Re: Grace somehow managing to write a paper that destroyed his career being unbelievable and etc, a) you are absolutely correct here and b) my personal take since reading the book, where there's a blink-and-you'll miss it reference to Grace being really done with academia already by the time he wrote it is that he's one of those people who had an absolutely miserable PhD experience and felt stuck by the sunk cost fallacy of it all, which may have lead to him sort of self-sabotaging his career in other ways we don't know as much about.
Like, he felt like he put too much work in to just leave/quit, but at the same time, that's what he really wanted to do. And Grace is clearly someone who hates making decisions and choices for himself. He just wants someone to tell him what to do -- or in this case, that he's not allowed to do it anymore. So he got a postdoc but just started sort of quiet-quitting the whole thing, and everyone was really frustrated with him and his performance already. So when some controversy came along at the conference? It was a neat and tidy excuse to get rid of him.
Ohh interesting! And something I can also see. The whole thing makes a lot more sense—and also feels a lot more resonant to his character and his emotional arc—if he is kind of lying to himself about what actually went down and what everybody else thinks about him.
@bicherrim wrote something along somewhat similar lines in the comments of the post too:
I don’t remember where I read it, but I like the concept that Grace wasn’t actually ousted/blackballed from academia at all, it just feels better to him to frame it that way – in reality, he couldn’t handle the criticism his paper received, lost his shit, and then afterwards was so embarrassed that he dropped out of the field entirely so he wouldn’t have to face anyone about it.
And both of these options feel way more believable—that “I was kicked out because they couldn’t handle my UNCONVENTIONAL IDEAS” is an ego-soothing narrative he built up around what happened to avoid acknowledging that leaving was his choice. Ending up as a middle school science teacher was clearly making him much happier than academia was—is it because this is something that feels more genuinely fulfilling and meaningful than the relentless pressure cooker gristmill that is academia? Is it because children can never meaningfully be peers and can’t criticize him, and among 13-year-olds he’ll always be unquestionably the smartest person in the room? Little of column A, little of column B, probably. And he can do that while also clinging to this fantasy of being Astrobiology’s Alfred Wegener and Someday Everyone Will See I Was Right And They Were So Unfair To Me, and crucial to the fantasy is that it’s incumbent on everyone else to change their minds about him, not him to do anything.
And I like how the movie does allude to this interpretation that there’s some willful mental rewriting of what actually happened on Grace’s part:
STRATT: Do you stand by what you wrote?
GRACE: I was fired for standing by what I wrote.
STRATT: You were fired for calling the leading scholar in your field a “staggering waste of carbon” at the UNESCO conference in Denmark.
GRACE: You… you heard about that, huh?
Stratt like. You weren’t disliked for your ideas, idiot, you were disliked for your behavior. The problem wasn’t that you defended an unpopular idea, the problem was getting assholish and unprofessional about it. Luckily for you the world is ending and I don’t have the time to worry about your attitude!
And Stratt unintentionally is providing everything Grace actually wants: someone who will unpromptedly tell him “I need you for your brilliant and unconventional ideas… and also you do not get a choice in the matter.”
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