the personal essay is dead

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over

There’s a certain kind of personal essay that, for a long time, everybody seemed to hate. These essays were mostly written by women. They came off as unseemly, the writer’s judgment as flawed. They were  too personal: the topics seemed insignificant, or else too important to be aired for an audience of strangers. The essays that drew the most attention tended to fall within certain categories. There were the one-off body-horror pieces, such as “ My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina ,” published by xoJane, or a notorious  lost-tampon chronicle  published by Jezebel. There were essays that incited outrage for the life styles they described, like the one about pretending to live  in the Victorian era , or  Cat Marnell’s oeuvre . There were those that incited outrage by giving voice to horrible, uncharitable thoughts, like “ My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing ” (xoJane again) and “ I’m Not Going to Pretend I’m Poor to Be Accepted by You ” (Thought Catalog). Finally, there were those essays that directed outrage at society by describing incidents of sexism, abuse, or rape.

These essays began to proliferate several years ago—precisely when is hard to say, but we can, I think, date the beginning of the boom to 2008, the year that Emily Gould wrote a first-person cover story, called “ Exposed ,” for the Times Magazine , which was about, as the tagline put it, what she gained and lost from writing about her intimate life on the Web. Blowback followed, and so did an endless supply of imitations. By September, 2015, online first-person writing was so abundant that Laura Bennett, at Slate, could refer to a “ first-person industrial complex ” in a takedown of the genre. “Every site seems to have a first person vertical and a first-person editor,” Bennett, who also cited Gould’s Times story as a turning point, wrote. One could “take a safari” through various personal-essay habitats—Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas—and conclude that they were more or less the same, she argued. While she granted that not all first-person writing on the Internet was undignified, there were far too many “solo acts of sensational disclosure” that read like “reverse-engineered headlines.”

The market, in Bennett’s view, had overinflated. She was right: a year and a half later, it barely exists. BuzzFeed Ideas shut down at the end of 2015, Gawker and xoJane in 2016; Salon no longer has a personal-essays editor. Jezebel, where I used to work, doesn’t run personal essays at its former frequency—its editor-in-chief, Emma Carmichael, told me that she scarcely receives pitches for them anymore. Indie sites known for cultivating first-person writing—the Toast, the Awl, the Hairpin—have  shut down  or  changed direction . Thought Catalog chugs along, but it seems to have lost its ability to rile up outside readers. Of course, The New Yorker and other magazines continue to publish memoir of various kinds. Just this week, The Atlantic published a first-person cover story by Alex Tizon, with the provocative headline “ My Family’s Slave .” But there’s a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay, written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers. The change has happened quietly, but it’s a big one: a genre that partially defined the last decade of the Internet has essentially disappeared.

What happened? To answer that, it helps to consider what gave rise to the personal essay’s ubiquity in the first place. Around 2008, several factors converged. In preceding years, private blogs and social platforms—LiveJournal, Blogspot, Facebook—trained people to write about their personal lives at length and in public. As Silvia Killingsworth, who was previously the managing editor of The New Yorker and took over the Awl and the Hairpin last year, put it to me, “People love to talk about themselves, and they were given a platform and no rules.” Then the invisible hand of the page-view economy gave them a push: Web sites generated ad revenue in direct proportion to how many “eyeballs” could be attracted to their offerings, and editorial budgets had contracted in the wake of the recession. The forms that became increasingly common—flashy personal essays, op-eds, and news aggregation—were those that could attract viral audiences on the cheap.

Sarah Hepola, who worked as Salon’s personal-essay editor, described the situation to me in an e-mail. “The boom in personal essays—at Salon, at least, but I suspect other places—was in part a response to an online climate where more content was needed at the exact moment budgets were being slashed.” When I worked as an editor at the Hairpin and Jezebel, from 2013 to 2016, I saw up close how friendly editors and ready audiences could implicitly encourage writers to submit these pieces in droves. For the first two years that I edited personal essays, I received at least a hundred first-person pitches and pieces each week.

But an ad-based publishing model built around maximizing page views quickly and cheaply creates uncomfortable incentives for writers, editors, and readers alike. Attention flows naturally to the outrageous, the harrowing, the intimate, and the recognizable, and the online personal essay began to harden into a form defined by identity and adversity—not in spite of how tricky it is to negotiate those matters in front of a crowd but precisely because of that fact. The commodification of personal experience was also women’s territory: the small budgets of popular women-focussed Web sites, and the rapidly changing conventions and constrictions surrounding women’s lives,  insured it . And so many women wrote about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and received not much in return. Most sites paid a few hundred dollars for such pieces at most; xoJane paid fifty dollars. When I began writing on the Internet, I wrote personal essays for free.

For some writers, these essays led to better-paying work. But for many the thrill of reaching an audience had to suffice. And placing a delicate part of your life in the hands of strangers didn’t always turn out to be so thrilling. Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame. Bennett pegged her Slate piece to an essay that Carmichael and I edited at Jezebel, written by a woman who had met her father for the first time as a teen-ager and engaged, under emotional coercion, in a brief sexual relationship with him. Bennett deemed the personal-essay economy a “dangerous force for the people who participate in it.”

By that point, writers, editors, and readers had become suspicious of one another, and the factors that produced the personal-essay boom had started to give way. Some of the online publishers that survive have shifted to video and sponsored posts and Facebook partnerships to shore up revenue. Aggregation and op-eds— the infamous, abundant takes —continue to thrive, although the takes have perhaps cooled a bit. Personal essays have evidently been deemed not worth the trouble. Even those of us who like the genre aren’t generally mourning its sudden disappearance from the mainstream of the Internet. “First-person writing should not be cheap, and it should not be written or edited quickly,” Gould wrote to me. “And it should be published in a way that protects writers rather than hanging them out to dry on the most-emailed list.”

There are still a few outlets that cultivate a more subtle and sober iteration of this kind of first-person writing, some of them connected to book publishing. There’s  Hazlitt , launched by Random House Canada, and  Lenny Letter , which now has a publishing imprint, and  Catapult , which describes itself as a book publisher with a daily online magazine. (The managing editor of Catapult is Nicole Chung, who previously worked for the Toast.) But the genre’s biggest migration has been to TinyLetter, an e-mail newsletter platform. Gould, who writes a newsletter called Can’t Complain, suggested that TinyLetters are doing what personal blogs did fifteen years ago: allowing writers to work on their own terms and reach “small readerships in an intimate, private-feeling, still public enough way.” Carrie Frye, formerly the managing editor of the Awl, also has a TinyLetter. She told me that it seemed like “writers—particularly female writers—had said, ‘O.K., I’m going to make an Internet on which my essays go out in pneumatic tubes to just who I want them to go to, and no one else.’ ”

It’s clear, in any case, that the personal-essay boom is over. If it had already peaked by the time Bennett wrote about it, in the fall of 2015, we can locate its hard endpoint about a year later, in November of last year. After the Presidential election, many favored personal-essay subjects—relationships, self-image, intimate struggle—seemed to hit a new low in broader social relevance. “I feel like the 2016 election was a reckoning for journalism,” Hepola wrote to me. “We missed the story. Part of why we missed it might have been this over-reliance on ‘how I  feel  about the day’s news’—and now the journalism world recognizes that we need to re-invest in reporting.” Killingsworth echoed this, talking about her work at the Awl and the Hairpin: “I want to encourage people to talk about mostly anything other than themselves.”

There’s been a broader shift in attitudes about this sort of writing, which always endured plenty of vitriol. Put simply, the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was. Many profiles of Trump voters positioned personal stories as explanations for a terrible collective act; meanwhile, Clinton’s purported reliance on identity politics has been heavily criticized. Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject. (Even Tizon’s piece, which was published posthumously and uses his damning closeness to his subject as a way to elucidate the otherwise invisible captivities of the Filipino katulong servant class, prompted an immediate backlash —which then prompted a backlash to the backlash, mainly among those who think Western readers have misunderstood Tizon’s understanding of his own position.) Writers seem less interested in mustering their own centrality than they were, and readers seem less excited at the prospect of being irritated by individual civilian personalities. “The political landscape has been so phantasmagoric that even the most sensationally interesting personal essays have lost some currency when not tied head-on to the news,” Bennett said in an e-mail. “There just hasn’t been much oxygen left for the kinds of essays that feel marginal or navel-gazey.” These days, she tends to see pitches “that center on systemic rather than personal trauma,” she added, “or on orienting personal trauma in our berserk new reality.”

No more lost-tampon essays, in other words, in the age of Donald Trump. And yet I find myself missing aspects of the personal-essay Internet that the flashiest examples tended to obscure. I still think of the form as a valuable on-ramp, an immediate and vivid indication of a writer’s instincts—one that is accessible to first-time writers and young people who haven’t developed experience or connections. The Internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things. But I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability. I never got tired of coming across a writerly style that seemed to exist for no good reason. I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

A.I. Could Be Great for College Essays

Every year, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI improves its text-writing bot, GPT. And every year, the internet responds with shrieks of woe about the impending end of human-penned prose. This cycle repeated last week when OpenAI launched ChatGPT —a version of GPT that can seemingly spit out any text, from a Mozart-styled piano piece to the history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss . The response on Twitter was unanimous: The college essay is doomed. Why slave over a paper when ChatGPT can write an original for you?

Chatting with ChatGPT is fun. (Go play with it !) But the college essay isn’t doomed, and A.I. like ChatGPT won’t replace flesh and blood writers. They may make writing easier, though.

GPT-3, released by OpenAI in 2020, is the third and best-known version of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer—a computer program known as a large language model. Large language models produce language in response to language—typically, text-based prompts (“Write me a sonnet about love”). Unlike traditional computer programs that execute a series of hard-coded commands, language models are trained by sifting through large datasets of text like Wikipedia. Through this training, they learn patterns in language that are then used to generate the most likely completions to questions or commands.

Language is rife with repetition. Our ability to recognize and remember regularities in speech and text allows us to do things like complete a friend’s sentence or solve a Wordle in three tries. If I asked you to finish the sentence, The ball rolled down the … you’d say hill, and so would GPT-3. Large language models are, like people, great at learning regularities in language, and they use this trick to generate human-like text. But when tested on their ability to understand the language they produce, they often look more like parrots than poets.

Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor at NYU and the author of Rebooting AI , is a vocal critic of the idea that bots like GPT-3 understand what they’re writing . In a recent preprint (an academic paper that hasn’t been peer-reviewed), Marcus and two co-authors used OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to demonstrate the limitations of large language models. DALL-E 2 , like GPT-3, responds to text-based prompts. But instead of producing language, it creates images. DALL-E 2 was trained to learn associations between images and their captions to produce entirely new images based on the text users enter. If you ask it for, say, “an impressionist painting of Albert Einstein surfing” you get the four images below.

Not bad, right? DALL-E 2 was recently used to win an art competition .

But as Marcus and his co-authors point out in their paper , DALL-E 2 doesn’t understand the relationship between the words that users enter. If, for instance, you ask it to produce an image of “an old man talking to his parents,” you get four images of three people talking. The AI fails to understand that, however old the old man looks, the people he’s talking to must, by definition of being his parents, look older.

Compared with DALL-E 2, ChatGPT appears to have a better grasp of the text users enter and the responses it spits out. This might be why the Internet responded to its release so enthusiastically. ChatGPT “is causing jaws to drop and brows to furrow,” wrote Axios .

I had trouble stumping it with some classic riddles from cognitive psychology. Take the Lily Pad problem:

Prompt: A lily pad, in a pond, doubles in size every day. On the 20 th day, it covers the entire pond. On what day did it cover half the pond?

ChatGPT: A lily pad in a pond that doubles in size every day will cover half the pond on the 19 th day, one day before it covers the entire pond.

The A.I. got that the question described exponential growth—a phenomenon that, as the pandemic demonstrated, many humans fail to understand. But I did fool ChatGPT with the bat and ball problem made famous by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow :

Prompt: A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

ChatGPT: If the bat costs $1 more than the ball, and the bat and ball cost $1.10 in total, then the ball must cost $1.10 - $1.00 = $0.10.

The correct answer is 5 cents. (Trust me.)

ChatGPT might fail at tests of reasoning, but it’s great at generating humanlike text to different lengths and in various styles. This brings us back to the college essay—an easy task for ChatGPT, many commentators claimed on Twitter. “We’re witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime,” tweeted one Google employee . Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had ChatGPT write an essay question , create a grading rubric for said question, answer the question, and grade its own answer. (It got an A minus.) How could the essay not be doomed?

This isn’t the first time that large language models have been predicted to fell the essay or worse. “To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite [a GPT-3-based A.I.] is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure,” wrote journalist Stephen Marche in a 2021 New Yorker piece. (On Tuesday, Marche wrote an article for the Atlantic titled “ The College Essay Is Dead .”) And in 2019, when GPT-2 was created, OpenAI withheld it from the public because the “fear of malicious applications” was too high .

If any group were to put an A.I. to malicious use, essay-burdened undergraduates would surely be the first. But the evidence that A.I. is being used to complete university assignments is hard to find. (When I asked my class of 47 students recently about using A.I. for schoolwork, they looked at me like I was mad.) It could be a matter of time and access before A.I. is used more widely by students to cheat; ChatGPT is the first free text-writing bot from OpenAI (although it won’t be free forever). But it could also be that large language models are just not very good at answering the types of questions professors ask.

If you ask ChatGPT to write an essay contrasting socialism and capitalism, it produces what you expect: 28 grammatical sentences covering wealth distribution, poverty reduction, and employment stability under these two economic systems. But few professors ask students to write papers on broad questions like this. Broad questions lead to a rainbow of responses that are impossible to grade objectively. And the more you make the question like something a student might get—narrow, and focused on specific, course-related content—the worse ChatGPT performs.

I gave ChatGPT a question about the relationship between language and colour perception, that I ask my third-year psychology of language class, and it bombed . Not only did its response lack detail, but it attributed a paper I instructed it to describe to an entirely different study. Several more questions produced the same vague and error-riddled results. If one of my students handed in the text ChatGPT generated, they’d get an F.

Large language models generate the most likely responses based on the text they are fed during training, and, for now, that text doesn’t include the reading lists of thousands of college classes. They also prevaricate. The model’s calculation of the most probable text completion is not always the most correct response—or even a true response. When I asked Gary Marcus about the prospect of ChatGPT writing college essays his answer was blunt: “It’s basically a bullshit artist. And bullshitters rarely get As—they get Cs or worse.”

If these problems are fixed—and, based on how these models work, it’s unclear that they can be—I doubt A.I. like ChatGPT will produce good papers. Even humans who write papers for money struggle to do it well. In 2014, a department of the U.K. government published a study of history and English papers produced by online-essay writing services for senior high school students. Most of the papers received a grade of C or lower. Much like the work of ChatGPT, the papers were vague and error-filled. It’s hard to write a good essay when you lack detailed, course-specific knowledge of the content that led to the essay question.

