MALIGNED
TRIVIA
Mr. Unclean
Maligned is my first book inspired by the Daily Show, and probably the last. You can view the clip below, if you want, and see where it began.
The cause for my inspiration was subtle enough--a little anecdote about how Jon's "grandmother used to tell him a story" about a woman that didn't wash her hands and killed everybody. It made me realize that I had no idea who Typhoid Mary was, even though her name is easily recognizable by nearly everyone in America. So, naturally, I read about her in Wikipedia. And then I did the Wikipedia thing, where I clicked on link after random link, in the vague direction of finding out when our sanitation practices began to improve, as a society. I wouldn't recommend researching that, it's a sad topic (if you watched the clip above, that's all you need to know). But eventually it led me to the tragic life of Ignaz Semmelweis. And there's nothing I like more than people with an absurdly tragic life. So I decided to combine their stories. Because the theme is the same—why we wash our hands. Why we should attempt to be rational, and do the trivial things that prevent people from dying. Because sometimes, it seems, we should care. It's a rather didactic theme, which I usually try to avoid. And that's why I've been telling people, when describing Maligned to them, that it's my only book with a moral at the end. But feel free to ignore it. It's what Mary would have done. |