Susan Fowler's Blog

Hello all!

I’ll now be blogging over at squarknotes.substack.com. I’ll keep a few posts up online here for posterity’s sake, but if you want to keep up with what I’m working on, squarknotes is the place to be!

See you there!

2019 was a really big year for me. It was also a really difficult year, but I think the challenges I faced gave me more clarity and determination than I would’ve otherwise had.

Here are some of the things I’m most proud of:

1. Finishing My Memoir
I officially started writing my memoir WHISTLEBLOWER back in October 2017, and finished it a few months ago. Writing it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I wanted to quit so many times during the writing process, because finishing it meant I had to...

I’m so excited to share that my memoir, Whistleblower, is now available for presales! It will hit shelves (and e-readers) on March 17, 2020.

I’ve been working on this book since October 2017. Writing it has been a very bittersweet journey; I’m excited to share it with the world, but I’m also terrified, because I’ve put my whole self into these pages. There’s so much in here that I’ve never shared with anyone outside of my immediate family, and in these pages you will learn about so many thin...

Nearly three years ago, I wrote up a blog post about how to learn physics: “So You Want To Learn Physics.” It’s been a big hit over the years, and I frequently get lovely emails from readers who have been following the learning plan (sometimes, for a couple of years!) and are having lots of fun learning physics.

I find learning very rewarding. It’s rewarding in the classroom, but even more rewarding (and fun!) when conducted independently. It takes a bit of self-discipline, but I’ve found tha...

Cover image from Amazon

I have many different reasons for choosing books to read. Sometimes, I read to inform myself, to learn new things, to develop different aspects of myself. Other times, I read to counteract the forces in my own life, to bring into my day-to-day experience the things that I feel are missing. In both cases, I’m looking for an escape. In the first case, I want to be someone other than who I am; perhaps that person is someone who understands number theory, or understands a...

Image from Amazon

Almost two years have passed since I discovered I was pregnant with my sweet daughter Seymour. Since that moment, I’ve found myself on the joyful, mystifying, wonderful journey that is motherhood and parenthood, experiencing everything incredible and terrible that comes with it.

The time passes so quickly, and my daughter changes so much every day, that I find myself struggling to understand the experience. I’ve found that before I even have a chance to process and understa...

2018 was a rather big year for me: my daughter was born in January, I wrote a memoir (which is coming to a bookstore near you very soon), I joined The New York Times, and did a handful of other things that I will (I’m sure) tell you all about in the near future. It was a wonderful year, filled with joy and fun and new levels of focus, but it was also a very difficult year, filled with sadness and hurt and serious illness.

As you know from my reading list, I try to read 52 books each...

There’s an episode in Season Four of the show Parks and Recreation called “The End of the World,” in which we meet a cult known as “The Reasonabilists.” Members of this cult believe that an alien god named “Zorp” will destroy the world. Every few years, the Reasonabilists predict that Zorp is about to come to Earth and they hold an all-night vigil in the park, awaiting the apocalypse. Early in the episode, Chris Traeger (Pawnee’s City Manager) asks Leslie Knope why the cult calls themselves “...

The author and her father in 1993

My father passed away eight years ago. Today would have been his 64th birthday. 

When he died, family and friends told me that the grief would subside with time, that time would dull the pain. The grief has never subsided, and, if anything, the pain has only grown stronger each year. The world feels less bright, less wonderful, less good without him. 

He left us at a time when our family was struggling. We were struggling financially, struggling emotionally as...

All of the really great people of the past and of the present always have some singular destiny. Somehow they know exactly what they love, they find it when they're young, and they spend their entire lives doing that one thing. Their destiny, their singular passion becomes their entire life, and they love every minute of it. It's their calling, it's what they were born to do, and it's beautiful. 

My husband, for example, is one of these people, driven by one thing: building a quantum computer....