ChatGPT may fail at writing a passable paper, but it’s a useful pedagogical tool that could help students write papers themselves. Ben Thompson, who runs the technology blog and newsletter Stratechery, wrote about this change in a post about ChatGPT and history homework. Thompson asked ChatGPT to complete his daughter’s assignment on the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the A.I. produced three error-riddled paragraphs. But, as Thompson points out, failures like this don’t mean that we should trash the tech. In the future, A.I. like ChatGPT can be used in the classroom to generate text that students then fact-check and edit. That is, these bots solve the problem of the blank page by providing a starting point for papers. I couldn’t agree more.

I frequently used ChatGPT while working on this piece. I asked for definitions that, after a fact-check, I included. At times, I threw entire paragraphs from this piece into ChatGPT to see if it produced prettier prose. Sometimes it did, and then I used that text. Why not? Like spell check, a thesaurus, and Wikipedia, ChatGPT made the task of writing a little easier. I hope my students use it.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate , New America , and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

The End of High-School English

I’ve been teaching English for 12 years, and I’m astounded by what ChatGPT can produce.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick .

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.

Read: The college essay is dead

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.

I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

I mean, look at this: I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here’s an excerpt from its response:

In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.

It also managed to compose a convincing 400-word “friendly” cover letter for an application to be a manager at Starbucks. But most jaw-dropping of all, on a personal level: It made quick work out of an assignment I’ve always considered absolutely “unhackable.” In January, my junior English students will begin writing an independent research paper, 12 to 18 pages, on two great literary works of their own choosing—a tradition at our school. Their goal is to place the texts in conversation with each other and find a thread that connects them. Some students will struggle to find any way to bring them together. We spend two months on the paper, putting it together piece by piece.

I’ve fed GPT a handful of pairs that students have worked with in recent years: Beloved and Hamlet , The Handmaid’s Tale and The Parable of the Sower , Homer’s The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno . GPT brought them together instantly, effortlessly, uncannily: memory, guilt, revenge, justice, the individual versus the collective, freedom of choice, societal oppression. The technology doesn’t go much beyond the surface, nor does it successfully integrate quotations from the original texts, but the ideas presented were on-target—more than enough to get any student rolling without much legwork.

It goes further. Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI’s bots. “Can you fix this essay up and make it better?” Turns out, it could. It kept the student’s words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic.

I’ve been teaching for about 12 years: first as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct professor at various public and private universities, and finally in high school. From my experience, American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, basic comprehension, and legibility. The middle group mostly has that stuff down and is working on argument and organization—arranging sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within an essay. Then there’s a third group that has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, mellifluence.

Whether someone is writing a five-paragraph essay or a 500-page book, these are the building blocks not only of good writing but of writing as a tool, as a means of efficiently and effectively communicating information. And because learning writing is an iterative process, students spend countless hours developing the skill in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then finally (as thousands of underpaid adjuncts teaching freshman comp will attest) college. Many students (as those same adjuncts will attest) remain in the bottom group, despite their teachers’ efforts; most of the rest find some uneasy equilibrium in the second category.

Working with these students makes up a large percentage of every English teacher’s job. It also supports a cottage industry of professional development, trademarked methods buried in acronyms ( ICE ! PIE ! EDIT ! MEAT !), and private writing tutors charging $100-plus an hour. So for those observers who are saying, Well, good, all of these things are overdue for change —“this will lead to much-needed education reform,” a former colleague told me—this dismissal elides the heavy toll this sudden transformation is going to take on education, extending along its many tentacles (standardized testing, admissions, educational software, etc.).

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

But again, the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate—just like I, sitting with my coffee and book , rereading Moby-Dick , do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing. They have no interest in exploring nuance in tone and rhythm; they will forever roll their eyes at me when I try to communicate the subtle difference, when writing an appositive phrase, between using commas, parentheses, or (the connoisseur’s choice) the em dash.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn’t to communicate “I already know how to do this job” (because of course I don’t) but rather “I am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job.” What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn’t “I memorized a bunch of information” but rather “I can express that information clearly in writing.” Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now—maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class—but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?”

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

Maybe the moment when I felt most caught between these two thoughts was when I asked GPT a question from an exam I give in my Eastern-philosophy course, something I’ve never imagined a student could find outside assistance to answer: “Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example.”

ChatGPT wrote back, as ever, instantly:

The Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence can be illustrated with a funny example: let’s say you have a pet hamster. You might think that your hamster has its own inherent existence, but in reality, your hamster is made up of many different elements such as its fur, its bones, its muscles, and its brain. None of these elements exist independently or inherently on their own, so your hamster itself does not have any inherent existence either. The same goes for all phenomena—everything is made up of various components that don’t have inherent existence, so nothing has any inherent existence either.

Everything is made up; it’s true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.

About the Author

More Stories

High-School English Needed a Makeover Before ChatGPT

The Personal Essay is Dead, Long Live the Personal Essay

In the wake of the mid-2010s ‘personal essay boom’, writers are shaping and stretching the personal essay form to share stories that refuse a traditional telling., by kylie maslen 30 mar, 2020, more like this.

In a feature on essayist Maggie Nelson for The New Yorker , Hilton Als writes of the power of experimentation within Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves—the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight—that makes her readers feel hopeful.

Through work that has transcended the traditional, Nelson has inspired many emerging writers to explore the essay form. Following in the footsteps of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Wayne Koestenbaum, The Argonauts , Als writes, combines ‘memoir, literary analysis, humour, and reporting with vivid instances of both the familiar and the strange’.

The subtitle of Ellena Savage’s debut essay collection Blueberries (Text Publishing) poses the question: ‘What kind of body makes a memoir?’

For Savage, the question forms a platform from which to interrogate the personal in two respects: bodily history within memoir through exploration of trauma, gender and sex, as well as how a collective body of work might be considered within literary sub-genres.

This line of enquiry is also pursued in two other recent publications—Tanya Vavilova’s We Are Speaking in Code (Brio Books) and Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena (Allen & Unwin) . All three carry the weight of their author’s experiences, voicing their doubt over which form—if any—is best suited to share these stories. The solution for all three writers is to take the memoir format and bend it, shape it, make it fit best for them. The results make not only for thought-provoking reading but also an interesting marker in the history of the personal essay.

It’s possible to see Maggie Nelson’s influence in the way Savage’s central ideas are marbled through her collection. Sara Marcus writes for the Los Angeles Times that in The Argonauts Nelson is ‘circling away and back again to central questions about deviance and normalcy, family-making and love’. One of Savage’s most cogent lines of enquiry is the nature of being an artist: the class implications, the lifestyle required, the ways in which it is both a distinctive profession and utterly ordinary. An artist is not above human experiences—they simply express them in their own way.

One of Savage’s most cogent lines of enquiry is the nature of being an artist: the ways in which it is both a distinctive profession and utterly ordinary.

Blueberries’ opening essay ‘Yellow City’ sees the essay form melded to provide for internal monologue and doubts as Savage’s sexual assault is relayed (a technique Osborne-Crowley also utilises in I Choose Elena in documenting her violent rape); in ‘Holidays with Men’, two columns provide the reader with dual narratives, each one a critique of the other, which play on the feminine and masculine; and the bullet point format of ‘Turning Thirty’ amplifies the relentless pressure to achieve arbitrary adult milestones such as ‘How did I get here without first learning to wear pastels?’

A traditional autobiography often does not make room for struggle found in the everyday. For a memoir to sell, publishers often believe it must be extraordinary: the life of a celebrity, a high achiever, or an ordinary person in exceptional circumstances (such as the recent case of the Australian doctors who worked on the highly-publicised Thai cave rescue ). Tanya Vavilova’s We Are Speaking in Code, however, utilises the contemporary idea that the essay writer can be a shape-shifter. In her case this is also highlighted from the collection’s subtitle: ‘Living on the Fringe with Grace, Humour and Lucid Rage’.

Vavilova’s book speaks of migration and language gaps, gender and sexuality, trauma and chronic illness. By creating a collage of these experiences and questions, We Are Speaking in Code allows Vavilova to write about ‘the fringes’ of her subtitle in ways that an orthodox memoir would flood. Working through vignettes and juxtaposing paragraphs, Vavilova has the freedom to disclose the personal at her own pace; the form doesn’t pressure the author to be cohesive, and it allows the reader to create their own tempo: to pause in the gaps of language Vavilova has with her family members and sit in that place without words—a task difficult to achieve on the page.

While Nelson’s influence is of course most apparent in Vavilova’s chapter ‘The Mean Reds: An Ode to Maggie Nelson’ (which also follows the vignette pattern of Blueberries ’ titular essay) it’s the essays that concern Vavilova’s relationship with—and grief over—her Russian grandmother ( babushka ) that use experimental devices best. Listening to recordings made just before her death gives Vavilova a way to connect to the babushka she was always some distance from, either geographically or linguistically. Vavilova quotes a friend, also of Russian lineage, who says: ‘In my family, we don’t speak a language where we can share complicated things.’

Vavilova has the freedom to disclose the personal at her own pace; the form doesn’t pressure the author to be cohesive, and it allows the reader to create their own tempo.

As she listens to her grandmother’s tapes, Vavilova painstakingly works to bridge gaps in history, knowledge and language. While her comprehension of Russian outweighs her ability to speak or write her native tongue, the recordings bring Vavilova a sense of the moments that her and her grandmother could never freely speak of before her death. The recordings—converted from cassette tape to CD-ROM to USB—allow Vavilova to listen to her babushka’s voice over time, and also speak importantly to form: that movement is necessary. Tradition can block access: in this case the inability to listen to a cassette tape, as well as Vavilova’s inability to express her lines of enquiry in a more conventional essay collection. What it feels like to be queer in one country, while the country in which you were born still outlaws homosexuality and being ‘out’ frequently attracts vigilante violence. The conflicts between difference and deviance are constantly questioned. On leaving her babushka after a trip back to Russia for her thirtieth birthday, Vavilova writes:

All I know: we are happiest in the forest behind her house, sitting on a park bench, reading our books, hers in Russian, mine in English, in companionable silence under the same shining sun.

Leaving now, I feel unmoored like a small, rusty boat.

Hollow but somehow cut up, too.

Sometimes, what you have does not feel like enough.

By using the personal as a vehicle to discuss the theoretical nature of psychology, queerness and migrant identity, Vavilova—like Savage—creates a form of personal essay that is firmly planted in cultural critique. It speaks to a form which has evolved from the early 2010s ‘personal essay boom’ propagated by sites such as Gawker , xoJane , the Toast , the Awl and the Hairpin . Speaking to Jia Tolentino for the New Yorker in 2017, Sarah Hepola—who worked as Salon ’s personal-essay editor— says that to her, the 2016 US presidential election was ‘a reckoning for journalism’:

We missed the story. Part of why we missed it might have been this over-reliance on ‘how I feel about the day’s news’—and now the journalism world recognises that we need to re-invest in reporting.

While Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena is formed out of a combination of the personal confession and journalistic reporting, the book’s central incident of violent rape is not framed as the story itself; rather it follows the emerging trend, identified by Slate features director Laura Bennett in the same Tolentino article: stories ‘that centre on systemic rather than personal trauma’. In doing so it moves away from the clickbait-style essays of the past, into a broader view that provides a cultural critique. This creates a framework for discussion as to how such an incident fits within political infrastructure, prejudices and privilege: a strategy that Savage, Vavilova and Osborne-Crowley all employ.

I Choose Elena is at once personal, but it does not miss the full story—that of systemic disbelief of women’s trauma, both in legal and medical establishments.

Originally an essay published by the Lifted Brow , Osborne-Crowley reports diligently on research proving what is known about how trauma affects the body. She speaks of her own experiences with endometriosis, vaginismus and Crohn’s disease and how it relates to her PTSD. ​ I Choose Elena is the most fluid of the three works discussed here, drawing on all of Osborne-Crowley’s skills as a journalist, essayist, creative writer and legal researcher. The account is at once personal, but it does not miss the full story—that of systemic disbelief of women’s trauma, both in legal and medical establishments.

The personal essay was in many ways reinvigorated by the release of Leslie Jamison’s 2014 collection The Empathy Exams . Essayists, Jamison says , connect with readers because of their ability ‘…to bring together very different kinds of expression—personal and critical and journalistic—without getting dismissed for their subjective stances or excessive first person’. These are writers, in other words, whose voices have been historically marginalised or undercut. While the works discussed in this piece have come from (white) women writers, the personal essay is not only the domain of writers who identify as women—Wayne Koestenbaum was an enormous influence on Maggie Nelson; Hilton Als and Hanif Abdurraqib are both significant contemporary writers in this area. All writers—noticeably—are queer (Koestenbaum and Als), or people of colour (Als and Abdurraqib).

What the personal essay offers is a home to the outliers, to Vavilova’s people ‘living on the fringe’. A safe space to speak to the personal and how it relates to society more broadly. A place to develop as an artist by bending the rules. A form open to interrogation of the ideas and concerns of the day. But as those writers who have guided the way (Didion, Sontag, Koestenbaum) have shown, while the subject matter may ​evolve when it comes to the personal essay, change is the only constant.

We Are Speaking in Code, Blueberries and I Choose Elena are all available now from your local independent bookseller.

Kylie Maslen is a writer, critic, and author of the essay collection Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness (Text Publishing). Her work has appeared in the  Guardian, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Adelaide Review, Crikey  and  Junkee , among other outlets. She was the 2018 KYD   New Critic Award winner, and her essay ‘I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Not Okay’ was longlisted for the Lifted Brow & RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-fiction. She lives in Adelaide on Kaurna Country.

More from Kylie Maslen

Liked This? Try These...

Chloe Hooper on Social Dysfunction, Climate Change and The Arsonist

Alice cottrell.

NZ Showcase: Whakamā – On Shame and Language

Kirsty dunn.

Debut Spotlight: Rijn Collins on Fed to Red Birds

Rijn collins.

Books Roundup: Little Stones , Maybe You Should Talk To Someone , Sweatshop Women

Ellen cregan kylie maslen elizabeth flux.

Shelf Reflection: Omar Sakr shares his bookshelves and reading habits

Masculinity in Deep Freeze: Robert Lukins’ The Everlasting Sunday

Ellen cregan, you have 0 free articles remaining., we hope you enjoy this one free article per month. kyd relies on membership to fund its content. please consider joining today from as little as $49.95 per year..

If you’re already a member, click here to log in

Want to keep reading?

KYD members enjoy full digital access and many other benefits , including writing opportunities, and discounts on courses and mentorships.

Become a member today from $49.95 .  

Ⓒ 2024 Kill Your Darlings | Privacy Policy

Design by The Company You Keep | Build by Cinch

• Debut Spotlight
• New Australian Fiction
• Write for KYD
• Tips on Pitching
• Awards & Prizes
• Manuscript Assessments
• Mentors Program
• Online Courses ⬀
• Memberships
• Online Writing Courses ⬀
• Gift Vouchers
• Member Benefits
• Writing Opportunities
• Pitch, Publish, Promote
• KYD News Hub
• Contributors

Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Two Paths for the Personal Essay

The personal essay is not dead, but has it traded politics for style?

