This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with Avalon George — Minneapolis-based writer and author of the debut middle grade novel Ivy Ever After, out this October — for a conversation that feels less like an interview and more like two old friends finally getting the chance to talk. Before diving in, Avalon shows off her yearly vision board tradition (this year's made a few months late, post-holiday CF crash and all), and the two quickly bond over a shared observation: an awful lot of people with CF end up drawn to writing, as if all those hours spent doing vest and nebulizer treatments carved out the time — and maybe the need — to create.
Avalon walks through her CF story from the beginning: diagnosed at one month old, a \"pretty normal\" childhood that included competitive dance, mounting hospitalizations, and a steep decline in college that included a professor stopping a lecture mid-sentence to check if she was okay. She and Morgan trade the particular, specific humor of chronic illness, like the \"quota of appropriate coughing”. They talk about growing up as the eldest daughter, and in Avalon’s case, the strange experience of watching your younger sibling step into the older sibling role, and the complicated grief and pride of living with CF as a kid — wanting the attention at events like the Great Strides walk, but just wanting to blend in and be ‘normal’ at school.
The conversation turns to Trikafta, which Avalon started right around her wedding, after what she calls her \"rock bottom\" — a hospitalization two weeks before the ceremony. She describes the surreal experience of \"the purge,\" gaining back over a decade's worth of lung function within months, sleeping through the night for what felt like the first time in her life, and the strange sci-fi feeling of a body suddenly doing what it was supposed to do. Both women reflect on the identity split of a life before and after modulators, and the unsettling reality that access to a medication this transformative is still gate-kept by insurance companies, governments, and sky-high prices — a point neither is willing to gloss over.
From there, the episode moves into Avalon's therapy journey: an unexpected OCD diagnosis, the realization that her childhood held real trauma even though she'd always thought of herself as “lucky”, and a particularly striking insight from her therapist connecting her recurring fear of the house burning down to the body being its own kind of home. Morgan shares her own parallel — recurring dreams of tornadoes threatening (but never fully destroying) her house — and the two dig into the need for control and the exhausting pressure of childhood \"toxic positivity,\" where being anything other than grateful felt like betrayal.
That thread leads directly into the origin of Ivy Ever After: a metaphor born in therapy, of CF as an unruly dragon Avalon had spent her life trying to leash and train. The book grew out of years of messy, cathartic first drafts, inner child work, writing classes, and a long, difficult querying process that ultimately led Avalon to self-publish. She and Morgan talk about what it means to write for the ten-year-old version of yourself, the privilege of getting to be nostalgic when survival was never guaranteed, and reclaiming childlike whimsy — Disney parks included — without apology.
The episode closes with Avalon sharing about her discomfort with being called a \"chronic illness warrior\" — the way that language quietly implies choice, and blame, in outcomes no one actually controls — and how that tension became a central theme of her book's fictional prophecy.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
You can follow Avalon's writing and CF journey on Instagram at @avalon.writes, and connect with Morgan at @morganbarrett__.
Support Morgan’s work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com
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