What Is a Pandemic Good For? Blurred Days and Live Memories

In this chapter, Julia Watson traces her lived experience of COVID-19 in the United States, framing personal reflections with allusions to life narratives by graphic memoirists Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry, autobiographers Leslie Jamison, and Tove Ditlevsen, as well as plague literature from Boccaccio to Camus, Thomas Mann, and Kafka, that explore how isolation, grief, and mortality have, historically, reshaped daily life and self-understanding. Observing the uneven distribution of risk, the fragility of social ties, and the absence of communal mourning, Watson tracks the quotidian rhythms of her pandemic life with its rhythm of meditative walks punctuated by the unease of testing and quarantine, and the need for improvised rituals of grief. Her situating of personal reflection in cultural contexts suggests how life writing may mediate grief, register global crises, and serve as a kind of ethical witnessing to collective upheaval and the structural inequalities shaping whose stories are remembered.