Page 322 - The Love Hypothesis

Author’s Note

I write stories set in academia because academia is all I know. It can be a
very insular, all-consuming, isolating environment. In the past decade, I’ve

had excellent (women) mentors who constantly supported me, but I could
name dozens of instances in which I felt as though I was a massive failure

blundering her way through science. But that, as everyone who’s been there
knows, is grad school: a stressful, high-pressure, competitive endeavor.

Academia has its own special way of tearing apart work-life balance,
wearing people down, and making them forget that they are worth more
than the number of papers they publish or the grant money they are able to

rake in.
Taking the thing I love the most (writing love stories) and giving it a

STEM academia backdrop has been surprisingly therapeutic. My
experiences have not been the same as Olive’s (no academic fake dating for

me, boo), but I still managed to pour many of my frustrations, joys, and
disappointments into her adventures. Just like Olive, in the past few years I

have felt lonely, determined, helpless, scared, happy, cornered, inadequate,
misunderstood, enthusiastic. Writing The Love Hypothesis gave me the
opportunity to turn these experiences around with a humorous, sometimes

self-indulgent spin, and to realize that I could put my own misadventures
into perspective—sometimes even laugh at them! For this reason—and I

know I probably shouldn’t say it—this book means as much to me as my
Ph.D. dissertation did.

Okay—that’s a lie. It means waaay more.