Her dissertation, The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel,[4] is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the "winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty.

"[3] Batuman’s novel The Idiot is partly based on her own experiences attending Harvard in the mid-1990s and teaching English in Hungary in the summer of 1996.

[12] In 2016, she met her partner; she writes that this relationship, her first non-heterosexual one,[13] "resulted in a series of changes to [her] views not just of gender but also of genre" as Batuman realized how influential film and narrative had been to her ideas about how women should behave.

Batuman says that her obsession with Russian literature began when she read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in high school.