In a not-so-shocking twist, the person obsessed with self help has written an advice book! What is surprising is that none of this was my idea. My friend and long-time collaborator, Roberta, came up with the central idea and main structure of this book on her own. She generously invited me to become a co-author and before I knew it, I was formally trying my hand at the world of advice, specifically, the particular world of advice for academics.
I’ll share more about the content of this book, pre-orders, and why everyone you know who’s in grad school or working in a university environment should read it as we get closer to publication time (May 21!). This week, with the relief of final copyedits sent out to our wonderful team at Between the Lines Books, I want to reflect on what it’s been like stepping into the role of advice-book author.
Shrugging off the self-help rep
As academics, Roberta and I face a certain pressure to write serious stuff: it’s supposed to be theoretically innovative, empirically rigorous, and written in a way that only other truly serious people can comprehend.
The advice book genre does not typically meet these criteria! Many people in our line of work scoff at such writing. There are some good reasons for this: self-help often trots out pseudo-scientific claims and relies more on anecdotes than data. Its authors sometimes have hilariously inflated credentials (“Harvard trained” = “I went to a weekend seminar at Harvard”) that make those with genuine specialized degrees want to scream.
And still, we wrote a book just for these very haters of self help. Ack!
Even though our book is serious in many ways (see more below), I, at least, had to work hard to silence the voices in my head (who sound a lot like my academic peers) that were wary of being associated with a very different kind of writing. Both Roberta and I are lucky in that we’re tenured, and don’t need this book to “count” as an example of scholarship in our fields. It was truly a labour of love, but one that occasionally made me wonder: “Will anyone take this seriously?”
Letting the reader in
One of the things that makes any advice book successful is a sense of trust between the reader and the author. As an author, this means letting the audience get to know you and relate to you. An advice reader wants to feel confident that the authors have some expertise on the issue, but also that they’ve shared in the reader’s struggles. No one wants to take advice from someone who’s never failed, stumbled, or doubted.
For Higher Expectations, we had to find ways to disperse little tidbits about our own histories, frustrations, failures, and occasional successes throughout the book, without making it about us. During revisions, Roberta noticed that there were A LOT more stories about her than about me; not surprising given my struggles with vulnerability! Luckily, we’ve been working together for so long that we had a fair number of shared memories to include, such as the way we met: during my (failed) interview for a tenure track job at the school where Roberta was a PhD student.
It will never not be weird to share this kind of thing, especially for those of us trained to write like detached experts. For the most part, though, I found it fun to sprinkle the odd Easter egg about my life and career through the book. It was a good way to air the odd grievance (nicely cloaked for anonymity), too.
Finding humour in the painful
As in most advice books, the problems we’re trying to address are actually quite serious. The state of academia is no joke. It’s alienating, isolating, exclusionary, and structurally violent to far too many of its students and workers. In a lot of places, the very survival of academic institutions and the freedom to speak openly within them is under attack.
We knew we had to write candidly about these issues without underplaying them. At the same time, advice is an inherently hopeful genre. There has to be some light, some possibility, or else why even write such a book?
One of the ways to let in that light is to inject a little humour, including sarcasm, moments of the absurd, and the odd self-deprecating comment. I found it hard at times to trust that the reader would appreciate the joke, especially if they were feeling very overwhelmed by the shit state of their occupation. I had to remind myself that for the most part, the people who pick up this kind of book want to find some hope and some humour in the situation. Still, my mind would sometimes conjure up a “hate reader,” someone who reads an advice book just to say “none of this would ever work!” That person might exist, but if they bought the book I guess we still get to keep the royalties.
Juggling the big picture and the baby steps
As social scientists, we’re almost never satisfied with an explanation for something that blames the individual, or with solutions to problems that call for individual actions. Women aren’t getting enough sleep? Don’t tell us to go to bed early; dismantle capitalist patriarchy! Millennials can’t afford their first homes? Stop telling them to buy fewer lattes, and tackle rampant gentrification instead.
Of course, an advice book has to do more than point at a problem and shout: “It’s structural!” There are lots of books about academia that do just this. They’re great, but Higher Expectations isn’t one of those books.
There are also lots of academic advice books that never point out the structural problems that make it hard to write as much as you want, finish a PhD, or get your work published. Higher Expectations isn’t one of those books, either.
We set ourselves the daunting task of straddling these worlds. The book had to provide practical, concrete, “start today!” kinds of suggestions while also pointing out, for example, that academia is racist AF.
This strategy runs the risk of losing the readers who want you to diagnose a problem and call for revolution, as well as those who just want to know how to get their research done without hearing about the history of gender bias in citation practices. Despite this risk, we could only really imagine writing a book that points the compass at large-scale change, and also offers a bunch of baby steps along the way. From my perspective, this was probably the hardest part of writing an advice book!
You can’t please everyone
If I’ve learned anything from writing books intended for the general public over the last few years, it’s that there will always be someone who wanted you to write a different book. Or a book that addresses the very narrow and specific set of challenges they’re facing. Or a book that completely affirms their own belief system and way of looking at the world. Or a book with a different title. I could go on…
In other words, at some point you just have to decide to write the book you’re writing. This was harder for me in the context of putting an advice book out there. After all, you really want the book to be useful to as many people as possible! You have the audacity to suggest that people actually do the things you recommend, as if you could ever know whether this would work for them! It’s difficult to shrug and say, “this is just my perspective on the problem,” when you’re also prescribing solutions.
Perhaps more than with any of my other books, I’ve had to try (still trying!) to feel at peace with the knowledge that some potential readers will reject the very premise, others will find its tips uninspiring, and others will want, well, a different book all together.
As the parts of this publishing process that were under our control (the content) end, and the parts that are not under our control (the reception) begin, I’d be lying if I said I was completely sanguine about the whole thing. This discomfort, is, however, an inevitable part of the process of putting anything out into the world. Whatever happens, I’m immensely grateful for the time I got to spend co-writing and co-thinking on this project. Among many other things, it’s given me a whole new perspective on self help and the paradoxical cocktail of hubris, humility, expertise, and vulnerability it takes to contribute to the advice genre.
If you want to know more about what’s in Higher Expectations, stay tuned. I’ll be sharing more details as we approach publication time!
What I’m reading: Joe Country, the 6th Slough House novel by Mick Herron.
What I’m watching: Finally got around to seeing Belfast. It’s kind of distracting to have two people as good looking at Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan in one movie, honestly.