Barry Eisenberg

Recently, I was invited to write an article about the impact of the pandemic on our healthcare system for a SUNY journal, to be published in the spring. I wrote it just as we were approaching the year anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic. For a year now, our lives, our conversations, our relationships have been dominated by its all-consuming nature. A year ago, for so many of us, this new virus was a thing somewhere else, wherever that might be, maybe a nursing home in Washington or a confined community in New York. It was very real, yet also very abstract. Scary, for sure, but for the brief period in February and very early March, it was distant from most of us. That period lasted for the metaphorical equivalent of a minute.

Inspiration for a book comes in any number of ways. Sometimes from a long-held idea, other times from out of the blue. The idea for the book I’m currently writing came to me from the latter – when we brought my elderly aunt to come to live in our home at the end of her life. It crystallized both the joys and challenges of caring for an elderly loved one and opened the door to hearing similar stories from so many.

Since Primal Calling was published, I’m often asked how I came to write a novel. Apparently, it was something few who know me expected. I have always loved to write. But fiction was put on the back burner, partly because it was rough to find the time, but mostly because being a “novelist” felt outside of my own expectations. But doing it has been eye-opening. I had to research some subjects I was unfamiliar with. I learned a lot about oil exploration, searching for lost or unknown relatives, and international espionage (I know – sounds like totally different subjects, but they come together in the book). But of even greater value is what I learned about myself and life’s possibilities.