• August 22, 2017

The first essay in Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood is called “Heart Museum,” and it opens with a long description of an iPhone emoji:

There’s an emoji on my phone that I’ve never used, of a shell-pink tower-block building with blue windows. Smaller than an apple seed, crumb-sized—if that—it stands six stories high. Six windows going up: three square, three rectangular. I counted them and double-checked because extra-small things bring out the extra-small person in me who sometimes even triple-checks things; who still chances certainty might exist in asking, “Promise me?”

The style is proudly mannered: the twee metaphors, the gratuitous details, the repetition of these details to tiresome effect. One can see the author chasing down a shallow sort of mimesis, willing her readers to join her as she double-checks and sometimes triple-checks the emoji so that we too might experience the starts and stops and pauses of her heart. But one can see no reason why her readers might want to share in either this experience or the many other experiences of bourgeois living chronicled in “Heart Museum”: dinner parties and dates, travels to Machu Picchu and Kolkata, ritualized anxiety attacks about the relationship between writing personal essays and pointless self-indulgence—an occupational hazard, she suggests, suffered by only the most tender-hearted initiates of New York City’s creative class.

More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer.

For Chew-Bose, this isn’t a problem—indeed this is her point. All rhyme and no reason, she claims a little later in the essay, is preferable to “writing that clinches,” by which I take her to mean writing that too eagerly betrays its argument for the sake of some fidgety, faceless reader. “No writer hopes for ideas to take complete shape. Approximation is the mark,” she states—the first of many prescriptions about what writing is and what it is not; what can and what cannot be accomplished by paying careful attention to form or style. Most of these statements arrive as metaphors that substitute nonsense for sense, preciousness for persuasion. Writing is “a closed pistachio shell.” Writing is a “doubled-up glove.” Writing is, “off and on, running smack into Aha! and staring down Duh .” (She has a fondness for italicized onomatopoeia—“ GASP! ” “ Oof .” “ Woah .” “ Pop! ”) Writing is losing yourself, finding yourself, falling in love, having your heart broken, getting drunk, having sex, thinking about some stuff then thinking about some other stuff that kind of relates to the original stuff you were thinking about but not really.

But what makes “Heart Museum” so dispiriting is not the quality of Chew-Bose’s prose. Rather, it is how the essay not only celebrates its aesthetic failings, but also insists that these failings testify to the author’s success as a sensitive ethical thinker. If the prose is clunky, if the posturing is overindulgent, if the plot is lost and never found, then, Chew-Bose would have us believe, we have no recourse as readers but to grant how the formlessness of her writing—she would call it the “breathlessness” or perhaps the “messiness” of it—forces us to reflect on timeless quandaries about life and art. Is the writer a reliable witness to the past? Can she ever truly know the human beings she writes about? Can she ever truly know herself? Chew-Bose’s answer to all these questions is “I guess? Sort of.” “Is there anything better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated?” she concludes in “Heart Museum.” “The marvelous, hard-to-spell-out convenience of what’s indefinite.” These are pretty phrases that mean nothing and teach nothing. Their only purpose is to “clinch” (to echo Chew-Bose) the author’s status as a beacon of complex selfhood. But for whose benefit?

In a sense, there is nothing unique about the pose Too Much and Not the Mood strikes—and this is the real problem. For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy. Messy feelings, messy reality, messy relationships, the messy unfiltered stuff of life; the personal essayist evacuates all in one, big messy outpouring of repurposed clichés about love and life and pain and joy and men and women and whatever other themes readers of these essayists are, by now, primed to receive as universal human concerns. “Style is character,” Joan Didion proclaimed in her 1979 essay collection The White Album . However imprecise this statement of equivalence may be, one suspects that it has been thoroughly internalized by personal essayists today who elide aesthetic judgments—judgments about the formal or stylistic features of prose—with ethical and subjective ones that assess the character of the human being who would produce such prose.

If, in the early twentieth century, the ‘I’ of the personal essay bespoke the educated man or woman, then today it inaugurates the mindful one.

The eager transposition of the aesthetic into the ethical is not new; nor is criticism of the personal essay’s manipulation of its readers (its intimate “grossness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once sniffed). The form has always grappled with the many valences of the term “personal” and the kinds of authorial projections it allows. Taking an unapologetically snobbish tone in her 1905 essay “The Decay of Essay Writing,” Virginia Woolf lamented how the nineteenth-century democratization of literacy had flooded the literary marketplace with personal essays. A new class of writers, blinkered by the “amazing and unclothed egoism” that came from asserting one’s importance through reading and writing, thought nothing of sacrificing “their beliefs to the turn of a phrase or the glitter of paradox,” Woolf complained. Theirs was a mass demonstration of newly acquired cultural capital over and above any aesthetic or political purpose they may have had for putting pen to paper in the first place. “You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast in the form of the essay,” Woolf wrote, scolding those middle-class writers who would dare leave their grubby prints on the windowpane of good prose. If one can set aside her disdain, there is a larger point: too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.

If, in the early twentieth century, the “I” of the personal essay bespoke the educated man or woman, then today it inaugurates the mindful one; the subject whose apparently infinite capacity for self-reflexivity trades the precision of language and thought for “the baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose” (Chew-Bose again). Yet the shamelessness with which the bargain is brokered these days can leave a reader feeling like something cheap and tawdry is at work: a shortcut hacked through the dense thicket of form and feeling. More than the lack of conviction or the preciousness of prose, it is the peacocking of the author that chafes. What should we make of writing that serves primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to present the author as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others? It is the literary equivalent of the ill-mannered man who, thinking himself to be very mature, declares, “I may be an asshole, but look how self-aware I am about it.”

It is precisely the gimmicky quality of authorship that Jia Tolentino registers—albeit somewhat unwittingly—in a recent New Yorker piece titled “ The Personal-Essay Boom is Over .” Around 2008, Tolentino claims, the personal essay began to “harden into a form defined by identity and adversity—not in spite of how tricky it is to negotiate these matters in front of a crowd, but precisely because of that fact.” If Woolf had mass literacy to blame, then Tolentino has the Internet, which, she argues, seduced American narcissists with the same siren song of self-assertion that penmanship drills did for the British middle class. Her argument draws on a strangely truncated history of the personal essay, beginning with the collapse of LiveJournal in 2008 and ending with the 2016 presidential election—the last stand of American “identity politics,” she claims, before the emergence of a new, more thoughtful political consciousness that exiled the personal from the republic of letters, possibly for good. As Tolentino sees it, under Donald Trump’s threats to liberty and justice, even the most egoistic of writers suddenly developed an acute sense for their own irrelevance and scurried away from public exposure like mice fleeing a raucous cat. Now the most poignant thing about the state of the personal essay was its loss. “I never got tired of coming across a writerly style that seemed to exist for no good reason,” Tolentino mourns. “I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”

It’s not an especially persuasive argument—a selective history coupled with a wide-eyed faith in the writer’s desire (or ability) to stop thinking about herself. Lucky for us, the universe of the personal essay is not as young as Tolentino believes it to be, and not everyone who inhabits it hounds their readers into choosing between a total lack of purpose and an interesting prose style.

The antidote to Too Much and Not the Mood might be Mary Gaitskill’s Somebody with a Little Hammer , a collection of her reviews, essays, and short memoirs from the past two decades. Here and there we catch glimpses of Gaitskill’s life: first as a high school dropout, then as a teenage runaway, a psychiatric patient, a homeless drifter, a born-again Christian, an occasional stripper and sex worker, a journalism student, a professional writer. There is plenty of material here to mine for dramatic revelation. Yet even while invoking these experiences, the essays she writes are so circumspect in their claims to self-knowledge that a reader grown used to the personal essay’s relentless flash of exposure might wonder what kind of shy, self-effacing creature produced them.

Mary Gaitskill refuses to trespass on interiority that transforms the stripper’s cheap trick into a magisterial act of self-preservation.

But Gaitskill is anything but shy. Somebody with a Little Hammer offers strong aesthetic judgments about music, movies, and literature in a tone that brooks no disagreement. “Bitch, please,” Gaitskill snaps at writers from Carl Wilson to Elizabeth Wurtzel to Gillian Flynn, while commending the ordinary loveliness of Nicholson Baker’s prose and Björk’s pop music. She enjoys coming to the defense of writers whom mainstream literary critics, their sense clogged by all the “silly shit” in the ether, have savaged, mocked, or simply failed to appreciate. Of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde , a novel about Marilyn Monroe that Gaitskill praises as “beautiful and clear,” she writes:

One is given the impression of a soul that has been, by some impossible error, snatched from its deep place in the psyche and thrust into a maze of personality and persona, through which it must grope and blunder, trying to make sense of the earthly barrage of words, images, and ideas like ‘movie star.’ The Monroe of Blonde is like every other lost soul, except that her lost state is so brutally public; in this essential way, the character may be true to the real woman, who continues to touch our imaginations more deeply than can be explained by great beauty and brilliance alone.

In her description of Oates’s Marilyn, one can find the nerve center of Gaitskill’s aesthetic and ethical project, which is nothing as generic as observing weakness or redeeming suffering, as many of her critics have suggested. It is the graceful acceptance of psychic irretrievability—the impossibility of knowing what may or may not touch the imagination; what may or may not undo the soul. We are all lost creatures, Gaitskill suggests, and not one of us can or ought to try to claim the higher ground of knowledge; not knowledge of ourselves, not knowledge of the world, and certainly not knowledge of others. There exists an “inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us,” she writes in the collection’s opening essay “A Lot of Exploding Heads,” which recalls her aimless conversion to Christianity and her first encounter with God’s absolute, incomprehensible rage in the Bible. Despite “the soft, radiant beauty of many of its passages,” she writes, it has a “mechanical quality” that feels “brutal and violent.” Its prescriptiveness will always fall short of psychological or spiritual revelation because its style is premised on its writer’s omniscience—his “primitive attempt to give form to moral urgency.” “All I felt was that persistent sense of truncation, the intimation of something enormous and inchoate trying to squeeze through the static form of written words,” she remembers. “These realizations don’t mean I have arrived at a point of any real knowledge, but they are interesting as markers of my development.”

This resignation is not the same as messiness or moral ambiguity. It is, in fact, its opposite. Ambiguity wants desperately to know, and not just to know but to know in spades. A writer like Chew-Bose pursues multiple interpretations for why people do what they do and what it means about who they are, leaving in her wake a trail of confused feelings, theories, and metaphors; evidence that she has circled the truth like a dog has stalked its dinner—from all angles. Gaitskill never even makes the attempt. For her, there exists no obvious relationship between the complexity of human experience and the profusion of prose; no need for qualification or subordination, the pile-up of pretty phrases to approximate an awful truth that will only recede before us. For Gaitskill, part of growing up as a writer has been learning to accept “my own stringent limitations when it comes to giving form to impossible complexity.” For her reader, it feels refreshing to finally have a grownup in the room, laying down the law but not really caring whether you follow it or not.

For Sontag, Didion, Arendt, and others, unsentimentality was not a personal failing, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy that perceived the limits of empathy after World War II.

Part of growing up, too, is learning what objects in the world are worthy of our sustained attention. People are less original than they would like to think, and living is both less transcendent and less abject than most acts of narration would lead us to believe. Many of us move through life according to a relatively predictable set of rules and social codes that shape not only human behavior but also the kinds of art human beings produce to reflect their moral universe—the Bible, for instance, but also nineteenth-century novels, romantic comedies, and memoirs. This is a phenomenon that Gaitskill describes time and again as “mechanicalness,” and it grinds all manner of human interactions down into dirty shards of reality: rigid debates about sexual propriety and dating; the preoccupation with being cool; the idle chirping of social media. Since all this further alienates us from anything like a knowable or authentic self, the essayist’s ethical prerogative is to pay close and direct attention to this mechanicalness—to note its predictability, its self-absorption, its avoidance of painful reality: how it “cannot tolerate anything that is not happy and winning,” Gaitskill observes.

Her preferred metaphor—her only one in fact—for describing the mechanical quality of the world is the mask. Here she is, for instance, on Carl Wilson’s book about hating Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love :

What Wilson is describing, in this section and throughout the book, is a world of illusory shared experience, ready-made identities, manipulation, and masks so dense and omnipresent that in this world, an actual human face is ludicrous or “crazy.”

And on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel Gone Girl :

What makes Gone Girl scary rather than kooky is its cast of characters—what motivates them, and how they view each other. Amy and Nick do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of malevolent artifice, and its exactly that masked, artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening. Most frightening of all is that the artifice is so normal .

And on Lars von Trier’s old-fashioned musical Dancer in the Dark :

The musical sequences are not just charming, weird delusions; they are there to show that under the ‘story’ of these lives there is a broader reality in which people who are deadly enemies or dear friends are merely playing roles for the sake of the soul’s exercise. Further, these roles are in fact flimsy and can be stepped out of for transcendent moments that expose human personality as a mask and human action, whether compassionate or cruel, as a kind of ridiculous theater.

The procession of masks in Somebody with a Little Hammer is at once terrifying and strangely anodyne. Everyone wears them all the time, which doesn’t make them any less garish; it only means you need someone to remind you repeatedly that they’re always in the wings, leering.

Despite her claims to otherness, reiterated to the point of self-fetishization, Durga Chew-Bose’s style ensures that the vision of the world she offers her readers is apolitical, bereft of any common political or ethical position.

For Gaitskill, the best art illuminates the cracks in our inexhaustible social performances, lighting our way through “the maze of personality and persona” so that we may, if only for a brief and fragile moment, forget who or what we are playing at. Often, the best art is not serious or dignified. It is silly and irrelevant, irrational and ecstatic. It is the frantic, funky murmur of the Talking Heads on their album Remain in Light . It is the closing number in Dancer in the Dark , when Selma, a factory worker on the verge of going blind, shoots a police officer who has betrayed her, and he, instead of bleeding to death at her feet or shooting back, rises from the floor so that the two may sing a rapturous duet called “I’ve Seen It All.” It is Humbert Humbert’s feverish confession of his love for seventeen-year-old Dolores Haze, now “pale and polluted and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine” in the final pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita . None of these works of art aspires to truth in any revelatory sense of the word. Most are elaborate jokes, toying with our romantic sensibilities. Yet each admits a sliver of light into the theater of tragic automata and lets it dance, briefly, with abandon.

To Gaitskill’s list, we might add “The Bridge: A Memoir of Saint Petersburg”—one of only a small handful of memoirs in Somebody with a Little Hammer . Gaitskill recalls how on a trip to Russia for a writers’ conference she and her husband were floating down the Neva when she was hit in the head by a bridge. Bleeding, blind, and barely conscious, she gropes through her memory and stumbles upon the face of one of the strippers she used to work with.

