Q&A

A Conversation with DEE ANDREWS

On the Inspiration Behind the Novel

Q: Where did the idea for The Fevered World come from?
I was living in Spain during the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and I discovered that the 1918 “Spanish Flu” may have actually originated in Kansas—my home state. I’d grown up right on top of this incredible, overlooked story and never knew it. I wanted to understand how a virus in 1918 traveled from a remote prairie around the world to kill over 50 million people. I couldn’t understand that number, and I wanted to humanize it. For years I tried to answer the question by writing a novel in linked stories, following the virus from person to person. But breadth was working against me—every new character reset the reader’s attachment just as it was forming. I realized the way to make 50 million feel real wasn’t to widen the lens, it was to narrow it: to go deep enough into two lives that their loss could stand in for all the others. That’s what led me to this story.

Q: Why did those two lives end up being a father in Kansas and a daughter in France?
The pandemic and the war were never separate stories. The virus most likely would have died out in rural Kansas had it not started traveling with the soldiers, so I needed two lives that could carry that collision:  one in a laboratory, one traveling to France with the virus and the soldiers, each fighting the same invisible enemy from opposite sides of the world. A father and daughter didn’t just give me two vantage points on the crisis—the relationship gave readers something with its own stakes, so they’re not just tracking a virus, they’re tracking two people who need to find their way back to each other. The distance between them is geographic, but it’s also emotional.

Q: Is Dr. Lorne Miller based on a real doctor?
Lorne is inspired by the real Dr. Loring Miner, the Haskell County physician who was among the first in the country to sound the alarm about an unusually lethal strain of influenza. But Lorne is an invented character. His biography, his family, his choices in the novel are all fiction. He shares Miner’s circumstance—and his mustache—but not his life.

Q: What other real historical figures or events show up in the novel?
Lorne works alongside real medical figures of the era—Dr. William Park and Dr. Anna Wessels Williams among them—and later travels to Gallops Island, where incarcerated sailors volunteered to be deliberately exposed to influenza in exchange for pardons, an early and ethically fraught form of clinical trial. It let me put his scientific certainty up against a genuinely uncomfortable moral question, and it’s one of the more under-told pieces of 1918 medical history. Helen’s world has its own real pioneers: nurse anesthetist Alice Magaw, the surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing, and her mentor, Chief Nurse Anna Maxwell. Most readers have never heard of these women, in particular, which made them some of my favorite “did you know” discoveries in the research.

On Dee Andrews as a Writer

Q: What’s your background as a writer, and how did it shape the way you approached this novel?
I’m a journalist by training—I have a journalism degree from the University of Kansas—and spent years working in marketing and communications. That instinct to find the story, verify a fact, and follow a thread never left me. When I turned to fiction, Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project gave me the rest: structure, accountability, and a mentor in Erika Krouse. Journalism taught me how to find a story. Fiction took years of practice to teach me how to craft one.

Q: This novel took a long time to reach readers. What did that process actually look like?
Between learning to write fiction, raising kids, a job… it took roughly ten years to write it. When my agent began pitching in April 2020, we ran straight into the worst possible timing: I’d always thought of 1918 as “the forgotten pandemic”—a great hook for a novel nobody else was writing—but by then it wasn’t forgotten at all, and editors felt readers wanted to escape the pandemic they were living through, not read about one.

I wasn’t willing to let this novel go though. I let it sit in the proverbial drawer for several years, hoping distance from our own pandemic would strengthen its appeal. In 2024, I started pitching small presses and was thrilled to land with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher. I appreciate how closely they collaborate with authors, and their distribution through Simon & Schuster means this book will reach bookstores and libraries—the places I go for my next read, and where I hope my readers will find this one.

On the Novel Itself

Q: Why does this resonate in a post-COVID world, even though you wrote it years before 2020?
So little of the human response has changed—the fear, the political pressure to protect normalcy over public health, the instinct to look for someone to blame. I didn’t add any of that after COVID; it was already there in the 1918 record. Living through COVID confirmed things I’d only understood intellectually before—the false starts, the haphazard public health response, the way people search for a villain when the truth is scarier. Living through COVID didn’t change the manuscript so much as it changed how certain I was that I’d gotten it right.

Q: What do you hope readers take away—not just from the plot, but from spending time with these characters?
Three things, really: that purpose is what gets you through traumatic events. That courage means choosing the peril rather than avoiding it. And that loss and failure aren’t the end of the story, they’re how you learn and find out what you’re made of.