Writing rather than retiring: Immaculate Forms

(revised 25 September) This is more of a series of links than a separate story, but I’m putting it up to explain why I haven’t been on this blog much recently. It’s partly because I’ve been on other platforms but mainly because I’ve been very busy with the publication of my first ‘trade book’: Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies. It came out on 5 September with Profile Books/Wellcome Collection and I was on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 to talk about it (here, about 18 minutes in).

The whole process has been long – about six years, with a break in the pandemic – but I learned a lot writing it. I chose to divide up the book by ‘body parts’: breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb. There have been a few more podcasts on it, most recently this one, and here’s a link to the little list of them.

There will also be various events. The next ones are in October. On 2 October, I shall be at the Wellcome Collection for an event – ‘Women’s Bodies and Work – focused on their new exhibition, Hard Graft. The following day it’s Oxford, for an event in conversation with Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose new history of Christianity and sex, Lower than the Angels, I was fortunate enough to read while it was still being finalised. The Wellcome event also has a remote attendance option; hooray for that.

A busy couple of days there. Which brings me to the point that I am not sure how anyone in full-time employment ever manages to write a book. Yes, I know many do, and I know I did, but trade books are different. There’s far more working closely with an editor, with pretty well every sentence coming in for attention. There’s far more use of images – and with a team at the publisher’s to do all that complicated work of finding the image, getting the rights to use it and so on. With all those people, why is it so much more work? Because you still have to think about which images to pursue, and with around 100 in this book, some of them included as colour plates, that takes time. To make it just that little bit more challenging, when we sold the US/Canada rights the publisher there wanted various changes so I needed to do some of those myself, and to check through those they did in-house.

Some of it is sheer pleasure: I would single out choosing a cover image, and having a wider than usual range of formats for the book. There’s a kindle edition and there’s an audiobook, the latter converting me entirely to this medium because the reader is just so very good at ‘getting it’. We had some fun emails too, not least the one about how to pronounce a short section of an ancient spell which was in an imaginary magical language! You don’t get that level of fun in the printed book, even though you do have those lovely colour plates to study…