She didn’t dance; she posed in an almost trancelike way. Thought she did have a powerful look in her eyes sometimes, and her eyes were deep. She did this complicated ‘stocking act,’ where she would hook the stocking on the end of her toe and change position, stretching it this way and that, so that she was looking at it over her shoulder, et cetera. She’d make it this precise, balletic thing, like a narcissistic ritual, her alone in her room—and then she’d look up and give the men these hot, deep eyes, and let them in the room with her. Let them inside her , but for just a second; then she was back with the stockings. That was the striptease really; this placid beauty who suddenly showed herself. Or seemed to. It’s the cheapest trick, but she didn’t realize that, which is why it worked.

This is not a passage so much as a pose, which, like the pose it describes, seduces its reader with the promise of psychological revelation while never touching that hot, deep place in the soul. It is a respectful pose, a refusal to trespass on interiority that transforms the stripper’s cheap trick into a magisterial act of self-preservation. It is, above all, a deflection of Gaitskill’s own pain—remember her head wound?—onto the “precise, balletic thing” we would call her style.

To position Somebody with a Little Hammer as the high point of the personal essay is to gaze down a longer path for the form than the one Chew-Bose and Tolentino ask us to tread. We can begin to separate the notion of the “personal” from the adjectives that have clung to and muddied its coattails—not only “messy,” but also “warm,” “caring,” “confessional,” “emotional,” “empathetic,” and “sentimental.” What if personal writing were not a manifestation of intimacy or interiority? What if art were a dish best served cold?

Often described by her critics as a “distinctly” or “utterly unsentimental” writer (and human being), Gaitskill would have kept good company with the women Deborah Nelson assembles in her magnificent book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil . Nelson’s study of the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality celebrates those icy, unsparing, and acid-tongued female artists who were committed to “looking at painful reality with directness and clarity and without consolation or compensation.” Many of these women depicted their own lives in uncomfortable detail: Mary McCarthy’s religious education, Susan Sontag’s breast cancer, Joan Didion’s loss of her husband and daughter. Others, like Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, documented the horrors of industrial modernity: the miseries of factory work, the devastations of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Yet none believed that the representation of human experience, no matter how complex or agonizing or imponderable, demanded emotional expressivity. Indeed, for them, compassion for the human condition required the opposite: the evacuation of emotion from art.

Their unsentimentality was not a personal failing, Nelson claims, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy; a “lifelong project” that perceived, with great and terrible urgency, the limits of empathy after World War II. For the women of Tough Enough , dwelling on the emotional effects of an experience often occluded painful reality, shrouding one’s objects of criticism behind the cheap veil of sentiment and self-regard. Bringing an audience to tears was a parlor trick that preyed on people’s perverse attraction to suffering—their ability to take any awful situation, no matter how remote, and make it about their uniquely hurt feelings. Yet pain and suffering were as ordinary as living and dying, and absent-minded feelings of woundedness and pity and even love were the most illusory ethical grounds on which to build a shared world. “Generally speaking, the role of the ‘heart’ in politics seems to me altogether questionable,” wrote Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem after he chided her for the “heartless” tone she took toward the Jews in Eichmann in Jerusalem . “You know as well as I how often those who merely report certain unpleasant facts are accused of lack of soul, lack of heart. . . . We both know, in other words, how often these emotions are used in order to conceal factual truth.”

The universe of the personal essay is not young, and not everyone who inhabits it hounds their readers into choosing between a total lack of purpose and an interesting prose style.

Stoicism in the face of suffering is an attitude much admired in a man. But a woman like Arendt was often the “wrong protagonist,” Nelson observes, for the conscientious management of feeling. Warmth, emotion, sentiment—all these adjectives have a long and irksome history of latching onto models of female comportment; the angel in the house, the good listener, the shoulder to cry on. But unsentimentality was a choice that came with risks: uncertainty, helplessness, alienation, a state of unhappiness from which there could be no relief, neither consolation nor commiseration. “In cases of profound and permanent unhappiness, a strongly developed sense of shame arrests all lamentation,” wrote Weil. “Every unhappy condition among men creates the silent zone alluded to, in which each is isolated as though on an island. Those who do escape from the island will not look back.”

Unsentimentality had its rewards too. Time and again, I found myself moved by Nelson’s simple, yet powerful, insistence that we disentangle ethics from empathy so that we might see anew the obligations we have to each other and to the world we share. We see it in Weil’s “painful clarity”: her simple, yet brutal, prose style that stressed concrete detail over abstraction in her descriptions of factory work, and thus extended neither sympathy nor empathy to laborers but a far greater form of compassion: attention and intellectual honesty. We see it in Arendt’s “realism”: her insistence that building a shared world after Auschwitz requires steering clear of both boundless sympathy and the “mania for introspection”—a solipsism that denies the plurality of human experience by appointing the self the primary arbiter of what is worthy of attention. We see it in McCarthy’s “factuality”: a journalistic practice of perception that attempts to isolate the truth and, in the process, often alienates the writer from her political community. We see it in the cold gaze of Arbus’s camera when she turns it on her beloved “freaks”; a willed concession of artistic control that shows us how the experience of physical and intellectual limitations is the most normal thing of all. We see it in Sontag’s strict management of desire and Didion’s moral toughness in the face of death.

To this chorus of cool female voices, we might add Gaitskill’s confrontation with the mechanicalness of life and art. Here she is writing about how Americans, who seem to love claiming the mantle of victimhood, secretly hate confronting pain:

I think this is the reason every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty years, telling his/her “story” and trying to get redress. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It’s to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the “story” must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life.

For Gaitskill, telling the story of one’s suffering is not an occasion for insight—it is a cause for suspicion, a crude attempt to transform endurance into resolution. Most people cannot live in the senseless and unhappy tangle of life; they need their experiences to reaffirm their sense of self, their dignity, their purpose for living. Yet every triumphal act of narration denies the painful condition of existence shared by all human beings, which is that we will all, eventually, die. Our victories over suffering are temporary at best, a trick to forestall our inevitable confrontation with meaninglessness. To pretend otherwise is a profound act of self-deception.

Under what conditions should we care about the stories of other peoples’ lives? Why, especially, should we care about them as works of art? I think there is a lesson to be learned in recalling the barest definition of “care”: “To feel concern (great or little), trouble oneself, feel interest.” Nowhere does it specify what the character of care must be; how hot or how cold it must run to do some good in the world. One can, as Nelson has, build a very persuasive case for compassion that is based on thoughtfulness, particularity, intellectual honesty—a more persuasive case, even, than compassion based on the boundlessness of feeling.

What is true for human relationships is true for art and politics. If I care about building a world, real or imaginary, with you or for you, then I should think about that world in the most accurate and realistic terms possible. I should hold you to the same standards of precision that I hold myself; even—and especially—if we disagree; even—and especially—if that disagreement is uncomfortable and alienating. “Something happens and we retell it as a story, preparing it for communication or for reviewing it later with oneself,” Nelson writes. “Thoughtlessness begins with a deliberate choice not to represent actions in language, not to create memory.” The refusal to represent, or the insistence on representing messily, is a refusal to share the world with others; a turn away from reality that is comforting because it is so deeply self-absorbed.

This brings us back to the personal essay. More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer. The contract is not necessarily an emotional or intimate one, but, like all contracts, it is mutually constructed and it demands clarity. Just as the writer commits her imperceptible acts of cognition to language, asking the reader to accept this language as a poor proxy for her inner life, so too does the reader acknowledge and participate in this fantasy of self-construction. Together, reader and writer act as co-creators of a new fictional persona, the knowing self. This task is impossible, or at least impossible to derive pleasure from, without particularity and concreteness—a sense of reciprocity and respect.

Under the terms of this contract, the best part of Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood is the beginning of her essay “ D As In,” in which the author considers her reluctance to correct people who mispronounce her name. She argues that her behavior complies with an “imaginary code,” a rule which those of us with “unusual” or “non-traditional”—that is, non-white—names navigate every day: “that establishing room for everyone else is the quickest route to assimilation.” Her practice of self-erasure is presented as a matter-of-fact, the price one pays for ordering a coffee, making a dinner reservation, or meeting someone new. The thoughtlessness here emerges in the racial politesse of others; the expectation that you “remedy their curiosity” about your name or the color of your skin by telling them a story. “Where are you from?” they ask; a diplomatic way of demanding, How did someone like you infiltrate my neighborhood, my school, my country?

There is the promise of a point here; something to elicit our care. Alas, it never arrives, detained by more rhetorical questions about the complexity of the self: “How can an ‘I’ contain all of my many fragments and contradictions and all of me that is undiscovered?” Despite her claims to racial and cultural otherness, reiterated to the point of self-fetishization, Chew-Bose’s style ensures that the vision of the world she offers her readers is totally apolitical, bereft of any common political or ethical position. As is the case for so many personal essayists, all paths lead back to the “I.” “Is this ‘I’ actually mine to own?” Chew-Bose asks. The answer is, quite simply, no—not for her and not for anyone else, at least not according to the terms set by the personal essay’s readers and writers.

Just as easily as promises are made, promises are broken. What we see in many personal essays today is not the shattering of language but the shattering of a pact. All we can hope for now is its speedy restoration.

Merve Emre is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker . Her latest book is The Personality Brokers.

Boston Review is nonprofit and reader funded.

We rely on readers to keep our pages free and open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination: become a supporting reader today .

Further Reading

Good Reader, Bad Reader

Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again

Bloody Abroad

Donate to support work like this:, sign up for our newsletter.

The best writing on ideas, politics, and culture delivered straight to your inbox.

Most Recent

Cooling Tensions in a Warming World

Lessons from the new alliances between labor and climate activism.

The Harris Doctrine

Would Kamala Harris’s foreign policy depart from Biden’s? Clues from the work of her national security advisor, Philip Gordon.

Democratic Disenchantment

Can better decision-making procedures ever achieve real democracy?

A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975.

Registered 501(c)(3) organization.

Labor Day Sale

Get a FREE copy of our archival issue Left Elsewhere — featuring Elizabeth Catte, Reverend William Barber, and others—when you purchase or renew a membership. Just use code LABORDAY at checkout.

Celebrate Labor Day with a FREE issue!

Get a free copy of this archival issue—featuring Elizabeth Catte, Reverend William Barber, Nancy Isenberg, Makani Themba, and others—when you purchase or renew a membership.

Just enter code LABORDAY at checkout.

Podcasting is the new personal essay

The personal essay isn’t dead. It’s just found new life.

Earlier this year, The New Yorker’ s Jia Tolentino took a critical look at the once-popular personal essay in a widely read piece, “ The Personal Essay Boom is Over ”: “There’s a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay, written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers.” The genre, which was once a hallmark of the internet, has essentially disappeared, she wrote, citing the demise of Gawker, xoJane, and BuzzFeed Ideas. Tolentino wasn’t the first person to declare the genre dead. Virginia Woolf beat her to it with her 1905 meditation, “The Decay of Essay Writing.” And so did Laura Bennett, who wrote a takedown of what she called “ the first-person industrial complex ” for Slate in 2015.

Personal essays are alive and well today, just in a different form. The most exciting personal essays today, arguably, are being delivered via microphone and recorder. “First-person writing has long been the Internet’s native voice,” Bennett wrote two years ago. Today, first-person narratives are literally becoming the internet’s voice.

RELATED:  TV reporter quit to drive for Lyft, do a podcast

Podcasts are a natural home for these stories. Even journalistic storytelling, like what you might hear on This American Life or Radiolab , is usually rooted in a host’s anecdote from their own lives. With audio, you are not simply reading a person’s story, but hearing them tell it in their own voice, which adds a layer of intimacy and humanity that escapes the traditional personal essay. Some mimic the format of the medium (like Modern Love ). Others tweak or adapt it. Some are confessional. Others, more restrained. Some are universal. Others, hyperpersonal.

As you prep for your upcoming holiday road trips, arm yourself with stories that are happy, sad, relatable, emotional, and exceedingly personal. Here are a few shows and episodes to get you started.

Radio Diaries

You can’t get more personal than a podcast with the word “diary” in its title. Radio Diaries is the embodiment of the personal essay in audio form. It tells extraordinary stories about the ordinary people you may come across in your everyday life. Since 1996, Radio Diaries has been putting recorders in the hands of its subjects to help them tell their own stories. Each episode is a non-narrated, firsthand account that helps the listener see what it might be like to inhabit another’s life. One great example is its award-winning episode, “ Majd’s Diary ,” which chronicles two years in the life of a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia. In her audio diary, she uses the microphone to capture her thoughts about everything from late-night loneliness to arranged marriage to covering herself in front of men.

Recommended episode(s): “ Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl ,” “ Strange Fruit: Voices of a Lynching ,” “ Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man ”

ICYMI:  Is the podcast boom good for journalism?

The Heart has always had my heart. Kaitlin Prest, its host and creative director, recently announced the show would be on hiatus starting in 2018, which means you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on past shows before digging into her team’s new project(s). This year, the show launched a special miniseries that epitomizes everything I love about The Heart . Called “No,” it’s about personal boundaries, sex, and consent told through the experiences of Prest herself. She relives and even reenacts situations from her past in an extremely intimate, visceral, sonically dynamic way. It’s like a memoir come to life. This four-episode miniseries is required listening now, as sexual misconduct, power dynamics, and consent are at the forefront of public conversation.

Recommended episode(s): “ No ,” “ Mariya ”

Hope Chest describes itself as a “personal essay audio series,” but it’s really about the relationship between Stacia Brown , a writer and podcaster, and her young daughter. Its five episodes tackle topics like the struggles of single parenting or raising a black daughter in America today, all told beautifully through the lens of Brown. It’s confessional, contemplative, and creative, and a must-listen for anyone interested in mother-daughter relationships. Her fourth episode (see below) is a self-reflection on how women define themselves, and it’s a great place to start.

Recommended episode(s): “ Woman to Will-Be Woman ”

As Many Leaves

BBC Radio 4 is rife with audio documentaries—some reported features, others personal narratives. And it doesn’t get more personal than this 28-minute story from public radio reporter Sally Herships. In the fall of 2013, Hership’s now ex-husband emailed her saying he was never coming home again. Through audio diaries, conversations with family and friends, and even old recordings with her ex-husband, the documentary captures Hership’s grieving process in the aftermath of her ex’s disappearing act. It’s a raw and powerful glimpse into an experience usually hidden from the public—and one most people go through (in some form or another) in their lives.

RELATED:  Equipment you’ll need to start your own podcast  

As the name implies, Millennial is a show about millennials, or, well, one millennial: Megan Tan. An aspiring public radio reporter, Tan used the podcast to document the intimate details of her post-college life. Millennial started, quite literally, in her closet and followed her as she tried to jumpstart a career in public radio while navigating everything else twentysomethings deal with: love, family, friendships, and so on. Eventually Tan’s podcast caught the attention of podcasting network Radiotopia , and it became her full-time job (which, as Millennial fans know, was a dream come true). In subsequent seasons, she merged her story with the stories of others. Tan discontinued the podcast this past August, after realizing there was a disconnect between what the podcast was and what it was trying to become. The final episode, “ Saying Goodbye ,” is a reflection on this tug-of-war. Listeners wanted more Megan, but for her, that was untenable.

