“Have you seen this?,” a friend recently messaged me. She was referring to this article on awkwardness, which hit some points familiar to readers of my 2010 book on the same topic. The author does cite me, and judging from a quick Google Books search, she does so even more in the full book, of which the article is a précis. And yet, one does feel “some kind of way,” as they say, especially since the title is identical (simply Awkwardness) and the subtitle is even in a very similar style (A Theory vs. my An Essay).

My friend felt defensive on my behalf, as did several other people with whom I shared the article. And yet my own mind wandered back to two awkward occasions, many years ago. One centered around a story published in the late lamented The Awl entitled “I Can Awkward.” Awkwardly, I cannot find it right now [though commenter Matthew Bertucci helpfully shares a Wayback Machine link], but the basic point was that maybe we should not be so scared of awkwardness because it could be empowering. Yikes! Sitting in my living room stewing, feeling that I had perhaps enjoyed fewer writing and career opportunities than I deserved, I talked myself into the idea that this article had somehow deprived me of something by not citing my work. I wrote to the editors, who were more gracious than they strictly had to be and who pointed out that academic and journalistic standards are different. There was no reason to believe the author had read and ripped off my book. There was also no reason to believe that it would have made any difference to my life if he had cited it. In the end, I just wound up making a fool of myself in front of a couple of the coolest people ever to internet.

And who woulda thought? It figures — a couple years later someone emailed me about Awkwardness (my book, not the more recent one). They were concerned that I may have ripped off the author of this 2007 book, whose existence I had indeed noted but which I did not read, because it appeared to be a memoir rather than a theory of awkwardness. Lo and behold, my ideas about awkwardness arguably echoed those of this author, a coincidence I could only explain by noting that sometimes when people address a similar topic, they come to similar conclusions. (I still have not read the book, because I have this bizarre sense that doing so would somehow represent a concession to my accuser.)

So for those keeping score, here are the three books under discussion:

1. Awkward: A Detour (2007), by Mary Capello
2. Awkwardness: An Essay (2010), by Adam Kotsko
3. Awkwardness: A Theory (2024), by Alexandra Plakias

I note that I have not used the name of any other author before this listing, and the author of “I Can Awkward” remains unnamed even now. [UPDATE: Based on the Wayback Machine link above, it turns out his name is Matthew Wollin. I cannot find any evidence that his Awl piece catapulted him to the greatness that I should have enjoyed.] Similarly, I do not recall the name of the DePaul philosophy student who, in the course of a drunken conversation, stumbled upon the same joke connecting Heidegger to awkwardness that I had been honing for months — prompting me to stake my claim by finally putting together a book proposal.

It’s as though the idea is simply in the air, floating around, and all of us are always already too late to claim as our own. Writing a para-academic book, I didn’t feel I needed to do my due diligence of first reading everything potentially related to my idea — though of course I was also offended when someone treated me equally neglectfully. As for Plakias, it was doubtless strange to stumble across my oddball little text on ancient pop culture examples, and I’m glad she followed genre constraints nonetheless. Hopefully she will handle it gracefully when, some time in the next 5-15 years, someone else inevitably comes along and writes a book entitled Awkwardness with a two-word subtitle that puts forward the idea — perhaps not so creative after all — that awkwardness could be a positive thing if we attend to it in a certain way.