Second Book Blues

Note: This is going to be for paid subscribers (mostly), as a bit of craft talk.

I was talking to a friend recently, and he said: “you really got through the second book blues.” And it was funny to me because I think I had heard that phrase before, but I don’t know that I ever applied it to myself. I don’t know that I really had them.

I can see how the second book is a different beast. I know this. But I rarely thought of it as a downer. Frustrating, yes. Uncharted, yes. But my thought process was more like: I don’t know how to do this, so I’m just going to do what comes to mind and let that be enough.

It’s the enough that’s the hard part.

Background: When I wrote my first book, Argentine Intimacies, it was based on my dissertation. In academia this is common. I had been doing research on the dissertation for several years, and had cut my teeth on the archive I was working with. Then, to transition from the dissertation to the first book, I knew I needed to make changes, to include new elements and cut out things that were less interesting for a book. It isn’t always clear what those things are, but working with the brilliant Rebecca Colesworthy at SUNY Press helped, a lot.

A question I was surprised by in this process: what percentage of your book is different from the dissertation? The question, I think, was meant to gauge how much of the information in the book could already be accessed by readers. In truth, by the time you work on the book for several years, whatever was in the dissertation is likely to be changed, edited, reworked significantly. But in my case I had added two entire chapters, one about diaries, and another about photographs, cutting others that didn’t make sense. The book was about 40% different. At least that’s what I said. But it was probably more like 60% different, at least structurally.

After that book came out, in November 2019, I had a couple months of giving talks, but then COVID happened, so lots of that turned online. (If you want to see a book talk I gave, there is this one that I recorded.)

With the first book, I had the pressure of getting it done so I could go up for tenure. I work in a field that is book-heavy, so if you don’t have a book, you don’t get tenure. It’s the basic requirement in most language/culture departments. You need a book. It’s that simple.

But once that book is done, what happens next?

(First book unboxing in the same place as the second book unboxing. META!?!)