Recommended episode(s): “ Welcome to Millennial ,” “ Long Distance Love Story ,” “ Becoming More of a Somebody ”

The voice of journalism, since 1961

• Privacy Policy

Support CJR

• Become a Member

August 30, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication, words, words, words.

What does the advent of ChatGPT mean for already beleaguered teachers?

Have you heard the one about the two English professors who walk into a bar while lamenting their professional demise thanks to ChatGPT? They order a couple of beers, and the bartender says, “Why so glum, my friends? ChatGPT is just a tool. Don’t let it define you.”

No? Well, neither had I—until I asked ChatGPT to fill in the blank after “and the bartender says.” For the heck of it, I also asked the program to generate the answer as a koan. It’s hardly a knee-slapper, granted, but no worse than my own lame effort: “What’ll it be, gents? / Wait, no need to tell me / I’ll ask ChatGPT.”

The joke, it seemed, was on me.

But no one in the academy is laughing.

ChatGPT, released in November, is a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that, according to its creators, “interacts in a conversational way” and can “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” The implications of this, particularly for the education field, are huge. So much so that several contributors to The Atlantic foresee in this latest spawn of Silicon Valley, the future of teaching. The reason is simply that ChatGPT works all too well.

In one essay , high school teacher (and former professor) Daniel Herman declares that with the advent of ChatGPT, his life “and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators is about to drastically change.” In another , Stephen Marche, also a former professor, offers a timeline for the coming apocalypse: “Two years for students to figure out the tech, three more years for professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five more years for university administrators to figure out what, if anything, to do about it.”

Marche and Herman believe that they did the right thing by getting out of the humanities profession. But is the situation so dire for those of us who are still in it?

Not necessarily, according to Zeynep Tufekci. In her New York Times column , she observes that this is hardly the first time that the world has been upended by seismic changes in the transmission of knowledge. More than two millennia ago, Plato fretted over the shift from oral to written culture. Referring to what she calls Plato’s “Dialogues,” Tufekci cites the myth of Thamus, the Egyptian god who warned that writing, shunting aside memory, would breed “forgetfulness.” More ominously Tufekci continues, Plato believed this would allow anyone—even fools and knaves—to pretend they are someone “omniscient and wise.” But rather than, like Plato, lament these “supplanted skills,” as Plato did, Tufekci concludes, we should look for ways to create with these new technologies.

As I stare as my laptop, which rests on a table littered with student exams and papers, a coffee mug, my iPhone, and scattered books, including an old copy of the Phaedrus , I wonder if either of these camps has got it right. The subtitle to Marche’s essay is: “The College Essay is Dead.” Perhaps because Marche no longer teaches, he does not realize that the obit is a bit late: the college essay died years ago. During my three decades of teaching at a public university, I have encountered a dwindling number of students who can write a declarative sentence, much less a clear thesis. Perhaps more important, they have no desire to learn how.

The essay is dead, yes, but it is not yet buried. Instead, it has become the lifeless star of “Weekend with Bernie in the Groves of Academe,” a corpse that students and teachers have an equal interest in pretending is still alive. It’s a mug’s game in which a student sends me an electronic file that, when open, spills out a jumble of words that the sender propounds to be a finished paper. A week later, I send back the file, which, when open, spills out a cascade of red markings underscoring that the student’s words amounted to, well, a jumble. In determining grades, I try to find the elusive mean between the papers that my students wrote and the ones they thought they had written.

To paraphrase Dr. Who, memory is a wibbly-wobbly thing. But I do not think I am being overly nostalgic when I remember how students wrote when I first began teaching in the 1980s. Bad writers abounded back then, too. The difference was that writing—or, for that matter, reading—was a familiar, not a foreign, activity. Writing was as much a part of my students’ world as it was of mine—so essential a part that they most often took up my standing offer to comment on drafts.

Today, that offer still stands, but it stands mostly alone. The current generation of students has moved on from writing. Literally. Most students fail to see the relevance of writing in a world—their world—that is largely post-literate. They are at home in media not yet born when I began teaching, media that privilege images and sounds over written text. This does not spell the end of the world, but it does spell “tbh, dwbi.”

“Don’t worry ’bout it” is part of the appeal to Tufekci’s position. Just as we adapted to earlier leaps in communications technology, she writes, we can do so with artificial intelligence and language models. By flipping the classroom—the practice where students listen to recorded lectures at home and draft their essays in class—teachers can remain relevant.

Lol. Given the sheer irrelevance of writing in their world, one defined by mumblecore and memes, texting and TikTok, students will mostly flip the finger at such solutions.

Tufecki perhaps unwittingly points to a different approach. When she refers to the “Dialogues” of Plato, she means a specific dialogue, the Phaedrus . Yet the passage she quotes, the myth of Thamus, comes at the dialogue’s end and cannot be understood without knowing the rest of the text. Socrates and his sole interlocutor, Phaedrus, begin by agreeing to discuss what kind of speech—scripted or spontaneous—is truer to knowledge of ourselves and our world. Walking outside the city, with its streets channeling traffic, and into the countryside, where one is free to roam, the two interlocutors take turns trading claims and counterclaims. Just as their steps wander, so too do their words.

The spontaneous nature of this stroll mirrors Plato’s fundamental point about language: the superiority of an unscripted conversation to written words, which Plato calls “images.” As the interlocutors, who chose to join each other in this philosophical activity, pursue this dialectical back and forth, they stumble across—though do not always welcome—new perspectives on old matters. These shifts, Plato believed, cannot happen when one reads a written text. How could it be otherwise? Unlike a teacher or student, a book can no more protect itself against misinterpretation, the Platonic scholar Thomas Szlezak has observed, than it can choose its readers.

There is an irony too obvious for Tufekci to note: Plato writes to warn us against writing. Compounding the irony is that Plato writes so well. Szlezak might well be right when he asserts that Plato “never thought of entrusting his entire philosophy to writing.” But although he and countless other commentators debate such matters, Plato’s written words remain wordless. No matter how brilliantly Plato re-creates the artlessness of dialogue, his written words remain only that, re-creations—pale images of a free-flowing conversation between two people who, in the moment, were able to react to each other’s comments and further explain themselves.

What if ChatGPT spells not the end of the academy, but instead a revival—a return to its beginnings? The late Pierre Hadot, whose work revolutionized our understanding of the ancient Greek and Hellenistic schools of philosophy, contended that their goals were wholly unlike our own. Students enrolled in these schools, including Plato’s Academy, to be formed, not simply informed, by their teachings. Rather than studying in order to exchange their degrees for jobs, these students studied to change their lives.

According to Hadot, the Academy was not the ancient equivalent of a moot court, a place where students were taught effective debating techniques. They were taught, instead, to engage in dialogues, or dialectics. Ultimately, such dialogues—which cannot be scripted—are an exercise in humility, even a kind of wisdom, for they teach students (and teachers) “to put themselves in one another’s place and thereby transcend their own point of view.” In short, they entail “spiritual exercises which demanded that the interlocutors undergo an askesis , or self-transformation.”

Of course, the crisis facing the academy, apparently heralded by the invention of language models, will not be saved by trying to scale up this ancient approach. But while we debate the place of writing at the academy, it might help to recall that writing did not have much of a place at all in the original academies. Like most everything else, ChatGPT might prove to be little more than a footnote to Plato.

Robert Zaretsky  teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author most recently of Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.

● NEWSLETTER

The Personal (Essay) is Not Dead: an interview with Mensah Demary

MELODY NIXON interviews MENSAH DEMARY

Mensah Demary as an editor is most known for his work with Catapult Nonfiction , and more recently, Black Balloon. But Mensah Demary the writer is a force to be reckoned with. The Common published his essay “ Blood and Every Beat ” in our most recent issue, No. 13. In this month’s Q&A, Interviews Editor Melody Nixon talks with Demary about audience and desire, creative partnerships, “getting out of his own way,” and why the personal essay is not dead (“the idea is absurd”).

Melody Nixon (MN): In your essay “Blood and Every Beat” in the latest issue of The Common , you encompass the national and the personal in one breath. You tie together national politics, the election of Trump, and body-level anxiety and a fear of heart attacks; private moments of solitude with your partner, and public moments of racism, at the micro-aggressive and institutional levels; writing and democracy. “I edit for money, liberating my writing, but what do I know about freedom? I was told to vote, so I voted, but here we are.” Is this essay an attempt to make sense of the global at the level of the body, through “every [heart] beat”?

Mensah Demary (MD): Yes, I think you’ve nailed it, and thank you for the great question. I hadn’t thought about the essay in those terms until now. I remember the night I sat down and wrote it. Carrie Fisher had died that night—when I wrote how my partner informed me of Fisher’s death minutes earlier, that was, or is, in real time—and I was listening to Run The Jewels 3 for the first time. I just started thinking about Disney, and the Star Wars franchise, and the movie Rogue One, which I enjoyed, and the expanding Skywalker storyline thanks to the new trilogy, starting with The Force Awakens, and the new president, and how all of it related to my personal anxiety. Everything is connected and I just have to chase the threads when I write, to recreate in an essay the patterns I see.

MN: Viet Thanh Nguyen noted recently that writers in America are awakening now, forced to come out of passive slumber and claim a place as opinionated, public intellectuals. With your editorship at Catapult— which you’ve written about cogently and in a down-to-earth way —your public profile has increased. How do you relate to Nguyen’s comment?

MD: Writers need to write, to see the world for what it is, absent appeal to wish fulfillment, then find the best language and descriptions to render onto the page the world as they see it—or perhaps I’m speaking only for myself. Widen your perspective, gain empathy, remain intellectually curious and skeptical, these things will wake you up. If it took the US presidential election for some—myself included—to wake up, then so be it. But it remains to be seen if the election has caused true awakening or, for some, merely disturbed an ongoing slumber. Premature retrospectives on how we got here don’t interest me. I don’t need any more public intellectuals telling me what they think will happen in the world; they don’t know any more than you or I. Writers need to claim a place in public as writers, and let the work speak for itself.

MN: What is the role of the personal—and let’s expand that to the personal essay, since you’re a nonfiction writer—in times of collective crisis and reawakening, such as now? I.e., Is and can a politics of the personal be enough, and if so, where can it take us?

MD: The personal reinforces the physical world in which we live; collective crisis and reawakening are terms that all lead back to death—our anxiety in realizing our lives will end, and we cannot predict how, or when, and the mortal threat the physical world poses to us at all times. The personal should inspire you to live, and live more, before you die.

The personal essay is not dead; the idea is absurd. Literature is wholly human; it lives and dies on whether we’re around sharing our personal stories or not. If you don’t want to read personal essays that’s your prerogative, and if you do not wish to pay writers to write and publish them—if you’d rather pivot to video—that too is your choice. The essayist can do more with the personal, however. It’s what I’ve tried to do in my Tinyletter, and with “Blood and Every Beat” and other essays. I’m still figuring out how to do more with the personal. I’m not even sure what I mean by more. More creative? More artistic? More entertaining to the reader? Just—more. The essay is such a flexible and expansive form; it’s perfect to me. I can do anything in an essay, and still cater to hardliners expecting of an essay nothing but facts, as if we still agree on what’s true or false anymore, assuming we ever did.

MN: “Blood and Every Beat” has an organic flow and an associative style. There’s a right-brain, unconscious-like, linking of elements that brings to mind the essay writing of Eduardo Galeano, Bernard Cooper, or Tisa Bryant: that suggests and sparks in the reader subconscious connections (science is just starting to recognize the unconscious as an essential element of the creative process). Does this resonate for you? What role does the un/subconscious play in your writing, and/or writing process?

MD: Yes, that resonates—at least, I’ve more or less arrived at the same conclusion when thinking about my work. I just want to get out of my own way. So long as the essay makes sense, that the associations work organically as you read—this is the interplay between the conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious being what it is, it’s not like I can ever know for sure when it’s at work in my work, and where on the page. But I know it’s always present. It’s the wild mind. I can’t control it. I try to regulate it with rationale and logic, with causality. I trust that I know what I’m doing. And if I screw it up, I can always fix the piece when I edit it.

MN: Who are the writers who’ve really shaped you?

MD: Of late, I keep coming back to Borges and Bolaño, as well as other writers but these two have had the most influence on my work these days. I mention the Borges collection in “Blood and Every Beat,” the one I found and purchased during a recent trip to Chicago.

MN: Do you return to their books, works, essays, to reread them?

MD: Overall I’ve become a re-reader over the past three years, whereas before I would devour a book and simply move on to the next, new title. Nabokov preached the necessity to re-read a book, to give a book a second opportunity to work itself into your mind after the first pass and introduction to the book’s language and rhythm and secrets. I hadn’t thought about reading in those terms before.

MN: As well as editing Catapult Nonfiction , you have a role in acquisitions at Catapult/Black Balloon . Do you get to read for pleasure? If so, who?

MD: I don’t read for pleasure as much as I used to, or want to, but then again I get to read for a living, so I’m not one to complain or cry about lost leisure time. Not everything I read is good, but everything I read is educative and illuminating with respect to human experience within observable reality, the world in which we live and more or less have to reconcile ourselves to, should we wish to carry on. I’m just—wishing to be more mindful of the fact I get to do what I love for a living; while there is always an opportunity to gripe about one imperfect thing or another, I wish to maintain perspective.

On one hand, I want to read more for pleasure—meaning, I want to read for leisure, not for work. On the other hand, this wish is becoming less of a reasonable desire. It’s the price you pay for doing what you love for work; your love and your work intertwine, then blend until distinctions are blurred entirely. What happens if or when you begin to hate the work you do, in this context? Hopefully I’ll never find out but should it happen, I can always read for pleasure again as a singular pursuit. Right now, I’m reading James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Maya Angelou, Borges again, a biography of Alice Coltrane, César Aira, Sebald, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki, and others. I jump around from title to title. I re-read specific chapters. It seems to work for me.

MN: You’re a fellow Brooklynite. Where do you write: at home in Brooklyn, or in some other space? What’s it like?

MD: I write at home, mainly. I tried the coffee shop thing when I first moved here in 2012, and it worked for a time, particularly when I was unemployed and new to the city. Writing outside of my home at that time helped me feel connected to Brooklyn, even if living here brought on anxiety for the first few years. I wasn’t sure I would stay, for a time, or if I could. I’m glad I did. Moving to New York was the best decision for me. Here, I got to grow into myself. I found people who supported my work. I found my partner, my family. For all the millions of people who live here, paradoxically I found a quiet space to work and think, to practice without distraction.

MN: Does Brooklyn as a place enter your work often, as it does at the end of “Blood and Every Beat”? Which other places occur often in your work, as setting or as subject matter, and are important or formative for you?

