I want to be honest about something before I start writing regularly on here: I did not choose bookselling the way it might sound like I did, some deliberate turn away from academia toward something more honest. I fell into it, the way most of the actual turns in a life happen, and it took me a long time to stop describing it as a failure.

I was two years into a PhD in English, working on a dissertation about epistolary form in eighteenth-century fiction that I was, if I’m being fair to my younger self, genuinely excited about. My advisor was the reason I’d chosen that program over two others that admitted me. When she left for a position at a university three states away in the spring of my second year, I assumed, the way you assume things when you haven’t yet learned how institutions actually work, that the department would find me someone else, that the machinery would keep running because that’s what machinery does.

It didn’t, not for me. There was a committee meeting I wasn’t invited to. There was an email about “reassessing cohort advising capacity” that took six weeks to arrive and said nothing specific. There was a semester where I kept showing up to a workspace that had quietly stopped expecting me. I don’t tell this story looking for sympathy, and I want to say clearly that plenty of people survive exactly this situation and finish their degrees; I wasn’t pushed out, not technically. I just stopped being pulled forward, and I didn’t have whatever it takes to pull myself the rest of the way alone.

A shop on Westminster Street had a hand-lettered sign in the window that August, looking for someone who could tell a first edition from a book club reprint, which is a strange, specific skill to advertise for and a stranger one to discover you already half-had, from years of used-bookstore browsing rather than any training. I took the job assuming it would be a bridge to something else. Twelve years later I still work there, and at some point in the last decade the bridge became the destination without my ever formally deciding that it should.

What I actually miss from the program isn’t the degree, which I think about maybe twice a year now, usually when a customer mentions their own dissertation in passing. What I miss is the specific kind of sustained attention graduate work asks of you, the sense that a text deserves to be read three times before you’re allowed to have an opinion about it. I think that’s actually what this site is. I didn’t leave that discipline behind so much as I found a version of it that doesn’t require anyone’s permission to keep practicing.