Hello pals. I’ve had a busy week this week, and plenty of it has involved talking about my new book in front of strangers. The book is a series of personal and philosophical essays on freedom and desire in the context of sexual violence. I haven’t yet finished writing it (and it won’t be published until early 2027) but I have, at last, reached the point at which I can see its shape and its argument clearly. Because I’m writing the book as a PhD project, and because it’s a non-fiction book, the writing process has differed greatly from the writing of my first two novels.
My first novel was written in a feverish and secretive state: I was working full-time, writing at lunchtime, at weekends and in the evenings. I was emailing myself sections of the book while I was supposed to be working, and I was covertly using the office printer to print out big chunks of it to edit. I started writing my second book in 2020, during the pandemic, and the writing process was marked by the experience of isolation. Isolation is a theme of both books, and it is a theme that has always preoccupied me — as it relates to shame, as it relates to intimacy, desire, and connection.
This third book, though, has been different. Though isolation is certainly a theme, the conditions of its writing have had little to do with isolation. The PhD, in creative nonfiction, is structured around workshops and supervisions, so my work has been read by my peers and colleagues as it has developed, and its shape has been informed by their responses. However, though there has certainly been more input and external influence as it has developed, this process has still for the most part taken place within the safe confines of a small group of creative writing students, all of whom understand the vulnerability involved in putting words from your heart straight to the page.
I’ve avoided, for the most part, speaking about my work to anybody outside of this very small group. This impulse towards self-protection has to an extent been necessary, but it also limits the reach the work can have, the ideas with which it can interact and can shape it. More recently, I’ve set myself the task of trying to talk about the book to students and academics outside of creative writing. This was something I resisted doing for pretty much the first two and a half years of the PhD, in part because of the difficulty of translating what I am doing into an academic register, but in large part because of imposter syndrome. A creative practice differs from an analytical or critical one, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to talk about what I was doing and, more to the point, I simply felt that the book wasn’t intellectual or academic enough.
Of course, I had fallen into that stupid old trap, downplaying the value of my own work because I’d assumed that everybody else knew what they were doing. The book isn’t an academic book, but that doesn’t mean it can’t interact with, be shaped by and shape academic work. Ironically enough, I have not until now recognised what I have been experiencing as imposter syndrome because I assumed I was too mature and too wise to be suffering that old insecurity, and that on this occasion, by the logic of a kind of reverse exceptionalism, I really genuinely was the under-qualified person who had been put in the room as a result of some system error.
But then, a couple of months ago, I decided I really ought to just try being in the room. I started turning up more, putting myself out of my comfort zone, putting myself in the rooms where I thought I didn’t belong just to find out what was happening there, and to figure out if anybody else actually knew what they were doing. And, shockingly enough, it turns out that everybody else is in that room for the precise same reason — to figure out whether anybody else knows what they’re doing.
A cliché, such a cliché! You’ve heard it more than enough times, and so have I. But it bears repeating — again, again, and probably again — because, as I am once again learning, it’s so easy to forget what you thought you already knew: most people spend a great portion of their time feeling like they’re in the wrong room.
So, what happens, when you stick around in the room? Plenty of times, nothing. Simply, you were in the room, and maybe you feel a little encouraged or at least not discouraged about going back. Other times, there is something that happens. On Thursday I stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes to a lecture hall full of strangers about why I’m writing a book about desire and sexual violence, and the reasons for which I’ve thought along the way that perhaps this was a book I shouldn’t be writing. Waiting to speak, I felt nauseated. I considered feigning a sudden vomiting virus, handing my paper to someone else to deliver, or else simply refusing to get up. But I did get up, and I gave the talk anyway, and when I’d finished, the people who came up to speak to me afterwards said, of all things, that I had seemed so very confident in what I was saying (for this we can thank beta blockers), and that there was something about what I had said resonated — sometimes personally, but mostly in relation to their research, their ideas, ideas they were interested in, their art. Human experience is, after all, human experience, and if we have the courage to speak directly to it, then it will always somehow resonate. But, of course, we can only speak directly to it, and be heard, if we’re in the room. Which is, of course, a privilege that should not be overlooked.
So, here’s the point, just in case you need reminding, like I did. If you feel nervous about being in the room, if you feel you’re in the wrong room, then try sticking around anyway. You’ll be surprised by what you might find there.
Love, Rosie x