you know, half the population of Europe, uh, so part of it I think is that diseases come freighted with stigma and shame and, uh, people don't like to talk about it.
There's little heroism involved in getting sick and dying of a disease. Uh, it’s a, you know, it’s the story of victimhood. One talks about battling a disease but the truth is, uh, it's suffering is what you do, and uh, also you know, in the early 19th century— [inaudible] in the early 20th century, many of the diseases that were conquered in the 20th century by the great medical advances, uh, had not been at that point, you know, so we were still seeing terrible ravages of Cholera and dysentery and typhus and diphtheria and you know those diseases…Polio, uh, you know so many of them were addressed in the 20th century, a great march of medicine, and I think that bred a sense of hubris that mankind has conquered nature and, uh, we have little to fear, but the truth is that nature has a lot of cunning traps in store for us.
Mark Updegrove: Does it—has it surprised you that it’s taken this long for, uh, a pandemic to spread throughout the world, given, given the inevitability of infectious diseases like this springing up?
Lawrence Wright: Oh well, I was constantly reminded how lucky we were, uh, you know, just look back since 2003: we've had SARS which killed, you know, 10 percent of the people it infected; MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome which killed 35 percent of the people it infected; uh, H5N1, which killed nearly everybody it infected, uh, Zika, uh, Ebola…you know, these were coming at us one after another and you know, uh, especially with SARS. It was a great triumph of public health to contain that, uh, very contagious disease within a hundred days. If, if the pandemic we were experiencing now were SARS rather than COVID-19, we’d in, in a lot more, uh, danger than we are right now.
Mark Updegrove: Your book imagines a, a scenario where there is a shortage of medical equipment and PPE. The vice president is a former radio host who has been made point person on the government response to the pandemic and can't seem to satisfy a very impatient president, and your, one of your protagonists in the book laments the lack of presidential leadership and she thinks as you write "the president has been almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs.” Did you take hypothetical disease and then extrapolate for current conditions including our administration? How, how did you imagine this?
Lawrence Wright: Well let me say my fictional characters are singular individuals and so, uh, and, and they may be inspired by real life, but, uh, I, I sense in my mind, I set it in present time. I, you know was looking at the dynamics— the political dynamics that we're experiencing, so you know, there is some reflection on that. Uhm, and you know, some of it, you know, like having the vice president be the head of the task force, [inaudible] it was sort of a lucky guess best—based on how bureaucracy works at, at the White House level. Uh, and you know, a lot of the, the book is, is conjecture based on how I see the world actually working.
Mark Updegrove: When it was reported that there was a virus was spreading so virulently in Wuhan, China, did you imagine that it would, uh, amount to what we're seeing in America today and throughout the world?
Lawrence Wright: Well, they announced it on New Year's Eve, if you remember, and you know it was already, uh, probably six weeks, uh, uh they think middle of November was the first case. Uhm, so immediately what I thought of was SARS, which also arose in China. And uhm, I had anxiety about, uh, how far along it was because when SARS came along the Chinese tried to suppress the, uh, the fact that it was [inaudible] fighting this big contagion. In fact, when health authorities went to visit China, there were reports that they put the SARS patients in ambulances and had them ride— drive around town until the authorities left the hospitals. Uh, you know, I’m not saying that, uh, they have done that in this case. This is highly political issue, but it certainly put me on guard, and I thought this could be dangerous. And uh, and the other thing is I had no doubt that it would get out of China because disease, it doesn't respect national borders and uh, people were, I mean, by that time you know 5 million people had already left Wuhan, so, you know it was [laughter]... the disease was seated all over the world, already. And uh, just took a little while to manifest itself in, in like Seattle and places like that. Uh, but I was, I was worried and, uh, by the end of January I was ordering masks and gloves and, uh, you know suggesting to my wife that we stock up on canned goods. I planted some lettuce because I figured that [laughter] that, uh, might be something hard to get fresh greens and, uh, you know so those kinds of things, little precautions. I unfortunately did, paid no attention to my retirement account [laughter]...some profit [laughter], you know. I had, I had written all about it in the, in the novel but it didn't occur to me until, uh, things suddenly tanked.
Mark Updegrove: Based on the research you've done for this project, what you know about, uh, pandemics in, in world history, uh, what have we done right in the US to combat this and what have we done wrong?
Lawrence Wright: Well, I think I underestimated in the novel the solidarity of people to stand together and resist a disease at great personal loss of themselves. I mean I've been inspired by the fact that, you know, for the most part Americans are sheltering in place, uh, and you know, it's come at an enormous personal sacrifice. You know all the jobs lost, and the—this is a very impoverishing event and, uh, so people behave better in real life than they do in my novels. The governments behave pretty much as expected or worse. Uh, you know, the—I, I had a, a jaundiced view of how we would handle it, uh, but also other governments as well and, uh, you know with only a few exceptions, I think, you know, uh, our— our various societies have had a hard time coping with the stress, and uh, you know we, we weren't prepared even though the experts all told us what was going to happen and how they just didn’t know when.
