Sometimes you need to give up on death to have the time of your life…
Caitlin is convinced she’s going to die. She’s going to be kidnapped and murdered while walking late at night, or be crushed by a piece of scaffolding, of fall out of her bedroom window. She doesn’t quite know how it’s going to happen, only that it will, and she’ll be ready. It’s all she can think about.
She deals with these thoughts by throwing herself into work, self-medicating with alcohol and attending a support group for people with death-related anxiery, informally known as the Morbids.
But when her best friend announces she’s getting married in Bali, and she meets a handsome doctor named Tom, Caitlin must overcome her fear of death and learn to start living again.
When I first started writing The Morbids, I had no idea.
I had no idea how to write a book, not properly. It wasn’t even supposed to be a book. It was a random scene I wrote one morning before my kids woke up, back when I was just getting confident writing fiction. I didn’t know how to structure a story or plot out a narrative or create a character. I still don’t. I was just writing, and this thing came out. Too long, too sprawling, with all these subplots that I thought were cool and edgy but weren’t really relevant to anything.
I had no idea what to do with the book once I’d finished it. I knew writers. I knew people who worked in publishing. But I had no idea what to do with it. Even when I thought I had it figured out, I didn’t. And I definitely didn’t know how long and winding and repetitive and emotionally exhausting the whole process would be.
I had no idea that it would put me back in therapy. That it would feel like the hardest, worst thing I’d ever done, that every setback, no matter how minor, would feel crushing and world-ending, while every step forward would feel tentative and surreal and fragile, and more and more and more frightening.
I had no idea I’d be looking at bringing this book into the world in 2020, the year that keeps trying to kill us all, over and over and over again.
I have no idea what happens next and it is terrifying. But maybe, just maybe, The Morbids is a book and soon everyone will be able to read it and that is bloody incredible. I’ll keep you posted.
ewa ramsey 