Body, word and community: literature and medicine in Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

Abstract

Fourteen Days is a singular novel situated at an especially fertile point of intersection: the crossroads of literature, illness, isolation, and community life. Emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work was conceived as a collective writing project in which various authors, members of the Authors Guild, with very different trajectories, styles, and registers, give voice to the inhabitants of a Manhattan building who, confined by the same health emergency, gather—maintaining safe distance—on the building’s rooftop and share stories of all kinds over fourteen consecutive nights, resulting in an exquisite narrative polyphony.

Throughout the novel there is intertextuality with many literary works, some related to epidemics. However, it is neither a copy of a model nor merely a display of erudition; in Fourteen Days, the act of narrating reveals its deepest meaning: in the face of illness, uncertainty, and the constant threat of death, telling stories becomes a way of sustaining oneself, of accompanying one another, and of resisting; recording them becomes a way of not dying.