Mark Updegrove: Why were we not prepared? Where did we fall down on this?
Lawrence Wright: Well in terms of, of the United States, you know, we had, uh, we had a stock— medical stockpile, uh, which was compiled back in the, the Obama administration and before that in Bush's administration and it had been depleted and not replenished. We had examples of face masks that had kind of rotted, uh, and the—when the new administration came in, uh, you have these massive budget cuts, uh, and many of them in public health, so for instance, the Center for Disease Control had a, a team stationed in China as well as like 50 countries. It was a surveillance team. So, uh, whatever you might complain or however you might complain about the WHO, we had our own people there, uh, but the budget cuts caused, uh, the Center for Disease Control to have to cut off most of its international surveillance. And then in 2016, uh, the, uh, pandemic response team, which was a part of the National Security Council was eliminated. Uh, the head of that was a man named Admiral Timothy Ziemer who had handled the, uh, malaria outbreaks in, uh, Africa and is credited with saving six million lives. That team would have been in charge of our response to the COVID-19 infection but it doesn't exist any longer.
Mark Updegrove: What's your view of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the role they're playing currently?
Lawrence Wright: Well you have to understand that the WHO is a supplicant. It has no authority. Uh, you know, for instance, in this latest outbreak with COVID-19, uh, it was three weeks before the Chinese would even allow the authorities into the country. Uh, you know, WHO was begging to enter, but it did not have the authority to go in without permission and you know it’s getting a lot of blame for its courtly behavior around Chinese, uh, authorities, but what else are they to do if they want cooperation. The other thing is as handicapped an agency and as chronically underfunded, as handicapped as it is, it's the only agency charged with global, monitoring global health and, and trying to create a kind of unified response. We don't have an alternative and so yes, I think it's not the agency that it should be, but it's the only one that we have.
Mark Updegrove: And, as you look at, at the CDC, what is your view of the CDC's leadership during this, this crisis?
Lawrence Wright: Honestly Mark, I'm heartbroken. Uh, [inaudible], it, I thought the CDC was one of the most distinguish, distinguished agencies in our government. And when I was a young reporter, and I was reporting stories out of the CDC in Atlanta, I was, I was so impressed. Uh, you know, such great scientists, uh, you know, they were always on top of things, and uh, you know I, I— I envied them as a kind of intellectual adventurer, you know, and they had such erudite knowledge. I just was totally spell bound, bound by these people. And for most of its modern existence, the CDC was very well lead. Uh, I can't say that now and uh, it's been heartbreaking to see it stumble so badly and at the cost of the health and, and many lives of Americans. Uh, you know, had they been able to produce a reliable test early on, uh, we would have been able to test millions more people than we've been able to do. We’d have a sense of the scope of, of the, of the infection. And we, we also should be developing an antibody test because that's the key to returning to work, and uh, so far that hasn't gone very well either, so I don't know to, whether to blame the leadership or the, or the lack of funding but something 's gone wrong in the CDC and its hurt America very badly.
Mark Updegrove: Do, do you get a sense of whether that's administrative, whether there's been a societal shift where there is a de-emphasis on organizations like CDC? What do you think is at the root of, of their diminished capabilities?
Lawrence Wright: Well, it's not just the CDC that's, you know, suffered these kinds of, uh, budget cutbacks, and, uh, and, and I think, you have to look at it too in light of this sort of assault on scientific integrity. Uh, I find this, you know, very dismaying and offensive that, uh, the greatest minds, the greatest experts in, in public health are being dismissed, uh, but it's not, I mean, the, the budget cuts and the you know, the paring down of, of— of health authorities is all of a piece of this, uh, despising science, and, uh I think that's cost us dearly in this infection.
Mark Updegrove: Is that part of a larger trend of anti-intellectualism that's seems to have swept the country?
Lawrence Wright: Yeah, I think that, you know populism and anti, anti-intellectualism are married. They, they go together, you don't have one without the other. This, uh, business of encouraging people to go out in the street without masks and pressed closely together in order to protest having to stay at home, well we've seen this historically, uh, you know in San Francisco during the 1918 flu there was an anti-mask society and San Francisco suffered one of the worst outbreaks in the whole country. Uh, you know, there were— in the Black Death, there were flagellants that would, you know, march through the streets, you know, and, and, uh— and pray to God, you know, and they were protecting, attracting immense crowds and it just spread the plague. You know it’s— I will say, I am desperate for the country to get back to work. The economic devastation is horrible, uh, but how much more horrible will it be if suddenly people go back to work and, and then they have to go back into isolation. And that will happen, uh, if we, if we go too quickly. Giving the medical authorities time to work out, especially therapeutics, which they're doing right now will save thousands and thousands of lives. There are some very promising treatments that are being, uh, worked on right now. But if we had not shut down, if we had not tried to flatten the curve, we wouldn't have had time to pre— slow it down at all.
