I went back through journals, photos, and old slides and even dug up my dissertation and some old scientific papers to verify dates and memories. So if anyone reads this, on page 204: “datasets spanning the years 1970 to 2011” should be “datasets spanning the years 1940 to 2011.”Īll of the personal stuff is true as well as I can remember. Most were inconsequential but one bugs me a lot. And I still found a few errors when I recorded the audio book. Then the copy editors found a few things too. I also paid a fact-checker to go through all the dates and names and dollar amounts and anything else she could find. I had Shin-ichi Uye, who is the jellyfish expert who traveled in Japan with me, read the whole book and I sent off chapters to some of the key scientists for comments.

Yes, the science was all fact-checked as hard as I could fact check it.

How much did the fact-checking extend to the non-science stuff, such as who you were hanging out with in college and grad school? When it came to the personal parts of the book, did you ever fudge anything or condense moments or people? Since this is a book about science, I would imagine that it was pretty heavily fact-checked. And I realized that I’d need to include my own story in the book. I could write a book with more of the stuff that makes fiction so compelling to me: a conversational voice and a “come along with me and let’s figure this out” story line. And that change of tone freed me from having to write a book “like that.” It was in that moment that I realized what I could do. One day, I realized that “I could never write a book like that” could be said with a different intonation, more of a proclamation than a sigh. Often I finish a non-fiction book, even one that I really love, and in my head I think, “I could never write a book like that.” And often the book I’ve just finished would have had a very authoritative voice and a somewhat distant energy. And frequently I don’t find that same sort of immersive connection to non-fiction books. But I’m a science writer and so I look for models for my own writing in non-fiction. And what I love about fiction is being sucked into a story so that I feel like I’m swimming in it. I’m a huge reader both of fiction and non-fiction.

Did you always know that your story would be part of the book? Was there a moment you realized that it was? Spineless is about jellyfish, but it’s also about you.

Spineless juli berwald