Love (and War) in a Time of Tuberculosis

Andrea Barrett, whose historical fiction spans centuries and the globe, follows a group of tuberculosis patients at the onset of WWI in her latest novel, The Air We Breathe.

What made you decide to write a novel about tuberculosis patients?

It grew sideways out of something I had written before, a story called “The Cure” in the book Servants of the Map—about two women running boarding cottages for wealthy tuberculosis patients in the 19th century. While I was researching that story, I got really curious about the big public sanitariums where people who didn’t have any money or families got sent.

Do you research your historical details before you write the story or write the story first and fill in the blanks?

It’s kind of a back and forth process. Whenever I’m working on something like this, I have to do a lot of research before I even start. How do I pick which year, which month, which sanitarium, why the Adirondacks instead of Colorado? This gives me a general background. Once I start writing, once the characters come alive, I have to do very specific research. Leo Marburg in this novel is someone who’s really interested in chemistry. How would I have known before I started that I needed to learn early 20th-century chemistry? So I have to stop and do chunks of research at various points along the way.

How did you react when you saw TB back in the news this summer?

The timing was odd. The way it broke in the media, the panic it caused, the responses of people, the anger, the worry. That was fascinating to me, and so reminiscent of what was going on in the time the book is set.

Part of your plot hinges on anti-immigration sentiment fueled by a foreign war. Were you thinking of parallels to current events?

It’s one of the reasons I write about different times in history. Sometimes things I’m most concerned about or upset about in the contemporary world—I can’t seem to write about them directly. If I can find an analogous period in another time and place, it helps me articulate my feelings more clearly. If you think the invasion of Iraq is the only time something like that has happened, you think about it one way. If you think about it in terms of other invasions and other periods, and other sets of attitudes towards immigrants, that changes your perspective on the current situation.