MD: Brooklyn is entering my work more often these days, the longer I live here, but I’m also travelling more too, so I expect these other locales to appear in my work as well. At first, I had this fascination with New York as a character in a literary work; I suppose most writers who live here go through this at one point or another. That’s okay. The city is a mystery for everyone who lives here, and how you decode and solve that mystery is a matter of personal preference. Some take photos, others collect experiences; I wrote the same essay over and over again for the first three years I lived here. More and more, New Jersey, where I was born, is returning to my work. Georgia, too, as I slowly write my book.

MN: About that… What can you tell us about it? Is this a recent project? Something that’s been in the work for a long time? Fiction or non-?

MD: I can’t talk about it. Blame it on superstition more so than secrecy or building up hype. The last time I told someone—my partner—about my book and in full, I felt depressed for weeks afterwards, or something like depression—melancholia, maybe? Anyway, I didn’t want to write, and I certainly didn’t want to work on the book or even open the file. Telling her about the book so early on, or at all, was like serving her a half-baked cake, soft and doughy in the middle, practically inedible. It wasn’t ready, but I talked about it as though the book was solid enough to take hits, criticisms, valuable criticisms sure, but—it couldn’t absorb the blows. Recently I did share with my agent a little description as a matter of business. She got goose bumps; she pointed to them on her arm. I’ll take this as a good sign and I figure I shouldn’t tempt fate by speaking on it any further.

MN: Your partner is the artist behind Rayo and Honey ; textile art with text on cotton, which has been picked up, promoted and enjoyed by many well-known writers . She also appears in “Blood and Every Beat.” Can you talk about what it’s like for you to be in an artistic partnership, and how, as a writer and artist duo the two of you inform, support, and challenge one another’s work?

MD: I once believed artistic partnerships meant that two people in love work together and, for lack of a better word, meddle in each other’s art. I tried this in the past, thinking that two writers or artists in a relationship automatically equaled partnership. It didn’t, and it never worked for all parties involved. For me, I always resented the meddling. But there are degrees to artistic partnerships, and it takes time and practice to find the right approach. Early on, we found it advantageous for us to work as though we were advisors instead of collaborators. [My partner] has asked me for my opinions on her art and business. At first I felt uncomfortable telling another artist what to do, someone I love, but [I took it that] she was merely asking for my opinion because she respects my opinion, and takes it into consideration—the final decision is hers.

It’s slightly different when it comes to my work because I’ll write and revise a piece for quite some time before she sees it. I won’t speak in details about what I’m writing; to do this means I’m talking about something that still doesn’t exist, and I don’t want to jinx things. In the case of “Blood and Every Beat,” I didn’t share it with her until it was published, so maybe four months went by between completion and her read. This was all on me. She looms large in the piece, more so than other essays. I was nervous about revealing too much about her. It was a cause for concern throughout the time I worked on the piece. In this way, she challenges me. She’s the reader I imagine when I write—her intellect and imagination and literary taste, specifically. If she doesn’t like something I’ve written, it’s not that I simply throw the piece away, but I conclude that it’s not done, that it needs more work.

I want to impress her, whereas in the past I don’t think such a thing ever mattered to me, or crossed my mind. I don’t know if I have the same impact on her, and to me it’s fine if I don’t. I love her work. I love that other writers know and support her work. She’s one of the most creative and visionary artists I’ve ever met. I hope I’ve had some impact on her, if for no other reason because, in the name of reciprocation, she has impacted my work in incalculable ways, and I would only wish to return the favor.

MN: Lastly, I want to touch on your personal newsletter, Regular Genius, which is written in first person, and reveals intimate details: your early start that morning because of travel, your recent weight loss and how weight loss and editing involve a similar sort of chipping away. Though the tone is not as confessional (or incriminating) as, say, the infamous first-person emails of Stephen Elliot, I’ve learned a lot about you as a person. Can you describe the intention behind these emails, and the role/function they play in your ongoing writing practice?

MD: At first, I tried writing personal letters to people I may or may not know. Most of my readers, at least hundreds of them if not more by now, are strangers to me, but a handful of them are my friends, and perhaps, secretly, members of my family. I find it difficult to generate the requisite intimacy in my letters, so I then switched to a more newsletter-y format, with links and information. I’ve changed and renamed my Tinyletter at least four times in the past year, if not more.

I don’t know what my readers want. This is a challenge. I’m not so self-absorbed as to think readers want to know everything about my personal life. But I am solipsistic, and I doubt this will ever change, so I figure I’ll make it my advantage. So now, I try to share my personal perspective—inward looking out, instead of inward looking deeper within, getting lost in my own miasma. I used to do this. It made for great practice, and for creative failures. I hope more people read more of my work. It’s all I ever wanted, to be a writer many people—millions of people—have chosen to read over and again. I don’t have a million subscribers to my Tinyletter, but it would be nice, I think. I don’t know. I just want to connect with people. I thought that was what all writers wanted. I now know better, but it’s still my desire.

Mensah Demary’s essay “ Blood and Every Beat ” appears in Issue No. 13 of The Common.

Melody Nixon is the Interviews Editor for The Common.

Headshot credit: Franklin Park Reading Series.

Related Posts

You Have a Mouth: Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren interviews Ani Gjika

ANI GJIKA It was through reading about trauma and speaking to people that I’ve come to understand that through trauma, we lose agency, and when we lose agency we also experience a disconnect from language, a rupture in it.

Violence and Its Other: Toti O’Brien Interviews Dimitris Lyacos

DIMITRIS LYACOS Could this be the answer, then? A society transformed somehow into a library like this one, and us, serene, contemplative readers, sensitive and profound, interconnected by waves of information, knowledge, and ultimately wisdom?

Return to One’s Roots, Return to a Person, Return to Oneself: Vika Mujumdar Interviews Susana Praver-Pérez

SUSANA PRAVER-PÉREZ in conversation with VIKA MUJUMDAR Sometimes the word is in a different language than the base language of a poem, and I try to make it understandable in the context of the poem. I find when you’re writing within a certain context you need to employ language that reflects that cultural context.

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.

Receive stories, poems, essays, and interviews in your inbox every week. 

Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• In-newsroom
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Minneapolis, Minn.
• St. Petersburg, Fla.
• Washington, D.C.
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics Training
• Ethics Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• IFCN Grants
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

Is the college essay dead? AI apps write scripts, speeches and so much more

Plus, the house of representatives will vote on a new speaker today. how does that work.

I want you to experience some artificial intelligence applications that I have been trying recently. You will see some jaw-dropping potential in these apps to disrupt, create and even cheat. Let’s start with ChatGPT, which, with just a little prompting, can write an essay or even a TV script. I asked it to create a Seinfeld scene in which George decides to become a journalist. In 10 seconds, the script appeared:

(OpenAI.com)

The New York Times can’t seem to rave enough about ChatGPT saying, “ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public. It was built by OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. company that is also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and  DALL-E 2 , the breakthrough image generator that came out this year.” In case you were wondering, GPT stand for “generative pre-trained transformer.”

I asked it how I could know if a racehorse would become a champion:

I asked ChatGPT to write a sermon that a United Methodist minister might deliver about lotteries. I asked it to explain quantum physics at a fourth-grade level. After it gives a response, you can ask for another response, and it will compose a new answer. And, according to the Times, “It can  write jokes  (some of which are actually funny),  working computer code  and  college-level essays . It can also  guess at medical diagnoses ,  create text-based Harry Potter games  and  explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty .” 

Recently, an essay in The Atlantic suggested that artificial intelligence technology makes it easy for a program to produce a logical, conversational article or essay. One student who was caught using AI to produce an essay said it was not unlike using a spellcheck program.  

They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program. The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of  marveling and hand-wringing , plus an  upgrade  to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google  previewed  new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a  $1.5 billion valuation  in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto,  tweeted  in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

Hyperwrite is another interesting program that includes templates.  Look at all of the options just under “marketing”

(HyperWrite)

Hyperwrite allows the user to build documents step by step. I asked HyperWrite to explain World War 2 in language that a 5-year-old might understand. Here are three possibilities it offered:

And I built a 322-word essay about the importance of submarines from World War II to today in 30 seconds. Here’s part of a finished essay:

Here are some other places you can go to learn how AI is moving into journalism.

• The future of content creation with AI is closer than you might think – Poynter 
• A news photo editor’s nightmare is an art director’s dream – Poynter
• These projects are using AI to fight misinformation – Poynter
• How news organizations used automated news to cover COVID-19 – Poynter
• What is the future of automated fact-checking?  – Poynter
• Here’s how publishers around the world are using automated news – NiemanLab
• “Look at the robot as your new colleague”: what automation can do for sports reporting – Journalism.co.uk
• How a local paper in Argentina uses AI to publish hundreds of sports pieces a month – Reuters Institute for Journalism
• Runway – an example of text for video editing. This is their latest trailer for 2023.

The battle over today’s vote for Speaker of the House

Let’s keep in mind that this has to do with one of the most powerful and important positions in U.S. government, and hours before the House of Representatives is to vote on who holds that position, the outcome is uncertain. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has the backing of almost all his Republican colleagues, but 15 Republicans don’t back him and that is enough to send the leadership vote to a second round, which hasn’t happened in a century.

Since today’s vote will not be the formality it usually is, you should know the rules . PBS explained some of the details that you might not expect, including that the speaker does not have to be a member of Congress, and to be elected, the speaker does not have to get 218 of the 435 House votes (a majority.) The vote only requires a majority of those who are present and vote by name. 

All candidates for speaker must be nominated by members of the House, but they don’t need to be elected lawmakers of the House.  Article I, section II  of the Constitution says only that the House “shall choose their Speaker and other officers.” So far, the chamber has only chosen its own members as speaker, but a non-lawmaker is possible. Earlier this year, former Secretary of State Colin Powell received a vote for speaker, as did Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. To be the next speaker, a person needs a majority of the votes from House members who are present and voting. (See this useful  Congressional Research Service (CRS) report  for more detail.) That means that while a majority is 218 votes in the House, a person could become speaker with fewer votes if several members do not attend the vote. That happened in 2021 when Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., won with just 216 votes after three members voted “present.”

The House has been deadlocked 14 times before. The House historian traces the floor fights back to 1793 when it took three ballots to choose a Leader.

Most House Speaker floor battles happened before the Civil War. But for sheer drama, read about the House Speaker vote from 1917 , or the nine ballots required to elect Rep. Frederick Gillett  of Massachusetts to be speaker in 1923. 

CNN reminds us:

In 1855 and 1856, it took 133 separate votes for Rep. Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts to be elected, again by a plurality and not a majority. The process stretched over more than a month and included a sort of inquisition on the House floor of the three contenders. They answered questions about their view of the expansion of slavery.  Read more from the House historian’s website . It’s also interesting to  read about Banks ; his official House biography notes he was elected to office as a Republican, an independent, a member of the America Party and as a Democrat.

The Congressional Institute explains the House meets today: 

• Establish that there is a quorum. If a member in attendance declines to vote, they do not count toward the quorum.
• The clerk calls for speaker candidate nominations.
• Chairs of the Republican Conference and Democratic Caucus make short speeches on behalf of their parties’ nominees.
• The clerk then asks for any other nominations. 
• The clerk then appoints tellers to record the votes, and the voting begins. 
• Each member-elect has the opportunity to vote when the clerk calls his or her name. Typically, the member-elect responds by calling out the last name of the person they wish to be speaker. They may also answer “present,” which does not count as a vote but does contribute to a quorum. Or they could decline to respond at all.

Local news covers a lot of crime, yet people can’t find the crime news they need

Gaps in news coverage cited in new Pew Research study are opportunities to grow local audiences

How newsrooms track the diversity of their sources can lead to tradeoffs in time spent, information collected

A new research study offers a roadmap for newsrooms that may want to analyze which voices routinely get quoted and ignored

Opinion | Former politician convicted of murdering journalist who reported on him

Plus, two years after she lost, a federal appeals court revives Sarah Palin's defamation suit against The New York Times.

No, Tim Walz did not insult Ann Coulter after she called his son ‘weird’

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s purported response to Ann Coulter calling his son "weird" is not on his official X account.

University of Florida student journalists lead on breaking big stories about former President Ben Sasse

Independent Florida Alligator's stories drew national attention to former senator's high-dollar consulting and remote personnel spending

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

The Personal Essay Isn’t Dead. It’s Just No Longer White

Recent criticism of the form's faults says more about the genre's historical whiteness than it does the talent of its new stars.

T he reports of the death of the personal essay continue to be greatly exaggerated. In 1905, a mere three centuries after Michel de Montaigne gave the essay its name, Virginia Woolf lamented its decline in “The Decay of Essay-Writing.” “There are, of course, distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought,” she wrote. “But, on the other hand, there is a very large number who make the fatal pause, and the mechanical act of writing is allowed to set the brain in motion which should only be accessible to a higher inspiration.” The essay exists on a precipice, in other words. It leans only on the author’s experience and can be easily felled by a lack of rigour.

One hundred and twelve years after Woolf, the death of the personal essay was pronounced once again, this time by Jia Tolentino in a widely read piece in The New Yorker . Aligning with Slate ’s Laura Bennett, who wrote in 2015 of the “first-person industrial complex,” Tolentino accused the genre of trafficking in empty, sensational confession that lacked self-awareness or longevity. More recently (and more specifically), in the Boston Review , Merve Emre, an assistant professor in literature at McGill University, referenced Tolentino while eviscerating Indian Canadian author Durga Chew-Bose’s lyrical essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood for “peacocking” but saying nothing. Within the same review, she praised the cool precision of Mary Gaitskill and Deborah Nelson, two authors who happen to be white.

What Emre herself referred to as “the idle chirping of social media” flew not-so-idly her way with a pile of praise—even I congratulated her for voicing what I could not, for decoding a lack of profundity I had hitherto suspected but failed to parse, concluding I was simply too stupid to understand. This may have been one of the reasons few had openly criticized this kind of precious prose in the past, not to mention the social status of the writers who engage in writing such essays, causing peers who question it to do so on the DM so as not to risk their own upward mobility. (Surely, Emre’s position as a Canadian academic outside of New York’s literary circles insulates her, to a degree.) However, it was also noticeable that most of the praise for Emre came from white academics. Only a minority outside of this circle argued that “It” girl Chew-Bose was merely the writer of colour du jour to be sacrificed on the altar of white institutions or that writers like Gaitskill and Nelson were only the latest in a procession of Caucasian intellects.

Positioning Chew-Bose as an author who presents herself “as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others,” Emre slipped her work into the confessional form of personal essay—a particular sub-genre of the form that Tolentino interred in her New Yorker critique—which she claimed had already “muddied its coattails.” Yet while Emre has an evident distaste for both Chew-Bose’s work and confessional writing, the comparison fell flat—largely because Chew-Bose’s writing is not confessional. She is more concerned, successfully or not, with playing with the form, the words, the sounds, and the movement of a piece to provoke a momentary feeling rather than convey an overall thesis. Chew-Bose is only as confessional as her choice of rhymes is confessional, the personal and critical weaving through them like couplets. Emre’s preference for Gaitskill’s works, “circumspect in their claims to self-knowledge”—as well as her celebration of Nelson’s praise of equally detached white writers—seems more a matter of stylistic preference. In the same critical essay, Emre praised Gaitskill for the very openness she appeared to turn away from when discussing Chew-Bose, calling Gaitskill’s work a “graceful acceptance of psychic irretrievability—the impossibility of knowing what may or may not touch the imagination; what may or may not undo the soul.”

