Love, and Other Things
Some updates, wrapping up the first virtue of the year, the book I can't stop thinking about, and the show I am OBSESSED with.
The past few weeks have been busy beyond belief, so this newsletter is a little more packed than usual. Here goes! :)
Susan Time
For the latest issue of TIME Magazine, Annabel Gutterman interviewed me about Cover Story and my journey becoming a novelist. I absolutely loved our conversation, and it was so much fun to talk about Cover Story and how I went from being the Uber whistleblower to NYT editor to where I am now, writing novels and screenplays full-time.
Cover Story
Speaking of Cover Story, I’m getting ready for publication day, which is only TWO WEEKS AWAY!! Yes, that’s right, on April 5th, 2022, my debut novel will be available in bookstores and libraries and e-readers and everywhere books are sold, and I cannot wait until you read it and tell me what you think.
I had so much fun writing this book, and I think you will have a lot of fun reading it — I really, really do. Early readers have left some rave reviews on Goodreads!!
I’ll keep you all updated on any and all book-related news and events. For now, you can pre-order it so it’ll arrive on or right after April 5th. If you can, please consider ordering from your local bookstore! Covid has been a tough time for independent booksellers and they need all the love and sales they can get! (You can search Indiebound for your nearest independent bookseller!)
Plus, if you pre-order, I’ll send you a signed bookplate and a special note! Send me a DM on Twitter or Instagram with your name, address, and a screenshot of your receipt, and I’ll pop them in the mail ASAP. If you have a specific name you’d like me to make the bookplate out to, please let me know.
Yay, Rigetti!
As many of you know, my husband, Chad Rigetti, is CEO and Founder of a quantum computing company called Rigetti Computing. Well, on March 2nd, Rigetti became a Nasdaq-listed public company!!
Chad, our daughter, and I all flew out to New York and were there to ring the Nasdaq opening bell (you can watch the video here — that’s me in the purple-grey suit!). It was one of those completely unforgettable once-in-a-lifetime moments. I’m so proud of Chad and everything he has done to make this happen ('“proud” doesn’t even begin to cover it — I am in complete awe of him!), and so excited to see what the future holds.
On Love
My virtue for the month of February was love, and I want to say a few things about it before I jump into my thoughts on March’s virtues (sincerity and truthfulness).
Love is a tricky virtue for quite a few reasons. First, there isn’t universal agreement that love is even a virtue. Second, most accounts of love I’ve read and studied get very muddled very quickly because there’s usually an attempt to reconcile love as an emotion, the different types and forms of love, love as a virtue, and questions about what love even is (metaphysically speaking) — it all devolves to a sort of mysticism and hand-waving, which I find disturbingly unsatisfying.
So, is love even a virtue?
The answer, I think, lies in how we handle the second point — we have to define what we mean by “love.”
I decided, back in February, when I was trying to focus on love and work every day to become a more loving person, that what I needed was a useful, actionable definition of “love.” I decided that if I could find one — if I could find a definition of love that was as crystal clear as, for example, the definition we have for something like truthfulness, then yes, I would consider love to be a virtue.
My starting point was my everyday meaning of “love,” which is mostly a kind of feeling that I have that seems to have many forms and has many ways of expression and, sometimes, seems like something I can’t control. Even the way we talk about “falling” in love implies some kind of force beyond our control, something beyond the scope of reason. And I do think that has something to do with love, but if that’s all love is, then I don’t think we can consider love to be a virtue. You can’t develop something that isn’t even in your control. An emotion =/= a virtue.
So, after much searching and reading and many long walks in the neighborhood trying to think of a useful definition, I finally stumbled on one while I was reading Kant: one of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative. In a nutshell, it’s this: loving someone means treating them as an end, rather than a means to an end. (Note: this is not a really surprising definition, it’s basically just incorporating the golden rule into virtue ethics…and I’m sure someone somewhere has done this before but I haven’t come across it yet.)
I wanted to put this into practice before sharing it, because I wanted to make sure it was useful for everyday life. So, every single day, I’ve been putting it to the test. When I ask myself “how can I be more loving?”, I’ve been asking myself, “how I can treat this person as an end rather than as a means?” I ask myself this literally every single day, and about every person I interact with — my husband, my children, my family, my friends, people I work with, acquaintances, and strangers. And it works.
Wow. It really, really works.
Not only is this definition of love extremely powerful and at times, extremely challenging, but — most important — I feel like I have slowly been improving as a human being over the past couple of months and am becoming a more loving person — toward my family, my friends, people I work with, acquaintances, and strangers. It’s so much easier to be more loving toward someone when I have a definition that I can use, when I can ask myself, “am I treating this person as a means or an end? And what would it look like to treat them completely as an end in themselves?” (Also, as someone who is very self-critical, it has been a helpful way for me to be more loving to myself, which has been a big challenge for me over the years.)
I’ll write more about it throughout the year, but I wanted to share with you and would love your thoughts!
Next up: sincerity and truthfulness!
The Two Books I Can’t Stop Thinking About
I recently read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion for the very first time, and I can’t stop thinking about them. They are two of the most amazing, terrifying books I have ever read in my entire life. The character depth, the plot, the world building, the prose, the twists, the emotional rollercoaster, the themes — these are like nothing I’ve ever read before. They floored me. I finished Hyperion a month and a half ago and I still think about it multiple times every single day.
I don’t want to spoil them for you if you haven’t read them, so all I’ll say is: jump in.
However: I will note that they are absolutely terrifying and very, very violent, so if that makes you uncomfortable, do not read. (I don’t usually read horror because I don’t like being scared or feeling disturbed, but I made an exception for this one, and I had quite a few nightmares while reading.)
The Show I Can’t Stop Watching
I am OBSESSED with The Dropout, Hulu’s miniseries about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. It is one of the best shows I’ve seen in a really long time and maybe even one of my favorite miniseries ever (though I won’t know for sure until I see the last episode). I love everything about it: the acting, the writing, the directing, the cinematography, the costumes, the set design, the music, the absolutely magical attention to detail. So far, it’s perfect. Absolutely perfect.
I am always suspicious about movies and shows about Silicon Valley and the tech world, because even when they’re fun and/or entertaining, they rarely seem to mirror the world I’m familiar with — I often walk away feeling like “well that’s an interesting world for sure but that’s not the Silicon Valley I know at all.” And I’m happy to say that The Dropout an an exception: of all the shows about Silicon Valley, this one gets it right — the culture, the tech, the way they speak, the way things work, the way things go wrong and why they go wrong, and the way things sometimes go right. (I’d love to see a miniseries or feature set in Silicon Valley that’s accurate and fictional, i.e. not a biopic about a fraudulent company…maybe I’ll just have to make one myself!)