MosesWrites
Dear readers,
After a great deal of reflection, I’ve decided to serialize my book, Ice Cream Makes Us Smarter, on this website.
Part of me has always wanted to publish these stories as a “real” book, something printed on paper and bound and distributed to bookstores and held by libraries. Absent all the hassle of editing and agents and contracts and the corporate enterprise of contemporary authorship (accepting from the start an inextricable link between print and capitalism), I realize I want to have a different sort of experience.
First, I want to continue to write as I share and hear from those of you who follow along.
Since late June, I’ve drafted about six and a half of fourteen planned chapters but, for what comes next, I think it’s got to get a bit more dynamic.
Also, I worry about concluding a memoir in my mid-40s and forestalling how my story will evolve, how I ought to live, and how I tell and retell these stories through new experiences.
So far, writing has been truly liberating, decades of embodied grief and trauma flowing outward, allowing my whole self to flourish in new and incredible ways, providing new recoveries of body and soul. I’m tremendously excited for the future.
I serialize also as I admire how Defoe or Dickens or Dostoevsky, how authors of those eras, made sense of the world through ongoing composition.
Plus, I want my book to be mine, greedily, on my blog, in my domain, where, in many ways, it all began. I realize professional editorial assistance and others’ perspectives might improve some things, perhaps many things, but I’ll save that for other projects.
Every few weeks or so, I hope to share a chapter, or an essay of roughly similar length. I also want to share multi-media and multi-dimensional narrative perspectives, to include hyperlinks and photographs and sound and maybe even video, to see how current technology can expand our understanding of “book,” of readership, of storytelling. As much as I loathe most aspects of social media and electronic screens in general, they’ve also decent uses, and they have unavoidable, inescapable staying power.
A head-of-school friend recently posted about leadership and the appropriate bounds of sharing, of not over-sharing. I’m conscious that aspects of my own story might provoke strong emotions, or that what you read might change how you think of me as a person. Yet I’ve always been this person. In many ways much of my experience has been mundane—very intense, yes, but an intensity of everyday occurrences: life and death, sorrow and joy, love and heartbreak. Compared to most media, sultry and scandalous, I’m rather quite tame, and compared to most suffering—in war and famine, violence and abuse—I’ve had a rather wonderfully safe and privileged existence.
We’ll see how it goes. I’m honored, and flattered, that any of you want to journey together.
To get started, here’s something of an introduction, and an explanation of why I do indeed believe ice cream makes us smarter. Then I’ve also shared the first chapter, about my early childhood, and the third, “shattered,” because together they set the stage for all else.
Since early this summer I’ve experienced Toni Morrison’s words from her introduction to Beloved: “I knew what fear felt like; this was different. Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rouge anticipation with certainty.”
I am, very truly yours,
Christopher Moses
Shanghai
1 November 2025