PRosé with Special Guest Kimmery Martin
An ER doctor turned novelist writing an eerily prescient book about a pandemic before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19 sounds like the setup for its own novel, but it happened. When Kimmery Martin wrote Doctors and Friends in 2018, no one had heard of COVID-19. The novel’s descriptions of doctors fighting a deadly global virus came not from her own experience, but from extensive research. By talking with more than 40 physicians in fields such as virology, immunology, and emergency medicine, and with her own medical background, Martin wrote eerily familiar aspects of our current pandemic, with other aspects of the novel-reading like fiction.
Doctors and Friends is Kimmery Martin’s third medical fiction novel. It tells the story of Hannah, Compton, and Kira, friends from medical school who reunite for a vacation to Spain just as an outbreak of a fast-spreading virus begins to threaten the globe.
Martin spoke to PRosé while still finding herself left with some side effects of having had COVID in 2020, such as an altered sense of taste that left her unable to tolerate alcohol. “It was pretty surreal,” she says. “I had the idea in 2018 that I was going to write a book with an infectious disease doctor as the protagonist.” She pitched the idea to her publisher, and wrote the novel, with a draft ready in 2019, which turned out to be “the worst timing of any book ever.” Because the process of publishing is so slow, the book was finally released in 2021, and the world was deep into the current pandemic.
Coincidences, or perhaps smart predictions, can be found in the novel, including, she says, a character getting a bizarre neurologic side effect from the virus, and the fact that she ended up getting her own bizarre neurologic side effect after getting COVID. Some things in the book went very differently than how real life played out, however. “There’s a very unified government and societal response” to fight the novel’s pandemic, she says, which is something that didn’t happen in reality.
Martin draws from her medical knowledge for her novels, but also from her personal relationships. “My original idea was to write about the really intense camaraderie you have with the people you do your medical training with. In real life I have this group of friends, we live in different places, but they are my ride-or-die people. I actually took a trip with this group of friends to Spain and Morocco where parts of the novel are set in 2019 in real life. This group of friends was my inspiration for writing novels about women doctors.” But don’t try to match up any of her friends directly to her characters, she says. “No one is completely represented by any of the characters, but there are little anecdotes and little personality traits, with a heavy dose of fiction too.”
Listen to the podcast to find out Martin’s opinions on the future of the real pandemic and what she believes is the key to its end. Plus how she transitioned from being a full-time physician to a novelist. She tells her most heart-warming story from her ER days and reveals a few hints to her next novel, which she is working on now and she promises is “not going to be about a pandemic”!