The Covenant Of Water | Oprah’s Book Club #101 | Abraham Verghese Profile | Oprah Daily

For much of his life, Abraham Berghese has been focused on healing the humanity side of medicine. The word story is embedded in history so we're learning what the patient's story is. The way we view illness, the way we view death, all of that is very much determined by different cultures. I've always felt that medicine is really life plus plus. It's life on steroids and you really can't practice medicine without being intensely aware of history, culture, family. You know, that's what makes this an art and a science. Combining his curiosity about the human condition with his willingness to work hard, he was determined to serve others through the power of becoming a physician. It was so ironic that HIV would land in the laps of a whole generation of us who went into infectious disease because it was all about cure and here we were taking care of an ultimately fatal illness. I think it changed all of us. We all began to understand that when you could not cure, you could heal. Living through and witnessing the devastation of the HIV epidemic and especially how it played out in that small town where I practiced, that was the genesis of my becoming a writer. Eager to document his journey, he decided to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was accepted in 1990 and in 1994 published his first non-fiction book, My Own Country. It was sort of an accident of sorts that my first book was non-fiction describing the AIDS epidemic. My first love was always fiction and so when I finally turned to fiction with Cutting for Stone, that is the kind of writing that I wanted to do and I thought I would be doing all along. The first thing I began with was geography. Geography affects everybody's story, I mean, and geography is destiny. Thinking that I didn't want to be inefficient and go off in many directions, I began to sketch out in some great detail on a whiteboard, a giant whiteboard that occupies almost the whole wall of my living room. I already had in mind this notion of a family with several generations. I also had the sense of a strong woman as the central character. I wanted to salute the quiet heroism of women who live very quiet lives that nobody will ever know about. The richness of Abraham's culture and the beauty of his relationship with his community deeply inspired this novel. My mother was extraordinarily influential. When she was in her 70s and retired in Florida, my five-year-old niece asked her, which means grandmother, what was it like when you were a little girl? And my mother hand wrote this extraordinary document just full of all the childhood anecdotes which we all had heard her tell us before, except they've become much embellished now. And she illustrated it beautifully. Seeing that document and then realizing how rich our community and our rituals were, that would have would not have happened but for my mother. And she was very excited when she learned I was going to do this. The Covenant of Water is an epic, transportive story. It is one of the best books I have ever read and I am so grateful to have the opportunity to offer readers this 101st Oprah's Book Club Selection. At one level it's entertainment, at one level it's a story, but at another level it's the beauty of this world we're in and all the myriad of characters and all the challenges we face. But if I had some things that I'm gratified to see coming out of the story from readers, as I interact with them, I think it's the recognition that, you know, that goodness doesn't have to take a mega shape. God could be at the smallest of things and that there was great beauty in the simplest rituals and in the most humble lives.