Mark Updegrove: Do you see, uhm, a, a solution for the right balance between protecting our health collectively and protecting our economy?
Lawrence Wright: Well, I’ve been advocating using convalescence. Uh, people who had the disease and recovered. They’re incredibly valuable to our society right now for two reasons: one is they've, they’ve conquered the illness in themselves they're carrying something very valuable which is anti-bodies and thousands of them right now have volunteered to donate blood, uh, and [inaudible] refine that, just extract the plasma and filter it, uh, and uh, making sure that you have no other diseases inside that bloodstream and— but only containing the antibodies to COVID-19 then you can inject that in people who are currently suffering. I think it’s going to be— I think it, we have a chance for that to be successful. The only problem is that it doesn't last forever and, uh, it's hard to scale it up. I mean you have to bleed people in order to get the antibodies and there are a lot of courageous volunteers. They have, they can go once a week, uh, they can give about a liter of blood and that might be enough for two or three [inaudible] maximum people to receive some of this plasma infusion.
Mark Updegrove: I want to go back to your stunning prescience, uh, not only did you portend, uh, a sweeping pandemic with this novel “The End of October,” but 22 years ago in 1998 you wrote a screen play for a movie called “The Siege” starring Denzel Washington and Annette Benning, which, uh, foreshadowed terrorism from, uh, Islamic terrorists throughout the United States. It, it didn't do particularly well in 1998 but it sure did well, uh, after 9/11 in 2001. But I wonder as you look to history as your guide, is there anything on the horizon that you think will inevitably impact us in the immediate future?
Lawrence Wright: Well, I, I've been thinking a lot about how— what kind of country we're going to be when we get out of this. And you know, there's an opportunity when you have a terrible tragedy as we have now for a kind of civilizational reset and 9/11 was such an opportunity. You know, I remember so strongly Mark that since, uh, and I know many people felt that—oh we're going to have to, uh, change. We're going to have to become the country that we say we are. The country our parents gave us. You know, we have – America has to stand for something again. And instead we invaded Iraq, and uh, it ruined the opportunity and changed our society in profound ways. And to take another example, the Arab Spring, you know I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and, you know, it’s a region that is desperate for change and reform and democracy and the Arab Spring came along. And I thought this is the chance that they’ve had— but what happened is most of those countries became even more tyrannical, so we’re up— at that moment again. We have a – we're facing, uh, a new future but whether it's going to be a future where we for instance set aside the partisanship and the needless rivalries with other countries that keep us constantly on the edge of conflict, uh, whether we demand responsible government, whether we behave as a more compassionate society, we have the opportunity now we can see that this all needs to happen, but whether we will step up and actually enforce those changes that's yet to be seen. But that's the challenge that this is disease has given us the opportunity to overcome.
Mark Updegrove: So are there simple steps, Larry, that we could take as a society to emerge from this stronger and more united so that we don’t squander an opportunity like the one that we had after the terrorist attacks of 9/11?
Lawrence Wright: Yeah, I think demanding more responsible government is high on the list. We're going to have to start funding our health agencies. Uh, there's no question that we need— what I worry about is this particular pandemic I think is devastating, but in some ways it's just a warning shot. You know, more devastating diseases will come, and we have to be prepared for them. Uh, now we see how unprepared we are, but we've been given the chance to, to change and so I think that if we can change then, uh, we'll be ready when the big one comes. This is not the big one yet, but it will come, and we need to be ready for it.
Mark Updegrove: Is there a lesson we should derive from “The End of October” that could apply to the situation in which we find ourselves in today?
Lawrence Wright: Well, “The End of October” is a warning, you know, about where things could go. It's, it’s— it’s, you know, it’s bleak I admit. You know, people have remarked on that, but I feel, uh, anxious about where we're going. I, I'm not trying to make it seem other than what I fear. Uh, I think that there are fractures in our society that are very dangerous and, and needless at the same time. We can heal those fractures, but I think if we don't, uh, we have really serious consequences ahead of us and if, if there's one message that I want readers to take from this is that it's in our hands, it's up to us to make those changes.
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Mark Updegrove: My thanks to Lawrence Wright, to our sponsors, the Moody Foundation and St. David's HealthCare, and of course, to you for joining us. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I'm Mark Updegrove. See you next time.
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