The re-release of Love Is the Drug, 10 years later

A tale of two pandemics

You know you wanna read it…

Bird wakes up.

This is the first line of my sixth novel, Love Is the Drug. It came out in 2014, six years before the Covid-19 pandemic, and about six years before the term “woke” left the friendly waters of black vernacular and became the unsubtle bludgeon wielded by somnambulant reactionaries that it is today. (Hmm, the pandemic, George Floyd, and “woke” getting pulled to pieces all in the same year? No wonder I moved to the country.) 

Love Is the Drug is a DC private school novel, a Beltway class novel, a pandemic novel, a political conspiracy thriller, a portrait of familial abuse, an exploration inter-generational trauma in the black community, a love letter to Songs in the Key of Life, and possibly my favorite of all of my love stories. The trauma and abuse depicted in the novel seems to stop some readers in their tracks, but let’s be real, we all know that it happens (which might be why they so object to encountering it, now that I think about it). Either way, I suppose the story isn’t for everyone. No story is. But Scholastic has recently re-issued this novel in time for Black Futures Month, with a shiny new cover with gorgeously disturbing art by Mishko and I can’t help but think how differently this book reads with a decade and a pandemic and a Trump in between. Sure, there’s some anachronistic stuff about smartphones in there, but I doubt anyone is going to give much of a shit. What is killing me about Love Is the Drug right now is that no matter how dystopian I tried to imagine a global plague ripping through our dysfunctional political system in 2012 and 2013, I didn’t come anywhere close to our dystopian reality of 2020 to…right fucking now. 

Things I got wrong:

• A US government that believes the global pandemic is actually a problem before it’s started to rampage across the country. Sure, a preemptive quarantine within the beltway to keep the virus out sounded pretty dystopian at the time, but little did I know…

• World governments and health officials that do not entertain mass death (a.k.a. “herd immunity”) as a viable public health policy.

• Just the sheer amount of gross incompetence at every level, from the “neener neener, won’t say airborne” WHO, to the “why isolate?” CDC to the “put bleach…where?!” White House. I was imagining global conspiracies. That was fine. But I should also have spent some time imagining a global oligarch clown show. 

• A vaccine that works¹ to prevent infection.

• Believe me, I would have mentioned fentanyl, but it was not a danger back then. If you take drugs recreationally, get narcan! It saves lives!

Things I got right:

• One plague for “the best” of us, one plague for the rest of us. (Seriously, guys, rich people are over there shining far UV light into their nostrils and and telling us chumps to get back to our unventilated, underpaid jobs. I say I got this right, but honestly I didn’t go far enough.)

• Blaming everyone else around the world for problems that begin in large part at home.

• Capitalism has fucked us over, is fucking us over, will fuck us over, until we figure out a way to save ourselves and stop it².

• Change your words into truth and then change that truth into love and maybe our children’s grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will tell:

A.K.A. If your revolution doesn’t have Stevie, I don’t want any part of it.³

In the meantime, the real-world plague isn’t over, folks. Thousands of people are still dying in the US of Covid each month (and many thousands around the world). We’re in the middle of a mass-disabling event. Ventilation is key, if you can swing it, and mask up if you can’t. 

And, of course, please buy my book in its friendly new paperback presentation, either for yourself or an authority-questioning young adult in your life (you probably have at least one). Here’s the back cover copy:

From the award-winning author of The Summer Prince comes a novel that blends John Grisham's The Pelican Brief and Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain set at an elite Washington D.C. prep school.

Emily Bird was raised not to ask questions. She has perfect hair, the perfect boyfriend, and a perfect Ivy-League future. But a chance meeting with Roosevelt David, a homeland security agent, at a party for Washington D.C.'s elite leads to Bird waking up in a hospital, days later, with no memory of the end of the night.

Meanwhile, the world has fallen apart: A deadly flu virus is sweeping the nation, forcing quarantines, curfews, even martial law. And Roosevelt is certain that Bird knows something. Something about the virus -- something about her parents' top secret scientific work -- something she shouldn't know.

The only one Bird can trust is Coffee, a quiet, outsider genius who deals drugs to their classmates and is a firm believer in conspiracy theories. And he believes in Bird. But as Bird and Coffee dig deeper into what really happened that night, Bird finds that she might know more than she remembers. And what she knows could unleash the biggest government scandal in US history.

If you’d like to ask me any questions about the book, comments are open!

1. So, the reason this vaccine works is a spoiler, but let’s just say that this is a political thriller, not a scientific treatise. I wish we could get a universal Covid-19 vaccine, but I can’t tell how likely that is any longer. Maybe the Cubans will manage it? 

2. All of those links go back to the essential Nate Bear of Do Not Panic! who I cannot recommend highly enough.

3. Paraphrased so loosely from Emma Goldman, she’d probably dance in her grave to it.