



Extra Life
76,000 words - Currently in search of an agent
When Mark Simon first hears Mos Def’s “Dollar Day,” about the horrors of New Orleans after Katrina, his memory of how much he loved doctoring under difficult circumstances is reawakened after years of dormancy. Now Chair of Internal Medicine at a Vermont hospital, he
is unhappy with his current distance from patients. He is the guitarist in his hospital party band, “BamaJAMA” and has also long wanted to finish a rock opera about a doctor ancestor who traveled from Vermont to New Orleans and then to Cuba, treating Yellow Fever and falling in
love with the daughter of a Cuban count. After getting into a fight with a surgeon and being given a mandatory sabbatical by his hospital, Simon heads South with plans to revisit his own salad days in New Orleans where he was a post-Katrina volunteer and to follow his ancestor’s
trail to Mississippi and Cuba.
The novel begins with him on the highway, remembering his New Orleans road trip with another doctor musician and their jam sessions along the way as well as the other music that has sustained him. In Boston, he visits his charismatic father in the hospital and thinks about his parents’
complicated Jewish/WASP marriage. He also remembers his college sweetheart, Teresa Lopez, whose recent email has added to his internal turbulence. Lyrics begin to come to him as he stops overnight in an inn in Virginia, and he finds tantalizing traces of his ancestor in Mississippi and
compelling contemporaneous accounts in New Orleans of young men bent on bringing Democracy to Mexico and South America. He sets off for Cuba but detours to Puerto Rico when he finds out Teresa is going there. They meet in the San Juan airport and rekindle their romance on a trip to Culebra. But just as they set off for her mother’s beach house in Rincon, Hurricane Maria bears down on the island. Mark convinces her to stay, believing that time with Teresa and helping out in the aftermath of the hurricane may be the motivation he needs to abandon his old life for the one he has always wanted.
Extra Life is a picaresque tale which ranges widely into discussions of music, religion, history ethnicity and medicine (a playlist will follow every section). Besides Mark’s life, it also delves deeply into Teresa’s – she too is dissatisfied, but as a female corporate lawyer in Manhattan stymied by the partner track spending time with her mother, a former Puerto Rican beauty queen, and her best friend Luther, a gay opera singer. In writing the novel, I was inspired by Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical “Hamilton,” George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land” and my own family history. The novel has been workshopped in Elizabeth Gaffney’s A Public Space Novel Workshop and Martha Hughes’
Peripatetic Writing Workshop.
Listen to the Extra Life Playlist - the music which inspired the novel.
