the joys and challenges of writing a "soul-crushingly of-the-moment" academic book
part 2 of my conversation with Rhiannon Garth Jones
Hello, friends! It’s been a little while. I’ve been traveling a lot, and I noticed that I haven’t really been reading the newsletters I subscribe to, so I figured it would be a kindness to us all if I didn’t force myself to put out content during the summer.
If I’m being honest, the state of the world is taking a toll on me, creatively speaking. I’m finding my manuscript revision for my memoir more challenging than expected. At the same time, people have been contacting me more with questions relating to my first book, Not All Dead White Men, which unfortunately feels extremely relevant once more.
For those interested, I wrote an essay for Foreign Policy about comparisons between Donald Trump and Julius Caesar. It was fun to write, but it definitely made me think more about how I got into this kind of work, which isn’t typical for classical scholars. Most of the time.
A few weeks ago, I talked with Rhiannon Garth Jones about her book All Roads Lead to Rome:
what we talk about when we talk about thinking about Rome
You know that meme from a few years ago about how guys think about the Roman empire every day? Perfectly parodied by SNL? I still get asked about it all the time. In emails, in DMs, through the contact form of my website, in notes slid into my locker that say “Will you answer some questions about why people are so obsessed with ancient Rome? Circle one:…
Inevitably, though, in addition to talking about the content of the book, she and I got to talking about the meta element — the process of writing a book like this, one that is both academic and highly researched with respect to material from thousands of years ago while also speaking directly to the contemporary extremely online world. It’s a weird feeling! Most classicists, I assume, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about memes as part of the process of writing their books, so it was a real treat for me to get a chance to talk with someone who has shared that experience — and had colleagues gently warn her about the dangers of it, as mine did.
This is a very exciting book. I tore through it in a weekend, I loved it so much. And, on a personal level, you are doing me a huge favor, because people ask me about the Roman Empire and tech bros all the time.
I cannot stress this enough. Understandably, most people look at the title and the subtitle, and they’re like, “Oh, really cool that when that meme happened, you were sort of ready to go,” and I’m like, “No, no, I wrote that proposal 4 months before.” The meme sort of started the same week that we’d sent out the proposal. The universe really had my back on this, which is not a thing I feel like I say very often.
Well, the opposite has happened to me now, twice, where I have submitted a manuscript, and then a little while later, Donald Trump got elected and I had to rewrite the whole thing.
I was literally just joking with someone, I would love for my work to be slightly less relevant, actually. “May your work be less relevant” is what academics should wish for each other, in my opinion.
Thank you!
Maybe not totally irrelevant, but just not so… soul-crushingly of the moment.
You’re one of the only people I know who have had this experience. I do like to joke, “Ah yes, that normal part of the classical scholar’s book process, where they have to be on the internet every day reading the news to figure out what’s going on with the present moment and how their book is going to deal with it, and not poring over fragments from 2500 years ago.”
I wrote it in a very condensed timeframe. I handed in my PhD dissertation on the 31st of January. I had, like, 3 days of celebrating. And then I wrote it in less than 7 months, which is not a thing I would advise anyone to do.
Wow.
But I think in some ways, it helped a little bit with that overwhelming pressure of how, every damn day, something was happening in the news that just felt so incredibly relevant to what I was thinking about and working with. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t have longer to write this manuscript.
I remember with Not All Dead White Men, there was a moment where I was finishing up the revised version in July and August 2017, and that was when all the stuff was happening in Charlottesville, and I was sort of like, “Do I take a few more months and add another chapter about Sparta and far-right militias?” And ultimately we decided not to, in part because… what would happen in those few months? Would I feel like, okay, well, now we need another chapter about specific Roman emperors? Thank you for doing that for me, by the way.
But at a certain point, I just felt that I was done. The next person can build on my work, or I’ll build on it in the next project.
And I think that absolutely has to be the attitude, right? Someone else can take it from here, and if they don’t, I guess I’ll pick myself back up and go again. But I had the exact same thing. I was finishing in the summer, and I was watching the US election…
The Zoom transcript is not capturing how much I’m just shaking my head in sadness and dismay.
Yes, and my hand movements of despair.
So this is a very exciting book for a ton of reasons, and I’m glad that you were able to really capitalize on that moment. It builds on some of your dissertation research, right? That’s why you were able to sort of turn that around so fast.
