Jeff Anderson's Backstory

     I did it for the Paparazzi.

     No self-effacing double talk here about why I started writing. It was all about fungating, sensational, hedonistic ambition to be invited to charity balls with coiffed starlets who remove articles of clothing when you enter the room, to be immortalized in sleazy supermarket tabloids about celebrity UFO abductions, to be consulted on issues of national importance like which Desperate Housewives actress is the hottest.

     That, coupled with the unfortunate circumstance of not being able to sing or do impressions. What was left but writing?

Of course, I didn’t realize all this at the time. I thought it was just early career ennui. People think there’s no room for boredom in medicine, where actor-doctor-models-in-scrubs spend their time sexually harassing interns when they’re not thrusting their fists in the spurting aortas of open chest trauma patients.

     Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to learn if you want to be a competent physician. Even more if you’re an academic that hopes to be a first-rate scientist and run a laboratory alongside your practice. But somewhere between medical school and residency where I crystallized time out of supersaturated days to add weeks to the lives of vegetative elderly men who breathe through straws and ask if they can die, I found my faithfulness to my career wandering. For months I would snap out of my angst whenever I could make a difference – put together a few hidden clues and make a diagnosis that started a sick child on his way to a cure, or comfort the family of a trauma victim in the patient’s final hours.

     But there were the long stretches of time between those golden moments. Much of the time I spent sitting in a claustrophobic hospital call room staring at the ceiling tiles and missing my wife.

So I started reading again.

     For years, I’d put away the diet of good literature that I grew up with. I was no stranger to great fiction; I even learned Russian in high school for the primary purpose of reading The Brothers Karamazov in Russian. But this was different. I craved escape. I wanted a story more than an intellectual challenge. I started reading thrillers.

     At first, it was like sneaking a glance at the Jerry Springer show displayed on walls of TV’s playing at the local Best Buy. I looked over my shoulder to see who would be watching what lowbrow title I was reading.

     But I stopped caring once I lost myself in some fabulous stories. I was wrong. There was nothing low about the experience. In fact, I developed a habit. I read every chance I could, right down to putting a paperback in my lab coat pocket for slow spots during morning rounds.

     I gravitated to science thrillers, where I loved best stories that pushed back the envelope on the great mysteries of science, stories that played with the laws of the universe and tinkered with the origins of life. There weren’t very many of those. I read everything written by Michael Crichton and Gregory Benford. I read a lot of hard science fiction. Pretty soon, I started getting desperate. There weren’t enough stories to feed my habit. And I got mad when authors would write something that got the science wrong, where plausibility wasn’t just strained, but broken for me when an immutable law of physics was ignored.

     That’s when I became a pusher. I started writing science thrillers, with the aspiration of telling a great story and getting the science right.

     So now, 5 years later, I’m still in a hospital call room, but now my days are packed trying to juggle three separate careers of radiology, neuroscience, and writing thrillers. I’m wondering when the gig will be up. Maybe at some point the career police are going to come after me and tell me I can’t do all three and do them well…that it’s time to give one up. But they haven’t found me yet.

And ever since I realized that writing thrillers was a sure path to glory amidst throngs of paparazzi chasing private jets and throwing free tickets to rock concerts and political fundraisers, there’s no going back.

     Please check out Jeff Anderson's website.

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