My Writing Life: From Books to Substack

…now that I’ve been doing this for just over four months and over 70 posts, with great, great thanks for all your support…!

Why I Started BordoLines

For most of my life, my chief identity and delight as a writer has been writing books. I’ve loved everything about writing books—from the moments when I realized “I’ve got to find out more about this” or “This needs to be said” to the months and sometimes years of becoming a student again, diving deep into primary materials, to the nervous excitement of the first paragraph—usually written many times until it found itself—to editing, over and over.

I adored editing, and found it hard to stop. I often thought of it in terms of tactile metaphors from other activities: pruning away weeds, carving clarity out of stubborn blocks of verbal concrete, foraging for just the right words. I’d get up every morning and couldn’t wait to get to my desk. As much as I loved other things in my life, I was depressed between books, picking fights with my husband, developing weird psychosomatic symptoms.

I didn’t always want to write books. My earliest ambition was to be a journalist and (possibly because I was a sixties child and also yearned for the admiration of boy politicos) I was dedicated to the counter-cultural. My first “public” piece—a parody of a neighborhood newspaper called “The Jewish News”—got me sent to the principal’s office. He was not impressed that I—a Jew—would be so disrespectful of my own traditions, and chewed me out. It was my first brush with a discourse police—but certainly not my last.

HIGH SCHOOL. NO COMPUTERS.

When it was time to apply to college, I was an aspiring journalist, so my first choice was Northwestern. But my interview was awful, they had no money for me, and the University of Chicago had scholarships for the descendants of World War I veterans. I’d applied because word was that it was the most intellectual, the most political, the place where you could find the radical boys who read Nietzsche. I did find plenty of those, but also got a D on my first paper in my English class. My professor was a famous literary critic, and he scolded me in big red comments for comparing my father to King Lear. Too personal!! Presumptuous and pretentious to being Yosh Klein into a piece on a Shakespeare play!! Just who did I think I was?

I was shamed. When my high school principal scolded me, it added to my reputation with the cool kids. But here at University of Chicago, “cool” was different—closer to cold and disdainful. Before long, I dropped out, and was in and out of jobs in Chicago for years. A couple of them were at bookstores, where I’d unpack boxes with that delicious smell of freshly published books and ring up Kurt Vonnegut and the Sunday Times for couples whose leisure I envied. When I finally made it back into school—a circuitous route through a bad first marriage and a nervous breakdown—I knew there was no way I was going to shamed by a male high priest again. So I majored (by then I was in Canada and Carleton University in Ottawa) in philosophy, and learned to master that most elevated, masculine and detached (at the time) game in town…while writing movie reviews on the side.

I won’t go into the story of how (along with other women in the discipline) I came to criticize and deconstruct the very discourse that attracted me to philosophy—or how my own writing was transformed, finding its way both forward from academic conventions and back to where I’d started, as a snarky and “too personal” writer. Let me just say that the times were right—and ripe—for women of my generation to find our own way. Once again, the route was circuitous for me. I didn’t have the money to strike out as a freelance writer, I needed a dependable source of income. So I became a professor (in those days, it was actually not so difficult to get a job in academia) which meant writing books. And I developed the love affair I described earlier.

When I’m writing, my life feels right, no matter what else is screwing up, saddening me, or infuriating me. And every book has been a wonderful adventure and a fresh chance to communicate with others. In 2023, however (and for about a decade preceding) books no longer occupy the same place in the culture as they once did. When researching and writing a book, I’d be fired up over the possibilities of truth-telling, of defying the forbidden, exposing the hidden, the shameful, the as-yet undisclosed, and loved writers who were similarly motivated. Those writers still exist. But in 2023, books are pure commerce, publishers no longer demand rigorous research (among the most fun parts for me) and facts are no longer discovered treasures, shining through the muck, calling out to be mentored and revealed. ”Influencers” rather than scholars have priority with publishers, and every tv commentator—most of them schooled as journalists not historians, sociologists, philosophers, literary scholars or political scientists—has a book. And the words I always asked my writing students to consider of their own work—“Who cares?” & “So what? Why does it matter?”seem to hover over the entire world of books, including my own.

It’s not impossible that someday I’ll feel the calling to write another book. But for now, Substack is my writing home.

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