Outside the box
How are books that defy traditional generic categories to find a home and an audience, asks
MAVIS HIMES
PERSONAL ESSAY
“You have to shed your academic personality,” the literary agent said. “Your manuscript is not suitable as a trade book. You have to imagine you’re writing for the man or woman on the street. Can you do that?”
You are asking me to dumb it down and I refuse to do that!
“Sure, I can.” I responded politely and hung up the phone.
When I set out to write my second book, motivated by both a professional and personal interest in the topic of names, I made a deliberate choice to write something that would be accessible to the general public. As a psychoanalyst, I knew that my writing would be informed by both my clinical practice and theoretical orientation. Yet, I decided to divest myself of that authoritarian pose and write in a more personal style. Using the relationship with my own name and history as a throughline, I attempted to interweave the personal and the professional by blending snippets of research with clinical vignettes and personal anecdotes of friends and strangers who had shared their stories.