What would you do if you walked out one morning and found a box on your front door — or in the hallway of your apartment building or next to your tent in the desert — with a piece of string that would tell you how long you had left to live? Would you open it, or would you throw that surprising intruder straight into the trash?
Nikki Erlick asks these questions—and a series of scenarios that emerge from them—in her debut novel, “The Measure,” which was recently on the hardcover fiction list for two weeks and is the Read With Jenna pick of the July “Today” show. . When Erlick talked to Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb about the book, which was inspired by the Greek myth about three old women spinning threads of human destiny, a viewer asked if she would open her own box, should one come out like the did for every adult around the world in her story. “I guess I wouldn’t open the box at this point,” Erlick said. “But I know we change so much in life, so I’m very open to changing my answer later.” (Her hosts agreed with this approach; Kotb said, “I wouldn’t go near the box!”)
Despite Erlick’s relative youth—she graduated from Harvard University in 2016—she seems to have earned the qualifications to weave fiction about a destabilizing global phenomenon. She has a master’s degree in global thinking from Columbia University and has visited about a dozen countries in three years while working as a writer for Indagare Travel. “The emphasis on the interconnectedness of the world is something that I took and put into this book,” Erlick said in a telephone interview. “I had all these different characters and I knew I wanted to create the feeling that even in our loneliest, most isolated moments – like when I was writing in quarantine – we are still connected as people. Our lives touch other lives, even if we don’t actively see it happening.”
Erlick started writing “The Measure” before the start of the pandemic, so it was a coincidence that the wooden boxes became a reality in her characters’ lives in March, a month we now associate with crisis and isolation. She explained: ‘These are the most unpredictable months; it could be a snow storm one day and summer the next. So I thought what a perfect time, you never know what’s going to happen.” Erlick had no intention of fitting “The Measure” into the robust subgenre of novels about Covid-19, but, she said, “People have told me it feels cathartic in the context of the pandemic, so I’m grateful that people to read it that way.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of ‘A Window Opens’.