Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans

This visceral account of the coronavirus years blends first-person, present-tense commentary about the pandemic with the perspective of a memoir, including other epidemics James Nolan survived, first polio as a boy then AIDS in San Francisco. The narrative is grounded in the social and political parallels drawn from writers who have explored past plagues, such as Boccaccio, Poe, Defoe, Pepys, Camus, Mann, Burroughs, and Kushner. These pages are largely focused on the author's native New Orleans. Although we have scholarly histories of the yellow fever and Spanish flu epidemics that previously devastated this city, what did it feel like to actually live through those dark eras? This sometimes contrarian "rough draft of history"--intensified by the bizarre plot twist of the writer's mid-pandemic eviction from the gothic Luling Mansion while Amazon was filming a vampire movie there--will find a receptive audience for years to come. All of us are haunted by memories of this disruptive era, each in our own particular way. The challenge now is to connect our stories, making sense of our abruptly altered lives. The rest, as they say, is history.