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"I've always put ridiculous amounts of pressure on myself," says Myla Goldberg when asked about the dreaded sophomore curse. "If Bee Season had been a total failure, the pressure would have been on to make this one work, goddamnit, so no matter what place you're writing from, there's going to be pressure."

To say the pressure's on is an understatement. Goldberg's debut novel, Bee Season, was a New York Times notable book of 2000 and has 400,000 copies in print. It's a perennial book group favorite and was a bestseller across the country. This fall, it takes its place on the big screen as a feature film starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, and Kate Bosworth.

So when Goldberg set out to write book two, she didn't even think of the sophomore curse. She was more concerned about writing a follow up that would take a different turn. "The authors I admire are the authors who do something totally different with every book," says Goldberg. "I set out to make this book as different from Bee Season as I possibly could."

Goldberg, 33, a vivacious woman who can usually be seen biking around Brooklyn, grew up in Laurel, Maryland, and studied at Oberlin College. After graduation, she traveled to Prague and wrote a collection of essays, Time's Magpie, about the country. She then moved to Brooklyn and published short stories in the literary journals Eclectic Literary Forum and American Writing before the success of Bee Season allowed her to make writing her full-time profession.

She found the inspiration for what became Wickett's Remedy in a New York Times article on the five largest epidemics in history. "I'd never heard of the 1918 flu epidemic," says Goldberg. "The more I read, the more fascinated I became, and I've always had a morbid streak, so lots of dead people always perk my interest."

That 1918 flu epidemic killed 20 million people worldwide, and while experts aren't sure exactly where it started, they've marked Boston as its epicenter because the city was a processing point for soldiers being shipped to and from Europe for World War I. For Goldberg, it was the only place to set the book.

It took five years of intense research and writing, hours in the Library of Congress, New York Public libraries, and historical records about Boston to make Wickett's Remedy into the novel it is on the shelves today: a winding, beautifully spun story with deep roots in history, but one that jumps back and forth between the past and today and also between the living characters and the dead.

The bulk of the novel follows Lydia Kilkenny, an Irish Catholic woman who marries Henry Wickett, a medical student, and moves with him into Boston's upper crust. Shortly after the couple is married and before flu rips through the city, Wickett quits medical school to create Wickett's Remedy, a tonic he sells through newspaper ads. To help promote this product, Wickett teams up with Quentin Driscoll, who takes the tonic and, in the confusion of a crippled city, takes full credit -- and profits -- and runs. This is no pocket change. Wickett's Remedy becomes a nationwide sensation after Driscoll repackages the tonic and sells it as a soda.

Meanwhile, Kilkenny watches as the flu kills thousands and then transforms herself, going form the overshadowed younger daughter and little wife into someone who volunteers to help the sick and dying without worry about her own risk of infection. Goldberg exquisitely brings 1918 Boston to life, even though she knew nothing about either when she set out to write Wickett's Remedy.

"I write books because I like to be inside people's heads, and this started with an event, not with a person," says Goldberg. "So I had to do research to even get to the kinds of people that were involved in the event, and then I had to do research to give me maybe a window into what those people were like so then I could get inside their heads."

Not only did Goldberg need to get the setting right, but she had to wrap her head around a very different Irish Catholic culture, too. Bee Season has been labeled by many critics as a Jewish book because the central family is Jewish, it deals with mysticism, and because the father is a rabbi. Even though Goldberg bristles at this suggestion -- she points out that not every book with a Christian family is labeled a Christian book -- she admits that an Irish Catholic family from the Southie section of Boston (think Good Will Hunting with horse-drawn carriages, shirt waists, and more cobblestones) is as different from the Naumanns of Bee Season as possible.

"While [Bee Season] is not autobiographical by any stretch of the imagination," says Goldberg, "it's certainly more personal in that it's dealing with the sort of people I know from my own experience -- a community that I'm familiar with, a culture that I'm familiar with. And then there's this book."

This isn't something she says with disgust. Rather, she saw it as a challenge, for both her and her readers. Goldberg knows that she's taking a risk by moving Wickett's Remedy so far from Bee Season, but it's a move she thinks she needed to take and she hopes that readers will enjoy.

"I'm trying to challenge readers who wouldn't necessarily pick something up like that and trying to see if I can ease them into it and maybe make them love it," says Goldberg.

She breaks the typical narrative structure by taking the story through time and perspective. While the main plot follows Kilkenny, that story is interrupted by newsletters from the QD Soda president to the mayor of Boston. Goldberg also includes letters Driscoll writes his dead wife expressing his remorse and guilt for bilking Kilkenny out of her portion of the Wickett's Remedy profits, as well as newspaper articles from 1918 Boston. The story also sometimes jumps into the conversations of peripheral characters.

Perhaps the most interesting thing Goldberg does in this weaving narrative is include a separate stream of dialogue written in the margins. This "commentary from the dead" is not a morbid trick. Rather, the collective "we" voice gives alternative perspectives of the narrative, marking for the record what another person saw, adding details, or even correcting the story. Varyingly funny, angry, petty, and even vain, their "we" is always human.

"One of the major things about this book for me is the idea that history and memory are just so faulty. You just never really know what actually happened. As I was writing, I realized that the perfect way to touch upon that is to have other voices disagreeing with the main voice of the story," Goldberg says. "As a reader, you're going to trust in the voice of the story and say, okay, well this must be the story. To mess with that, number one, is just a lot of fun. But, number two, it fit perfectly with what I wanted to do about taking about the faultiness of memory."

Goldberg cites the work of John Dos Passos, specifically the U.S.A. Trilogy, and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire as inspirations for her structural turns in Wickett's Remedy. "I have always been interested in books that do wacky narrative structural things, like things that take risks, whether they're imaginative or structural," says Goldberg.

Creating such a broad and complex book was an expansive undertaking, much more complicated and complex than Bee Season, and Goldberg admits that her second novel was more of a mountain to climb than her first.

"Every book is a challenge to write, but I never really faced a major crisis with that book," she says of Bee Season. There was more than one crisis with Wickett's Remedy, one that resulted in throwing out a draft that she had worked on for two years.

"I had friends, thank goodness, who were my readers and were honest with me," says Goldberg, "and they were right. I hadn't been able to get inside the heads of the characters enough to make them feel real with multidimensional and interesting, so I just tossed it." Not all was lost, though, including the research and part of the story.

"I kept the plot that I had been working on, but I had to do it from a completely different perspective, and it was terrifying. I really wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull it off," says Goldberg.

Wickett's Remedy will hit stores the same time Bee Season hits the big screen. And for an author who says she's now working on "nothing," Goldberg has a lot of irons in the fire -- short stories, children's books, maybe working on a film, and playing a band, The Walking Hellos, for whom she sings and plays the accordion and banjo.

"I'm just going to let myself do whatever I want," says Goldberg. "I think that will be a really great thing for just getting my brain back into shape to tackle something big again."

The Remedy for the Sophomore Curse

Myla Goldberg Takes a U-Turn in Her Second Book

September/October 2005