Why I Write Books

I write books because I love books—and because I love writing books.

Content note: misogynistic violence.

This week, as I prepare to give my first ever writing workshop—gulp—I wanted to answer a question that some of you asked too, when I put out the call to ask me anything some months ago. (I haven’t answered all of your good questions, but I also haven’t forgotten and intend to circle back to them.) Why do I write books? It’s a question that is relevant not only because many of you are authors contemplating different mediums, but also because, in the age of short-form attention-grabbing pieces—including, of course, here on Substack—many authors’ relationships with books and book-writing is becoming more complex. And less compulsory.

I stumbled into book-writing because of a variant on Pascal’s old chestnut about writing a long letter because you didn’t have time to write a short one: I wrote a book because I failed completely to write the op-ed I had intended.

It was May 23, 2014, but I can rehearse the story as if it was yesterday. There was a loud knock at the door at the Alpha Phi Sorority House, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Some forty to sixty young women, students at UCSB, would have been living there at the time. But it being Memorial Day weekend, relatively few of them were home to answer the door. The knocking continued—seeming aggressive, a veritable pounding—for one to two full minutes. The women inside decided not to open up. And it’s very fortunate that they didn’t. Because the man who had come knocking, a 22 year-old man by the name of Elliot Rodger, had a loaded gun in his hand and was planning to eviscerate all of them. The motive? Rodger addressed this in a YouTube video he uploaded just prior to his rampage: “Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration. You think I’m unworthy of it. That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.”

He wound up murdering two female students walking outside—members of tri-Delta—and four young men, three beforehand via stabbing, and one afterward, when he went on a random drive-by shooting spree which also wounded fifteen other people. It was a tragedy and an outrage of the kind that is close to an ordinary news day in America.

I was deeply upset by these events, of course, but it was the media reaction to them that really provoked my impulse to write. Everywhere, denials that this was misogyny. Elliot Rodger wasn’t a misogynist because he loved his mother, and misogyny involved hating any and every woman; Elliot Rodger wasn’t a misogynist because he himself was vulnerable, mentally ill, or, on some reckonings, autistic; Elliot Rodger wasn’t a misogynist because he was just as much a racist (and mired in self-hatred as an Asian-American person); Elliot Rodger wasn’t a misogynist because he didn’t have contempt for women—rather, he put them on a pedestal.

I wanted to write a short op-ed that addressed all of these bad arguments and said what I thought was obvious: what was important was not what Elliot Rodger felt, but what these women faced, at the hands of a gun-toting aggressor who was aiming to slaughter them. If that’s not misogyny, then nothing is: and that’s a problem. “Misogyny” is a loaded word, and one that women need to be able to wield to identify the potent problems facing us. And misogyny is a structural phenomenon that can be manifested not just by hate-filled individuals but also by the social practices and institutions that control and enforce gendered expectations—such as the expectation that we be providers of love, sex, admiration, and attention to designated privileged male recipients.

But I couldn’t put it that crisply, yet. And I didn’t find the structural and victim-centered theory of misogyny to help me defend my argument. To my surprise, it didn’t exist in the philosophical literature. And so I wrote my first book to say these things—and more, of course—and to gradually defend the view that has become my signature position in philosophy as well as public discourse.

A few points to note about writing that book: one, it nearly killed me. Two, it only didn’t because—in a superficial irony—two men held my hand in the process, one personally, and one professionally. My husband, Daniel, who came up with the term “himpathy” (although it is my concept, he’s the branding guy in the family) read every first draft instantly, as he continues to do to this day. He also supported an emotional mess of a person who was not yet able to bear the weight of what I was writing about. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my editor at Oxford University Press, Peter Ohlin, who was incredibly supportive, generous, and patient with me, during my tumultuous writing process. He was both an involved editor and one who managed to gently extract the project from me when I wanted to sit on it forever, trying to perfect it, and also convinced that I would be lambasted—or worse—on publication.

