Bill Koeb
Many pandemic journals describe the effects of monotony and routines for coping with it.
COVID-19 has brought a number of journalistic innovations—the coronavirus tracker, the epidemiology beat, the emergency room confidential, and, alas, the pandemic journal. This last one consists of first-person accounts by successful writers for top-shelf publications. They are highly informative, though less about the pandemic and its impact than about journalism, class, and privilege.
The journals fall into several categories. One is family and kids. In “Stuck at Home With My 20-Year-Old Daughter,” for instance, Todd Purdum described in The Atlantic the pandemic’s “achingly uncertain implications” for the future of his daughter Kate. A sophomore at Barnard College, she has led a charmed life. “Because of my career as a journalist and her mother’s as a former White House press secretary, political consultant, and Hollywood studio executive, we have the luxury of working from home, and the financial resources to help weather this storm.” That, however, does not mask “the reality that Kate’s world has shrunk to the size of her bedroom. In a flash, the daily life of the confident, privileged young woman who’d thrived at school, haunted Broadway stage doors, mastered the New York subway, and, yes, discreetly flashed a fake ID in the bars of Morningside Heights was upended indefinitely.”
“I love you guys,” Kate says, “but sometimes I’ll be writing a paper and one of you barges in to ask for help with so-and-so, and I don’t have a space like the library to go and sit and work, just have a little more privacy. I have my own bedroom, which is really great and lucky, but if I come out of my bedroom, then suddenly it’s like I’m fair game to be engaged in conversation.” If Barnard classes don’t resume in the fall, Kate “will have some big decisions to make about whether she should take a gap year … That uncertainty rattles us all.”
Taken as a whole, these journals show the extent to which today’s top writers live apart from, and sealed off against, the struggles of ordinary working people.
According to The New York Times, “tens of thousands of New Yorkers live at close quarters in cramped spaces, physically unable to quarantine from any sick household members.” The paper quoted a doctor as saying that those getting sick are “people who are stuck at home, immigrants who are living 10 people in one apartment.” In a mental-health survey of 2,000 college students, nearly all said the virus had caused stress or depression, with nearly half saying a major source was the virus’s financial impact on them or their families.
Another category is personal grooming. In “FaceTime, With Lipstick,” Daphne Merkin observed in The New York Review of Books that while at home she has worn “a nightgown with a sweatshirt thrown over it.” Though she has abandoned most attempts at upkeep, “there have been exceptions—like the other week, when I was getting ready to teach via Zoom my Columbia MFA class on the art of literary criticism.” The women in the class “appear on screen in assorted levels of togetherness,” and on this occasion she decided to take greater pains, applying “blusher, eyeliner, and mascara, topped off by a dusting of face powder and a slick of berry lipstick”; then, in a sudden impulse, “I finished by spraying on an unseasonably summery fragrance by Tom Ford called Neroli Portofino Acqua.”
In May, the Associated Press reported on the challenge of preventing the spread of the coronavirus “in slums, camps and other crowded settlements around the world where clean water is scarce and survival is a daily struggle.” Some three billion people, “from indigenous communities in Brazil to war-shattered villages in northern Yemen, have nowhere to wash their hands with soap and clean water at home,” hindering prevention efforts. In Africa, where virus cases were closing in on 100,000, more than half of the continent’s 1.3 billion people must leave their homes to get water.
Food is another journal staple. In The Washington Post, Susan Shapiro described how fights over it during the lockdown almost torpedoed her “perfect marriage.” During nearly 25 years of happy conjugal living, she had managed to keep at bay her “Pavlovian sense for any sweets in the vicinity.” She and her husband were both workaholics and ate most of their meals separately, but they marked “special occasions at Nobu (light seafood, no bread basket).” The shelter-in-place order, however, forced them “into co-consuming three squares daily,” and her husband became a “food hoarder,” bringing home “enough to feed a family of 12 in a bunker for months.” Shapiro tried to keep at bay “the deluge of delicacies into our kitchen,” but on one occasion she found a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels in his closet and polished it off, and she accused him of “flagrant insensitivity.” In the end, however, as she watched the grim news on TV, “I felt grateful that we could feed each other.”
The pandemic, the Times reported, has created a hunger crisis, with child hunger “soar[ing] to levels without modern precedent.” According to the Census Bureau, 31 percent of households with children lacked the necessary amount or quality of food to eat because they “couldn’t afford to buy more.” An article in Vox described how “America’s food banks have been completely overwhelmed by demand.”
Many pandemic journals describe the effects of monotony and routines for coping with it. The May 24 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in which 20 writers dilated on “What We’ve Learned in Quarantine,” abounded in examples:
- “Lately, I have found myself wondering—as I sit here hunched inside my dark house, for infinity weeks, hardly moving, wearing the same green sweatshirt while eating the same four snacks—about cocoons.”
- “I spent a day working from the floor, squatting before and around my computer as though it were a campfire … I wandered around naked and stayed up all night. I paced thousands of laps around the kitchen table. I slept in places that were not my bed … I spent hours sitting on the carpet against a wall, doing nothing except considering.”
- “Self-quarantine has me thinking and acting in all kinds of backward ways … As I sit and write, a new layer of dust accumulates. Later on this evening, I’ll make another round … I am so, so tired of endlessness: the unrelenting boredom, the cycles of self-pity, the constant systemic breakdown, the eternity of death.”
