“This Is How People Die”: Will Cathcart's Novel About CF, Mortality and Stealing Chopin's Heart

What if the future you spent your entire life preparing not to have suddenly became possible?

In this episode, Ahmet Uluer, DO, MPH, Lauren Harvey, and Andrea Gavin Becker welcome journalist, war correspondent, and author Will Cathcart, who lives with cystic fibrosis, to discuss his debut novel, This Is How People Die—a literary thriller that blends espionage, romance, and cystic fibrosis into an unforgettable exploration of survival.

Together, we explore how Will transformed the realities of growing up with CF into fiction, why survivor's guilt and the CFTR modulator era became central themes in the novel, and how those experiences continue to shape his work around the world and his ongoing fight for equitable access to CF modulators.

Also: Anthony Bourdain, Bob Flanagan, and the Gullah legend of the Haint.

Will Cathcart is an American writer, journalist, and war correspondent. A Charleston native and former media advisor to the president of Georgia, he has covered Russia’s wars in Georgia and Ukraine, trailed ISIS fighters through the Pankisi Gorge, documented Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and chronicled the unsolved killing of a CIA station chief. His work has appeared in CNN, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Air Mail, Literary Hub, Garden & Gun, USA Today, and VICE.

A former managing editor of the Georgian Journal, he has served as senior advisor to a digital diplomacy task force countering Russian propaganda and has worked with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to raise awareness and funding for research. In television, he has consulted and produced for Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, National Geographic’s Drugs, Inc., and ITV’s On Assignment. He and his family — along with their cat, Gocha — split their time between Charleston and Tbilisi.