The choice to write a “crossover” book—a book written for an academic press, but intended for a wider audience too—was a natural one given my subject matter. As I’ve written about before, I can’t imagine trying to make this book less accessible than it could be, given how many people I thought would benefit from thinking hard about misogyny along with its author. At the same time, Down Girl was written pre-tenure, and had to be academic enough to satisfy my colleagues in philosophy.

The book got a lot of good press, only because of an accident of timing: it came out the week the #MeToo movement, lead by Tarana Burke for over a decade, was publicized by celebrities such as Alyssa Milano (late in 2017). The result made my writing career—with prominent podcasts, interviews, reviews, and a trade paperback in the UK. Literary agents reached out to me, trade publishers were interested in my next book, and I was able to get a lucrative book deal for that title, Entitled. Designed in many ways to be a more accessible version of Down Girl, it had the mirror-image focus: how men are privileged and forgiven and upheld in ways that correspond to how women are downranked and punished and exploited. Published with Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House), and edited by my luminously brilliant editor Amanda Cook, it hit at a pretty bad time for books primarily on gender—the summer of 2020. Still, it got a lot of nice coverage and helped to continue a conversation that I am still passionate about having, and have been carrying on via my Substack—on socially sanctioned sexual assault, men’s negligence within heterosexual relationships, and our lack of care and attention to women’s health and well-being.

My third book, Unshrinking, came from a more vulnerable place—a place of much being left unsaid after I’d finished the first two. I’d been offered a lot of press that I turned down, simply—or not so simply—because I had long been fat, and because I was scared of being dismissed and mocked because of my body. I would turn down TV appearances unless it was via Skype where I could control the camera angle. I turned down an all-expenses-paid publicity tour of the UK that would have been a real career boost. I shrunk from the spotlight.

When I got pregnant, and had a daughter, I realized—cliché as it is—that I owed it to her to face my body shame and internalized fatphobia. And so I wrote a book to try to work through it. That book did begin with an op-ed, which generated a lot of conversation, and more importantly made me passionately want to explore the topic at more length: the futility of weight loss; the false sense of a moral obligation to diet; the beauty hierarchies at the heart of fatphobia; the gaslighting of diet culture; and the authority, in the end, of our body’s own hunger. I had to learn a lot in the process—including the science of weight loss, the history of anti-fatness, and the experiences of people who are much heavier than I’ve ever been. It was an incredibly rewarding process—undertaken with Amanda as well as her spectacular co-editor Katie Berry at Crown—and I’m so glad I did it. I was beyond honored that it was a finalist for the National Book Award last year. At the same time, the book has been the worst-selling of any of my three, something which I attribute partly to the contracting review outlets and market for serious non-fiction, and partly to the advent of Ozempic and similar weight loss drugs that made my body liberation message seem otiose.

Those are the realities of publishing, though. It’s impossible to control how your book will be received or even to predict how much press it will get. So much depends on timing and luck and other vicissitudes of the market.

In the end, I come back to this: I write books because I love books. I love sitting down (with my phone in jail across the room) and diving deeply into an author’s viewpoint and world and distinctive way of putting things. I love teaching books in full, and watching students benefit from following an argument from start to finish. And I love the challenge of writing books more than almost anything: thinking about the structure, the chapter order (something I really struggle with), each chapter as potentially stand-alone (given the way some readers will inevitably dip in and out), the all-important introduction, chapter kickers and conclusions, the examples and the interweaving of empirical data and philosophical theory, and and and and and. I love thinking about book titles and chapter titles and even cover design. I love working with editors and my incredible agent, Lucy Cleland.

Writing a book is a bit like having a baby though: a massive undertaking, and a potentially lifelong commitment. I don’t feel sure, at this point, that I will ever want to do it again. The last one took so much out of me, and for the moment, I’m happy here on Substack, as well as devoting more time to my academic work in progress.

Ask me in a year or two and maybe the old book spark will have returned. I certainly hope so. Few things are more satisfying.