Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday So I wrote all of these novels,
but I haven't published a new novel in six years and counting,
and I don't know when or if I will publish one again.
But I am writing,
and today I want to talk about what I'm writing and why.
So one thing you might not know about me is that technically, I am retired.
I retired in November of 2017. I just published my novel
Turtles All the Way Down, and we'd gone on this lovely but grueling tour,
and I was back home looking in a drawer when all at once my balance failed.
I fell to the ground, started vomiting,
was hospitalized, and eventually diagnosed with a disease called labyrinthitis.
Now, Labyrinthitis is a lovely name
for a disease and full credit to the people who came up with it.
But as an experience not recommended. Like, I lay in bed for weeks feeling dizzy
and disoriented, and I couldn't read or look at a screen.
All I had was my thoughts. And one of my thoughts was I should retire.
Like, aside from the fact that I couldn't turn my head without vomiting,
I'd been absurdly fortunate in my life.
I'd sold over 30 million books, and I had plenty of money
and YouTube views. But for some reason,
I was still chasing book sales and YouTube views and money.
I just wanted more and more. I was kind of like Smog from the Hobbit.
I was sort of demented with the mania of owning things,
as Walt Whitman memorably put it.
And then I felt like I kind of worked my way into the misery of this labyrinthitis,
all for, like, money and fame that I didn't need, and that wouldn't really make my life better.
So I decided to retire. For me, retirement has meant that
I don't obsess over becoming more rich or famous or more viewed or whatever.
Instead, I try to focus my definition of work on passion and impact.
Like, over the last five years,
our community has raised over $40 million to build the Maternal Center of Excellence
in Sierra Leone, which, by the way, is coming along great.
And just in the last year, Nerdfighteria has helped make literally
hundreds of millions of dollars of impact in the cost of TB tests and treatment.
And I don't think I would have been able
to work so much on those projects if I hadn't been retired.
So in a lot of ways, it's worked out. Also, for me, retirement didn't mean
that I stopped writing.
It just meant that maybe I stopped writing what people expect me to write.
Instead, I wrote this weird and personal nonfiction book called The Anthropocene Reviewed,
which did end up finding a broad audience, but not nearly as broad as my novels,
which is good, because post Labyrinthitis me just can't handle that level of attention
and pressure that came with publishing novels for me.
I do realize that these are the first worldiest of first world problems.
But having SNL sketches made about your books
or having movie adaptations made of them is lovely and interesting in a lot of ways.
But I can tell you that the time in my life when I was close to the center of US pop culture
was not a happy time in my life.
Like, I really craved fame and attention, but it turns out that it didn't make me happy.
It kind of made me really, really anxious. So, yeah, I don't want to do that again.
I'm still writing, and I'm writing fiction like eagle eyed viewers will know
about the semisecret livestreams I sometimes do where I read the stories I'm working on.
But mostly over the last couple of years, I've been writing somewhat obsessively
about tuberculosis, which is exactly what I want to be writing about.
Like, for me, writing about tuberculosis has been a way into trying to understand
both historical and contemporary inequities.
Like, how did we end up living in a world where 1.6 million people die every year
of a disease that most people in the rich world never worry or think about?
That didn't just happen.
It resulted from all these historical forces and weird quirks of tuberculosis itself.
And writing about that has been tremendously fulfilling for me.
I am aware that there's not, like,
a massive audience of people out there waiting for a new book about tuberculosis.
I just don't care that much.
I'm writing about what I want to be writing about.
I'm writing about what I'm passionate about.
And in a lot of ways that takes me all the way back to 2001 and 2002
when I was 23 years old and writing about exactly what I wanted
to write about, which became the novel Looking for Alaska.
I don't know if I'll ever publish another novel. Ironically, even though they're made up,
novels feel much more vulnerable and terrifying to me.
But I am writing, and I love writing, and I will have a next book,
hopefully someday soon. Hank, I'll see you Friday.