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NEW YORK -- Novelist Myla Goldberg isn't one for reunions.
Not that she didn't like high school in Greenbelt, Md., or college in Ohio (Oberlin, class of '93), but, she says, "When I'm done, I'm done. I don't go back."
No sequels for her.
Five years after the critical and commercial success of Goldberg's debut, Bee Season, her second novel, Wickett's Remedy (Doubleday, $24.95), published this week, is completely different.
Bee Season is set in a Jewish neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia in the '80s. The movie, starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche, will be released in November.
The story features an otherwise unremarkable fifth-grader with a mystical way of winning spelling bees, surprising her obsessive, scholarly parents.
Wickett's Remedy is set in Irish, working-class South Boston in 1918 during the influenza epidemic that killed more Americans in 10 months than died in all the 20th-century wars combined.
The only thing mystical about the novel is the brief annotations in the page margins.
They're voices of the dead, offering their versions of the story.
Goldberg calls them "marginal voices ... a footnote-type thing" but placed closer to the text.
She was inspired by one of her favorite books, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, "a novel essentially written in annotations."
Goldberg's chorus of the dead, whispering their corrections, also reinforces one of the themes of Wickett's Remedy: the fallibility of memory.
"I'm asking readers to do something that they're not used to doing," going from the text to the margins and back again, she acknowledges.
"Reading is a very personal experience. Readers like things a certain way. I just hope they give it a little time and go with it."
Isn't that risky?
"Sure," she says with a smile. "That's the whole point. Why write if you're not taking risks, especially when you're young?"
Goldberg, 33, never expected to be a full-time novelist without another job to support her habit.
"I'm still amazed that's happened and hope it's something I never get used to."
She lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn with her husband, Jason Little, a cartoonist, and a daughter who is nearly 2.
She wrote Bee Season in two years while working as a talent scout for Hollywood studios, reading manuscripts, none of which was turned into a movie by her employers.
But the success of Bee Season -- Doubleday reports 400,000 copies in print -- has let Goldberg fulfill dreams of being a full-time writer.
Her earliest memory: "Sitting at a typewriter and pretending I was writing a novel."
Wickett's Remedy began five years ago after Goldberg saw a list of the five deadliest plagues.
A self-confessed "disease nerd," she had never heard of the 1918 epidemic that was overshadowed by World War I.
Her research grew into a novel that features a poor but ambitious shopgirl whose life is changed by the epidemic.
It proved much tougher to write than Bee Season.
Her debut "wasn't autobiographical, but it was personal," she says. "I knew who those people were and their community. Now I was in utterly new territory. I was starting from nothing."
Two years into the novel, she started over: "The plot was OK, but the characters seemed dead on the page."
She also learned that "when you write a story, you have to let the story tell you how to tell it."
Wickett's Remedy became more than the story of Lydia Kilkenny, the curious, charming shopgirl, and Henry Wickett, a shy medical student who invents a patent medicine.
Goldberg drops documents and newspaper articles from 1918 into her novel, inspired, she says, by how John Dos Passos used different kinds of text in U.S.A. Trilogy.
Some of the history is stranger than any fiction she could imagine, such as the Boston health officials who said there was "no reason to fear an epidemic" but advised against kissing "except through a handkerchief."
As for Bee Season, the movie, Goldberg wasn't involved in its production but saw a preview.
Asked to review it, she says, "I don't. I like to maintain my separation. In some ways, it's very different from the book. In some ways, it's very similar. I respect what they're trying to do."
She's "giving my brain a break" for a while, working on a few short stories and thinking about writing a play or a children's book, "trying out some other form."
Her next novel will be set in the present for a simple reason: "I haven't done that yet."
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