Contemporary confessional writing has mainly been the province of white, middle- to upper-class women such as Emily Gould, Nora Ephron, Meghan Daum, and Sloane Crosley, who observed their lives and lives like theirs. Theirs were bold self disclosures, the “I,” in all its gore, coming first. The style was more plain-spoken, allowing for light humour, irony, lyricism, but principally approachability. Then, around 2008, as Tolentino noted, with the arrival of Gould, the conversation expanded to include more explicit confession, culminating in the publication of essay collections by name authors including Lena Dunham ( Not that Kind of Girl ) and Lindy West ( Shrill ). But the conversation was still dominated by white writers who shared a common set of interests. Their essays centred on subjects like gross-out body breakdowns, convoluted sexual relationships, and the peccadilloes of urban life. Tolentino argued that in the wake of the recent election, this sort of personal was no longer political enough to survive. And the argument wasn’t wrong, it was just looking the wrong way.

T he personal essay isn’t dead, it’s just no longer white. Three years ago, Haitian American writer Roxane Gay rejuvenated the genre with her bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist . This year has seen the publication of comparable compilations by African American blogger Samantha Irby ( We Are Never Meeting in Real Life ) and BuzzFeed writer Scaachi Koul ( One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter ), a Canadian of Indian descent like Chew-Bose. I do not, however, include Chew-Bose in this trio, although she was published around the same time, because she does not engage in the same graphic self revelation. Rather, the texture of the text takes precedence in her work, not to mention, as Emre observed, she is overtly “apolitical, bereft of any common political or ethical position.” The same cannot be said of Gay, Irby, or Koul. The dismissal of Chew-Bose as a personal essayist, simply for her style and associating her instead with confession, negates the diversity of the genre’s voices, implying that women of colour are one entity that can only do one thing and not particularly well, at that. It says that their refusal to adhere to traditional literary standards, largely defined by white authors, speaks to their inferiority as artists rather than their innovation.

In Slate , Bennett has observed that the one positive outcome of the first-person flood was that the underrepresented were able to ride the wave. The array of perspectives—non-white, non-cis, non-heterosexual, non-wealthy—helped popularize intersectional activism, prioritizing diverse writers who interrogated the culture that refused to recognize them. At Book Riot , a blog that focuses on diverse literature, writer Morgan Jerkins, whose own collection of essays ( This Will Be My Undoing ) is forthcoming, confirmed that this genre was the one place non-white points of view like hers seemed allowed to exist. “For the most part, many of us have been trained to invoke the voices of dead white writers,” she wrote. “Now, we have the opportunity to recognize and examine our own voices through our lens at our own individual paces.”

That opportunity can be traced back to the first-person wave but also feminism’s fourth wave, in which pioneering personal writing by women of colour resurfaced. Women have long written from a personal perspective, their voices acting as their greatest weapon against oppression. The first examples of literature written by African American women, for instance, emerged from slavery. Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , exposed her abuse but also her strength. One hundred years of continued oppression later, and the civil rights movement turned writers into fervent activists. At this time, poet Maya Angelou’s editor challenged her to transform autobiography into literature. In response, she used the tools of fiction to construct her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , into a narrative about racism and trauma told through the experiences of her own life. Emerging from the myopic masculinity of the civil rights movement, black feminism informed activists including Audre Lorde, whose seminal collection Sister Outsider (1984) furiously explores intersectionality and helped form the template for contemporary feminism.

These influences are written all over the current hybridized form of intersectional essays, in which writers of various races, sexualities, genders, and abilities blend criticism, personal essay, and reportage—what better way to reflect their multi-faceted lives? Lorde’s activism, and that of the female writers of colour preceding her, have equally inspired the loud, confident voices and personalities that have commandeered invisible podiums online. More than their writing, it is the charisma of these women, broadcast by social media, that resonates—charisma that infuses their personal essays, parlaying their popularity into bestselling books.

A nd Roxane Gay is the most charismatic of them all. First published over twenty years ago, Gay only soared to prominence within the past decade when she, like Cheryl Strayed, entered the world of non-fiction. “My life until I began writing essays was a period of silence,” she told Bomb magazine. “I didn’t dare try and use my voice for fear it wouldn’t be heard and for fear of what I might say.” In 2012, before first-person criticism went mainstream, Gay wrote about the power of young women through the prism of The Hunger Games and her own rape at age twelve, including the piece in her 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist , inspiring many of us to play with personalized critique in a similar way.

“I think, especially in non-fiction writing, it’s demanded that women unburden ourselves, that we splay ourselves open and let you see our bloody guts,” she writes. “But to what end? I’ll show you some of my bloody guts, but there’s going to be, hopefully, when I’m at my best, a larger sense of purpose to the writing. You have to look both inward and outward.” Her book became a bestseller. Deconstructing popular culture and feminism through the intersections of her own life, Gay popularized the form. The tone, however—uplifting verging on evangelical—was familiar, a sort of Oprah for millennials. Because of this, though Gay is a writer first, her insight into the human condition in all its diversity, bolstered by her social media presence, has turned her into something of an inspirational brand. Her writing reflects a set of marginal experiences so rare in popular books that she herself has become an icon of the underrepresented—the same way an actor who plays a rare part becomes indistinguishable from it. It is thus unsurprising that, earlier this month, she launched an advice column at the New York Times . This is testament to the significance of the personal essay resurrected by writers of colour: it is not simply their ownership of the genre that matters but that it imparts on them a power and an authority they have for so long been denied.

Scaachi Koul’s raison d’être is the opposite of Gay’s: it is not succor but discomfort. She established a clear brand of irreverence in Canada—the Land of the Milquetoast—as a strident online voice, tweeting invectives in response to any and all sociopolitical inequities and authoring columns such as “Unfuck Yourself” and “Well That Sucked” at Hazlitt . In her first book, Koul addresses the complexities of her own gender and identity politics, though the abrupt tone that has become her hallmark on Twitter is diluted in long-form, losing much of its punch.

It follows then that the title of the essay collection, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , gets the biggest reaction, hewing with Koul’s terse public persona, an unapologetic subversion of two stereotypes: the innocuous Canadian and the submissive Indian. She dedicates the book to her parents but addresses it to her niece. “It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself,” she writes. With her, it is less about the writing, more about having written—the act of confession is her activism, a clarion call for other women of colour to see that it is possible and to do the same.

Harking back to the black feminist literary movement preceding them, and indeed reflecting marginal groups as a whole, the new personal essayists form a tight group. Relating to each other’s oft-sidelined experiences, they gravitate together, establishing power in numbers, ensuring they remain visible where they weren’t for so long. Samantha Irby was championed early on by Gay at the Rumpus and the duo, along with Koul, write on similar topics—writ large, the nuances of moving in non-white bodies through a patriarchal society. “I want to go unnoticed. I want to hide. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body,” Gay writes in her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body . In a similar vein, Koul explains in her collection, “I still shop to save my soul instead of just to cover my ass, and it typically ends the same way.”

Then there’s Irby. “There’s always some bag of dicks with a beer in his hand, a triple cheeseburger on his plate, and a cigarette in his mouth trying to talk to me about healthy eating,” she writes. Where Gay is the sage and Koul the contrarian, Irby is naked honesty. Her latest book of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life , is all voice. It is disclosure at its juiciest, rich with lurid details and riddled with musically delicious expletives and shambolic jargon, the kind you only use with your friends. “He was sexy and everything,” she writes, “but I mean, he didn’t even know how to CC an e-mail to multiple recipients. I don’t have to be grateful for that shit.” Her confessions about everything from her Crohn’s disease, to the death of her parents, to her obsession with trashy reality television resonate precisely because she is not the ideal confessor.

Irby is not here to give advice or to make the world a better place, she is here to be your sister, whoever you are. Her work recalls that famous quote, often misattributed to C.S. Lewis: “We read to know we’re not alone.” In truth, the quote comes from Shadowlands , a 1993 film based on Lewis’s life, in which a student repeats the line, something his schoolmaster father used to say, to the fictional Lewis. But are those words any less resonant simply because their source is not the authority figure we established years ago? Are they any less meaningful because they have meandered through history, away from their ancestry? Critics who dismiss the voices that speak to the future risk being lost to the past. And writers of colour are the future, transcending everything—outside and inside—but their humanity. “My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m.,” Irby writes. “First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead.” No, you are very much alive.

Related Posts

The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design

August 14, 2024 August 19, 2024

Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada

July 4, 2024 July 4, 2024

Rachel Cusk’s Parade Turns the Novel Upside Down

June 7, 2024 June 7, 2024

The Walrus uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other purposes. Learn more or change your cookie preferences.

Fund the journalism that helps you make informed decisions. Fund The Walrus.

Before you go, did you know that The Walrus is a registered charity? We rely on donations and support from readers like you to keep our journalism independent and freely available online.

Read more…

When you donate to The Walrus, you’re helping writers, editors, and artists produce stories like the ones you’ve just read. Every story is meticulously researched, written, and edited, before undergoing a rigorous fact-checking process. These stories take time, but they’re worth the effort, because you leave our site better informed about Canada and its people.

If you’d like to ensure we continue creating stories that matter to you, with a level of accuracy you can trust, please consider becoming a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s tough out there with inflation and rising costs, but good journalism affects us as well, so I don’t ask this lightly.

Will you join us in keeping independent journalism free and available to all?

Your browser is ancient! Please upgrade to a different browser to experience this site.

• Skip to content
• AustLit home
• Advanced search
• About / Contact
• Member Home
• Editing Mode
• Public Mode
• Subscriber Management
• Add New Work
• Add New Agent
• Add New TAL Unit
• Delete This Record
• Undelete This Record
• Merge Record
• See Recent Changes
• Download as PDF
• LOG IN WITH YOUR LIBRARY CARD
• Log in as a different user: User login form User name Password

• Author: agent Kylie Maslen
• EDIT/CONTRIBUTE ADD HEADER INFO
• Abstract text
• Publication Details ( 1 )
• Issues ( 19044853 )
• Find Library Holdings on Trove

Latest Issues

Abstract history archive description.

'In the wake of the mid-2010s ‘personal essay boom’, writers are shaping and stretching the personal essay form to share stories that refuse a traditional telling.'

Publication Details of Only Known Version Earliest 2 Known Versions of

• Blueberries Ellena Savage , 2020 selected work prose
• We are Speaking in Code Tanya Vavilova , 2020 selected work essay
• I Choose Elena Lucia Osborne-Crowley , 2019 single work autobiography

Email Alert

Information.

Important Addresses

Harvard College

University Hall Cambridge, MA 02138

Harvard College Admissions Office and Griffin Financial Aid Office

86 Brattle Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Social Links

If you are located in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway (the “European Economic Area”), please click here for additional information about ways that certain Harvard University Schools, Centers, units and controlled entities, including this one, may collect, use, and share information about you.

• Application Tips
• Navigating Campus
• Preparing for College
• How to Complete the FAFSA
• What to Expect After You Apply
• View All Guides
• Parents & Families
• School Counselors
• Información en Español
• Undergraduate Viewbook
• View All Resources

Search and Useful Links

Search the site, search suggestions, the personal essay.

Unlike the rest of your application, which primarily consists of filling in boxes, the personal essay gives you the freedom to essentially write about whatever you want. No rules! Show who you are! Which sounds pretty cool, until you’re sitting there looking at a blank Word document.

While the personal essay is a great opportunity to infuse your voice into the application, I think some people (cough, me, cough) can get overwhelmed by it to the point where they don’t know how to begin. What do I write about? What makes me stand out? How can I explain all of this in only a few hundred words?

Well, as someone who eventually managed to get some words down on that blank document and turn out a decent college essay, here are a few words of advice.

1. Start by writing something.

I know, that sounds really obvious. But sometimes the hardest part of writing is just getting started – if you spend too much time criticizing your ideas before you write anything down, you won’t get anywhere. Write a few sentences, jot down some random ideas, note a couple anecdotes that might be interesting… just get something on paper that you can look back to. Maybe one of those ideas will catch, and BOOM you have an essay – or maybe you’ll look back to this list after a few weeks and think of something else that you would rather write about. That’s fine! The beginning of the creative process involves coming up with ideas, judging them comes later. Trust me, I took a class on this (really: it was a psych class called “Creativity: Madmen, Geniuses, and Harvard Students.”)

2. Think about something that has some significance to you.

Many students feel like they have to write about some huge, life-changing, important event in their lives. If you have something like this that you want to write about, that’s great! However, you can also write an awesome essay about something other than The Most Important Thing Ever. It can be the littlest things, if you explain their significance well, that actually stand out. In my case, somewhere in my essay I mentioned that I got up at 5:37am (rather than 5:30 or 5:45) because I liked prime numbers – and the first thing my admissions officer said when I walked into the room for my interview was, “So, prime numbers, huh?” That being said, remember that this is a college essay, so keep this audience and goal in mind as you write. When they finish reading, what do you want the admissions officers to know about you? Does this essay demonstrate something about who you are and what you care about? If not, you might want to go back to the drawing board.

3. Don’t be afraid to start over.

After finishing my first draft, I was glad to have something, but I wasn’t completely happy with it either. A week or two later, as I was reading over my essay again, I had an idea for a totally different topic - so I opened another document and completely started over. The second attempt was so much better, and I felt happy with how it turned out. It can be hard to scrap an initial attempt after spending so much time on it, but think of that time as just part of the process of getting to what you really want to write about.

4. Get an outside perspective.

One of the most useful things I did while working on my college essay was asking a couple people to read it over. At the time, I had two drafts that I was choosing between, and I wasn’t sure which one captured “me” better. When I asked my parents and teacher what they thought, they unanimously picked one option over the other. In the end, it’s important to have an essay that you are happy with – but sometimes having a fresh set of eyes can help you see what that is.

This is an important step! Both you, and perhaps someone who knows you well, should read over your essay and make sure it is in tip-top shape before you turn it in. There should be no grammatical or spelling mistakes – that gives the impression that you did not take your time on it. I know you’ve spent a long time on it by this point, but those last edits are super important!

The personal essay is a snippet of who you are and where you’re coming from – a snapshot for the admissions officers to look at as they read your application. It will never be able to capture everything about you, but you want to make sure that you’re giving them your best angle. So sit down, smile, and get to writing!

Halie Class of Alumni

Student Voices

Dear homesick international student at harvard college.

David Class of '25

My Harvard Monomyth

Denzel Class of '24

Applying to Engineering Fellowships?

Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide

A design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”:

Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content.