These accounts make almost no mention of any personal financial hardship incurred as a result of the virus—this at a time when the number of Americans filing for unemployment was headed toward 40 million. Pandemic journals are, in fact, filled with markers of material comfort and professional status. Some examples, culled from The New York Review and The New York Times:
- “My son had returned from his semester abroad in Europe, and so we were all hunkered down in our Brooklyn house, cooking, eating, working together and listening to music.”
- “By the time our housekeeper Daisy Nyathi (not her real name) walked into my home at 8:45 on Tuesday morning, she had been in close personal contact with a hundred people already.”
- “We stayed in our university flat in Greenwich Village until yesterday, when I rented a car and we came upstate to our friends Jay and Jackie’s place.”
- “We live in Geneva in a pretty small apartment” and so “we left the city for the mountains … We arrived at the farmhouse two days after my birthday, which is on March 11. We’ve been here now for more than two months.”
As these entries show, many pandemic journalists filed their dispatches from country homes to which they had repaired. Almost none expressed qualms about their choice or wrestled with its moral implications.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, in pieces for both Harper’s and the Times Magazine, cast his departure from Paris as part of a storied tradition dating back to the exodus from the city in 1940 as the Germans advanced. He recounted how on March 15, as the coronavirus was ravaging Spain and Italy but not yet France, he strapped his infant son into his stroller, “grabbed a bottle of wine from my nascent stockpile, and walked unworriedly with my wife and daughter across the plaza to our friends’ home to share a meal.” The friends were planning to leave that same afternoon for their family home in a village south of Brittany. They invited Williams and his family to join them, and he quickly accepted. While waiting for the train the next morning at Gare Montparnasse, he writes, “I was aware that we were all of us re-enacting a scene that has played out over and over again throughout this city’s dramatic history.”
As a “parisien d’adoption”—Williams is an American expat—he was now “an exile twice over.” Yet, “in exercising this authentically Parisian need to escape,” he wrote, “it feels as though, suddenly, I’ve had my position here solidified.” The coronavirus has “instilled a certain edifying simplicity into our lives that amounts to a form of discipline. We wake up, exercise, feed ourselves, divide between us the sundry chores required to maintain a household, shop for groceries, prepare our lunches, wash up, read and play, prepare our dinners.” This “is the discipline of the exile, of the person who cannot quite take her home for granted.” He and his wife “take turns scouring the internet for houses in the country to rent—a thoroughly Parisian activity these days.”
Most Parisians, however, had no country houses to decamp to.
Most Parisians, however, had no country houses to decamp to. Among those who remained was Pamela Druckerman. Her “Pandemic Marriage, Ménage, & Me,” appearing in The New York Review, masterfully blends all the essential ingredients of the pandemic journal. As the lockdown began, she anxiously read about all the divorces taking place in China during its own shutdown: “What would happen when we were cooped up for weeks or months with what the French government was ominously calling our cellule familiale? Would being socially distant from everyone else make us feel closer to our spouses,” or “were we each about to star in our own hell-is-other-people existentialist drama?”
At first, the confinement seemed calming. Her husband had seen the crisis coming, and she admired him for it. A week in, however, she grows frustrated over his lack of practical skills: “He could foresee a pandemic, but he can’t operate a can-opener or unblock a sink. Like many middle-class dual earners, we used to solve this problem by paying a weekly cleaner and summoning a never-ending rotation of plumbers, electricians, and handymen (here, they call these workers hommes à tout faire). In lockdown, however, we suddenly have to do all of this ourselves.” She draws up a chore chart for her family, and the higher the death toll, “the more I ask my husband questions like: ‘Does a frying pan really need to soak for three days?’”
Her husband’s work (he’s writing a book about soccer) “seems to require an enormous amount of meat. Pre-quarantine we’d cut down, to save the planet. Now, before I leave for the supermarket, he hands me a scrap of paper on which he has scribbled ‘chicken, lamb, hamburgers.’” For most, “the big shock of quarantine isn’t that their partners are terrible, but that—in the absence of schools, shrinks, business trips, drinks with friends, and the occasional flirtation with strangers—their shortcomings feel more consequential. Now, if there’s no one in your house who can do something like operate a power drill, cut hair, or teach math, it won’t happen.”
But then, after five weeks of quarantine, something shifts: “We cease thinking about our absent housecleaner and cancelled vacations.” The kids start doing their schoolwork, and her husband takes on the lion’s share of the housework. While her pre-lockdown life was privileged, she can now see that her ceaseless work deadlines “were their own kind of quarantine,” forcing her to spend weeks tethered unhappily to her desk. She’s now pleased with her growing list of skills and the daily workout she gets from her household duties. As the rules relax, she takes her kids to the orthodontist, and soon her cleaner will return. Her cellule familiale, Druckerman realizes, “is really not so bad. When life goes back to normal one day, I’m going to miss all this.”
The dramatic arc of the story is thus complete: The lockdown, far from causing fracture, brings everyone closer together. The plague itself, then rampaging through Paris and its suburbs, remains almost entirely offstage. One is left wondering about the impact of the virus and the lockdown on Druckerman’s housekeeper and plumber and all the other hommes à tout faire who service her family, and whether for them the big shock of quarantine was finding the shortcomings of their partners growing more consequential.
Taken as a whole, these journals show the extent to which today’s top writers live apart from, and sealed off against, the struggles of ordinary working people. In late May, the Times, reporting on growing public dissatisfaction with the federal government’s response to the pandemic, quoted an angry nurse in Hershey, Pennsylvania: “Every time I see a commercial on TV that says we are all in this together, my blood boils. We are not in this together!” The pandemic journals make that clear.
