Who am I?
Why am I doing this?
The same introductory questions that I’d answer when meeting someone for the first time are also the ones that return again and again as I think about writing my first book. Not that anyone is actually asking them. But they appear spitefully anyways.
I recently finished a PhD in Italian literature and philosophy and despite the hefty dissertation that I wrote for it, I still feel like writing a book. This might seem like a strange desire for someone who has chosen not to pursue a tenure track career, but it makes perfect sense to me, or maybe for me.
My field has been in dismal shape for a while, even before COVID came in like a rabid bull and took out the remaining pillars of hope for a better market in the future. So the kinds of academic positions that were available were teaching-heavy and did not leave much (any?) room for research. And research was why I got into this kind of work to begin with. I have always wanted to be a writer. My mistake was thinking that I needed a PhD to do it.
I can say now, though, after a fair bit of self-reflecting, that I do not regret doing it. Yes, it took a long time, and no, that experience does not easily translate into other kinds of work or positions. But how boring my downtime would be without all the ideas and skills I picked up during the dissertating process! What do most other people do, dread about politics all day? How suffocatingly one-dimensional. There are so many other things to worry about.
So I finished my doctorate with a boatload of writing energy still buzzing inside me. I knew that I wanted to take a break from the dissertation material, one, because I needed time away from it before I could revise it properly and two, because it made me sick just thinking about revising it.
There was something that had been bopping around my head for some time, though. Not so much an idea but a topic, a philosophical concept that hadn’t been taken up by the people who probably should have taken it up already. With graduation came a bunch more free time, even as I started a job right away. Who knew that you could fit so much free time into a single weekend! And with this free time I started reading and watching things that I was interested in not purely from a scholarly perspective. That’s when the concept became a book idea.
So now, I am pulling together all of my resources around writing and planning a book-length project to start research for a book that will appeal to scholars and non-specialist alike. This comes with its own problems, but I’m finding comfort in the fact that I’ve written something over 350 pages before!
More on those problems in the next post. Stay tuned!