Yeah, although, comically, not a lot. Half of Chapter 8, that’s my dissertation. To be honest, maybe more like a third of Chapter 8. But a lot of the bigger picture stuff, a lot of the threads that run through, a lot of what emerges in the chapters on the British Empire and the German and Italian empires on academia and archaeology, that’s very much stuff I learned and worked with as part of the process of my PhD. I’ve been thinking about this for a good 10, 15 years. So it wasn’t like I just sat down to write the book out of nowhere. And then I covered nine empires in the books, so it was more like, okay, I think I have the framework, I have the theoretical underpinnings, I've got some really rock-solid case studies. Fortunately, I think it was just a good hypothesis.
It’s an excellent hypothesis. And I do think it is an unusual kind of book for a younger scholar to write. It’s got a really wide scope, and such a relevant, of-the-moment topic.
This might sound kind of mean about myself, but a number of people have told me, “Oh, this is such a you kind of book. Only you are sufficiently strange to have this enormous breadth of interest that you could pull together.” I kind of joke quite a lot that I'm intellectually tarty.
Nice.
Because I am, honestly. I mean that in a good way.
Is there a bad way to mean that? We should all be more intellectually… I’m trying to think what Americans would say, because Americans wouldn’t say tarty, right? They’d say, you know, intellectually promiscuous.
Yes, that works! We should all be more intellectually promiscuous. And yes, a lot of people were like, “Oh, do you really want this to be your first book? Do you not want to write an academic monograph? Do you want it to be this popular and kind of informal thing?” And the whole time, I was thinking… I might only get one book. I might not have an academic career. Have you seen academia? My chances aren’t great. And even if they were, I want to do this more, and I want to do it in this way. More than I want, I don't know, the box check on my academic CV or whatever.
I was in the same place 10 years ago. When I signed the contract for Not All Dead White Men, my editor was like, “Just so you know, you're going to be unhireable on the tenure track if you do this as your first book. Ethically, I can’t have you write this if you don’t understand that.” And I completely believed her! I didn’t think, “Oh, no, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I made the same choice you did, because I thought, “I want to do more stuff like this. I don’t want to go back in that box.”
I think I got a lot of very similar advice from a lot of people who were incredibly well-intentioned and supportive, and they weren't saying “it's a bad idea” or “you shouldn't do it.” They were just like, “Do you fully understand what you're doing?” And I was like, “Yeah. And I'll be honest, I don't really want to fit their rubric, and also, have you met me? I'm never going to.”
Hard same.
I'm actually fine with that, thank you.
My heart really goes out to you, making that choice. But if it makes you feel better, I don't regret it for a second.
It’s a very popular style of book, obviously. I think that’s pretty obvious from page one. I had a lot of colleagues and friends peer review each chapter informally. I’m not going to tackle the entire historiography of Imperial Russia without getting some people to check this for me. And literally every single time I asked an academic colleague to read it, I had to preface it with, “I need you to know the tone is deliberately informal compared with what you’re used to, and that will not be changing.” Nearly every time I got some sort of text or email that said, “I get that you prepared me, but I was a little surprised.” But this is not a book for academics. I hope some academics will read it and enjoy it, obviously. But they are not the primary audience.
I had the opposite side of that. I published mine through Harvard University Press, so people expected it to be more academic. And then I got a lot of people being like, “It was much more readable than I expected it to be! It was almost fun, except that the topic was… so not fun.”
Incredibly not fun. I’ve read your book. I think that’s such a funny indictment of how we think about academic writing so often. Your book is definitely accessible, from what I remember, and engaging, but I wouldn’t have said it was not academic.
My very first version was more sarcastic. And then my editor made me cut the snarkiness.
I was delighted at how many of the snarky footnotes my editors let me get in.
Yes, sorry, when I said cut the snarkiness, she meant put it in footnotes, which I did.
But that’s just good academia, right? Academics do snarky footnotes all the time.
Honestly, apart from how wonderful some of the individual people I've met have been, the main selling point for academia I have encountered over the last 5-6 years isthat you can be really snarky in footnotes.
Thank you all for supporting Myth Takes, a place where I feel completely free to be as snarky as I want in the main body text (although I do still love a footnote). I’ll be publishing less regularly this summer, but I’m still here, and I appreciate you.