The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form. Here, then, are several main options.

Narrative with a lift

Take, for example, Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” The narrator, abandoned by her husband, is caring for a dying dog and going to work at a university office to which an angry graduate student has brought a gun. The sequence of scenes matches roughly the unfolding of real events, but there is suspense to pull us along, represented by questions we want answered. In fact, within Beard’s narrative, two sets of questions, correlating to parallel subplots, create a kind of double tension. When the setting is Beard’s house, we wonder, “Will she find a way to let go of the dying dog, not to mention her failing marriage?” And when she’s at work, we find ourselves asking, “What about the guy with the gun? How will he impact her one ‘safe place’?”

One interesting side note: trauma, which is a common source for personal essays, can easily cause an author to get stuck on the sort of plateau Kittredge described. Jo Ann Beard, while clearly wrestling with the immobilizing impact of her own trauma, found a way to keep the reader moving both forward and upward, until the rising tension reached its inevitable climax: the graduate student firing his gun. I have seen less-experienced writers who, by contrast, seem almost to jog in place emotionally, clutching at a kind of post-traumatic scar tissue.

The whorl of reflection

Let’s set aside narrative, though, since it is not the only mode for a personal essay. In fact, most essays are more topical or reflective, which means they don’t move through time in a linear fashion as short stories do.

One of the benefits of such a circling approach is that it seems more organic, just like the mind’s creative process. It also allows for a wider variety of perspectives—illuminating the subject from multiple angles. A classic example would be “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders’s essay about his alcoholic father. Instead of luring us up the chronological slope of plot, Sanders spirals around his father’s drinking, leading us to a wide range of realizations about alcoholism: how it gets portrayed in films, how it compares to demon-possession in the Bible, how it results in violence in other families, how it raises the author’s need for control, and even how it influences the next generation through his workaholic over-compensation. We don’t read an essay like this out of plot-driven suspense so much as for the pleasure of being surprised, again and again, by new perspective and new insight.

The formal limits of focus

My own theory is that most personal essayists, because of a natural ability to extrapolate, do not struggle to find subjects to write about. Writer’s block is not their problem since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump of personal experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.

Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” is an odd but useful model. She limits that essay to a single evening walk in London, ostensibly taken to buy a pencil. I suspect Woolf gave herself permission to combine incidents from several walks in London, but no matter. The essay feels “brought together” by the imposed limits of time and place.

As it happens, “Street Haunting” is also an interesting prototype for a kind of essay quite popular today: the segmented essay. Although the work is unified by the frame of a single evening stroll, it can also be seen as a combination of many individual framed moments. If we remove the purpose of the journey—to find a pencil—the essay falls neatly into a set of discrete scenes with related reveries: a daydreaming lady witnessed through a window, a dwarfish woman trying on shoes, an imagined gathering of royalty on the other side of a palace wall, and eventually the arguing of a married couple in the shop where Woolf finally gets her pencil.

Dipping into the well

Our attention to thematic unity brings up one more important dynamic in most personal essays. Not only do we have a horizontal movement through time, but there is also a vertical descent into meaning. As a result, essayists will often pause the forward motion to dip into a thematic well.

In fact, Berry uses several of these loops of reflective commentary, and though they seem to be digressions, temporarily pulling the reader away from the forward flow of the plot, they develop an essential second layer to the essay.

Braided and layered structures

Want an example? Look at Judith Kitchen’s three-page essay “Culloden,” which manages to leap back and forth quite rapidly, from a rain-pelted moor in 18th-century Scotland to 19th-century farms in America to the blasted ruins of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the author’s birthday. The sentences themselves suggest the impressionistic effect that Kitchen is after, being compressed to fragments, rid of the excess verbiage we expect in formal discourse: “Late afternoon. The sky hunkers down, presses, like a lover, against the land. Small sounds. A far sheep, faint barking. . . .” And as the images accumulate, layer upon layer, we begin to feel the author’s fundamental mood, a painful awareness of her own inescapable mortality. We begin to encounter the piece on a visceral level that is more intuitive than rational. Like a poem, in prose.

Coming Full Circle

First of all, endings are related to beginnings. That’s why many essays seem to circle back to where they began. Annie Dillard, in her widely anthologized piece “Living Like Weasels,” opens with a dried-out weasel skull that is attached, like a pendant, to the throat of a living eagle—macabre proof that the weasel was carried aloft to die and be torn apart. Then, at the end of the essay, Dillard alludes to the skull again, stating, “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

See how deftly Dillard accomplishes this effect simply by positing one last imagined or theoretical possibility—a way of life she hopes to master, that we ourselves might master: “Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” Yes, the essay has come full circle, echoing the opening image of the weasel’s skull, but it also points away, beyond itself, to something yet to be realized. The ending both closes and opens at the same time.

All diagrams rendered by Claire Bascom. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Volume I, issue 1 of The Essay Review .

This essay is fabulously This essay is fabulously useful! I’ll be showing it to my creative writing students semester after semester, I’m sure. I appreciate the piece’s clarity and use of perfect examples.

I love the succinct diagrams and cited writing examples. Very instructive and useful as A.P. comments above. I also loved that I had read the Woolf journey to buy a pencil–one of my favorite essays because it is such a familiar experience–that of observing people.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

An editor’s perspective: the personal parenting essay is not dead

By Lauren Apfel @ laurenapfel  

O n May 18th, 2017 the  New Yorker  declared the online personal essay  dead and buried . Cause of death was, apparently, a multi-organ failure. Slashed budgets and a need for increasingly click-bait content that left writers cold and over-exposed. A saturated market that led sites to seek out other sources of revenue. And the final nail in the coffin: a sea-change in the political climate that made the airing of individual laundry—dirty or otherwise—feel woefully irrelevant.

But what about the personal parenting essay? As the co-founder and editor of a relatively new digital parenting publication, the pulsing heart of which is the first-person narrative, I’d argue (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

On May 23, 2016, a mere year before Jia Tolentino delivered her death sentence, Randi Olin and I launched  Motherwell . In one sense, the timing seemed ideal. We were riding the crest of a wave. First-person writing on the Internet was ubiquitous enough for it to be described by  Slate , in late 2015, as an “ industrial complex .” Parenting writing was no exception.

To glance, even casually, around the Web was to believe it. Other parenting publications were thriving: the confessional, blogger-style sites such as Scary Mommy and HuffPost Parents with their  millions  of actively engaged social media followers; the newsier broadsheet parenting blogs at  The New York Times  and  The Washington Post  with their undeniable clout; and the more literary venues such as  Brain, Child Magazine , where my co-founder and I started our careers, and whose online presence had been growing like a wild flower under our tender loving care.

The problem, insofar as there was one, with parenting writing in the years preceding Motherwell’s launch was not a lack of outlets or interest. It was a lack of depth. In November of 2014, I wrote an article for  Time   addressing this issue  with a sweeping defence of the “mommy blogger.” In the brief spell I had been on the scene, I contended, there had been a palpable uptick not only in the quality of writing about parenthood, but in a recognition of its cultural importance. Call us what you will, I said then—and I believe it to be just as true today—but those of us who are chronicling our experiences raising the next generation of tolerant citizens, those of us who are thinking deeply about what it means in the 21st century to be both a woman and a mother, we are indeed doing serious work.

The Internet agreed with me. Big, venerable sites were now courting, and featuring, parenting essays, written mainly by women.  Slate ,  Salon ,  Vox ,  Aeon ,  The Atlantic.  New sites and parenting verticals were popping up on a regular basis. So in this sense, we were certainly riding a wave with Motherwell, capitalising on the surge of—and desire for—intelligent commentary on parenthood.

And then, six months after we went live, Trump happened.

The energy of the Internet changed overnight. It became at once frenetic with emotion—anger, fear, disbelief — but also overwhelming and oddly stultifying as a result. It felt, at least in my liberal bubble, almost sacrilegious to post anything not on the subject of political outrage. Publishing an essay about breastfeeding or the empty nest seemed, at this point, the literary equivalent of plucking idly at a fiddle as Rome burned all around.

And yet, while there was definitely outrage to be expressed and action to be taken, for moms and dads life trudged on. The little kids still woke at 5:45am, needing to be fed and entertained. The bigs kids still needed to be driven to band practice and gymnastics, all the while kept informed in a suitably soothing way. Trump was President, the doomsday clock was inching ominously towards midnight, but people were still parenting, their parenting concerns now ricocheting wildly between the mundane and the profound.  How do I find time to take a shower with a baby and toddler in tow?   How do I explain to my eight-year-old that the leader of the free world is a person who grabs pussies and builds walls?

As a publication, the balance between these poles was a delicate one to strike, particularly in the immediate wake of the election. We didn’t want to ignore the political situation entirely, to step clear out of the fray,  and we didn’t . But at the same time, it felt necessary to carry on with our original vision of running personal essays about parenting topics that didn’t hinge on the new world order. People were still weaning their babies and  waiting for their teens to leave home , after all.

In the  New Yorker  article, Tolentino concludes, “No more lost-tampon essays in the age of Donald Trump.” And maybe that’s fair enough. We might not be writing about tampons gone missing anymore. At least for a time. But I have no doubt that we will continue to write, in one way or another, about bruised nipples, about maternal ambivalence, about how to rear children who believe love is love.

Because parenting writing is a unique species of personal essay. The thing about kids is that we keep having them, and as long as we have them, we will keep wanting to talk about them. The rawness, the radicalness of the felt-experience of parenthood, of motherhood in particular, hits each generation anew like a blast of icy air. And even though parenting will always be spring-loaded with its own end date—that’s the other thing about kids, damn them, they grow up—as one generation of writers ages out, another crop will inevitably take its place, regardless of which direction the political wind is blowing.

With the rise of the online mother-writer over the last 10-15 years—fostered by voices such as Dooce and Ayelet Waldman and Lisa Belkin—women gained an unprecedented space to come to terms with the isolating and often crippling expectations of modern motherhood. Which is exactly why the personal parenting essay will not die. Because the first-person narrative serves here not as an opportunity for navel-gazing, but as a lifeline. A hard-won platform, a vehicle to assert the inherent value of mothering and, above all else, a mark of our shared humanity—at a moment when we need it most.

Lauren Apfel is co-founder and executive editor of Motherwell. She likes to write about parenting on a regular basis and believes strongly in providing a platform for others to do the same.  Connect with her on  Facebook,   Twitter  and  Instagram . 

Get Motherwell straight to your inbox.

Join us on Facebook.

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Awesome article, Lauren. Moms have to write, no matter what they say. It high time society understands our point. And strongly believe, we women can move mountains if we unite. Thank you. Dita

Love this Lauren. You are so talented.

I love this. Keep those personal parenting essays coming!

At its best, the first person parenting essay is an essay and not a profanity/easy joke-ridden rant. Essays about parenting will never fall out of favor because the role of parent is so enormous and confounding. But the cheap, ‘look at me, my kid put a diaper on his head this morning and I’m so stressed out’ excuse for an essay ought to be saying goodbye. Not that humor is bad, nothing is better than humor well-written. Nothing is better than anything well-written – an essay written with thought, depth, insight, and skill is a thing of beauty.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Discover more from

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

We need your support today

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Vox is here to explain this unprecedented election cycle and help you understand the larger stakes. We will break down where the candidates stand on major issues, from economic policy to immigration, foreign policy, criminal justice, and abortion. We’ll answer your biggest questions, and we’ll explain what matters — and why. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

by Sarah Kliff

It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled upon writers who were contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi’s experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto’s contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he’ll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — “weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough” — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he “probably won’t live long enough for her to have a memory of me.” Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it’s become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund’s essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. “Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?” she writes. “Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?”

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto’s cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto’s essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it’s also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto’s essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. “Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six,” Lopatto writes. “My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months.”

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

“Letting Go” is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die” — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It’s a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What’s tragic about Monopoli’s case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli’s last days played out.

• Health Care

Most Popular

• Georgia’s MAGA elections board is laying the groundwork for an actual stolen election
• Did Ukraine just call Putin’s nuclear bluff?
• Mark Zuckerberg’s letter about Facebook censorship is not what it seems
• Zelenskyy’s new plan to end the war, explained
• How is Kamala Harris getting away with this?

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Politics

The nominee is pivoting hard to the right on immigration, so why do progressives say they can live with it?

Will the biggest program to legalize undocumented immigrants in a decade survive a court challenge?

This is not a win for free speech. It’s a political grenade.

Trump-style immigration restrictions have gone mainstream among 2024 voters.

An radical troll got unmasked — and then spilled the beans.

Oklahoma v. HHS could potentially blow up much of Medicare and Medicaid if the justices decide to wild out.

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Health Death

A Father's Legacy: Reflecting on the Narrative of Losing My Dad

Table of contents, introduction, a guiding light and endless love, the unfathomable farewell, navigating the rapids of grief, a continuation of love.

*minimum deadline

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below

• Synesthesia
• Ebola Virus
• Multiple Sclerosis

Related Essays

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

• United Kingdom

How I Knew When To End A 5-Year-Long Relationship

The End Of Fairy Tales: Why I Left My 5-Year Relationship

I remember calling my sister from my car in the parking lot a week before ending the relationship, and her response was, “Are you sure? Have you really thought about it?” I had to tell her, “I’ve already thought about it for a year.” 

More from Relationships

R29 original series.

site categories

Global industry group ace announces shutdown of fmovies, deemed “world’s largest piracy ring”, breaking news.

Aperture Entertainment Signs Kyle McConaghy & Joe DeBoer, Filmmakers Behind Toronto-Bound Horror Thriller ‘Dead Mail’

By Matt Grobar

Matt Grobar

Senior Film Reporter

More Stories By Matt

• AGBO’s No Sleep ‘Til Film Fest Sets Fourth Edition
• Sissy Spacek & Nick Nolte Latest To Join Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Die, My Love’
• Mayim Bialik Boards Documentary ‘Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory’ As Executive Producer, Acquires Narrative Rights To The Project 

EXCLUSIVE : Adam Goldworm ‘s Aperture Entertainment has signed Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer , a Missouri filmmaking duo whose acclaimed horror thriller Dead Mail will soon have its Canadian premiere in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival.

We’re told the viewing experience is as if you found a vintage Fincher VHS, lost to time, in the back of your ’80s video store. Veteran genre producers Roy Lee and Steven Schneider took to the film so strongly that they came aboard as executive producers through their Spooky Pictures label.

Related Stories

‘Immaculate’ Filmmaker Michael Mohan Signs With Range Media Partners

CAA Signs Arlette Amuli & Bolia Matundu, Couple Behind Viral Online Dating Show ‘Pop The Balloon Or Find Love’

McConaghy and DeBoer’s 20202 directorial debut, BAB , won Best Feature at the Nightmares Film Festival. This year, McConaghy also released Sheeps Clothing , an acclaimed microbudget thriller, which he co-wrote, directed and lensed. Outside of his filmmaking career, DeBoer is the co-owner and creative director at Experience Fresh, a full-service creative agency based in St. