I am in the middle of writing a book review. I like to think of myself as someone unaffected by academic snobbery, but all the same I find myself anxious about publishing a piece of writing in which I talk about which character I liked, and why I liked her as if she was a person, which character was my favourite, and which character I didn’t like as much, and saying over and over what ‘I loved’ about what the book was doing. A simple, naive, reader’s response to the book – which is what I want to write about, and certainly what people will want to read – is still just a little fraught with anxiety for me.
… Having posted the above on Facebook, and received … absolutely no reply, I think I can get the message.
Nobody cares.
And nobody cares about this problem, because it is a non-problem, born of the non-culture of academia that operates mostly inside the isolated heads of individual PhD students who never ever mention their deep anxieties about writing and impostor syndrome to each other.
I think I will go away and finish telling you about this awesome book I read, which I absolutely loved, and my favourite characters were Izzy and Ellen and eventually between them they made me like Nadine who I hated at first.
Field Notes from Fairyland 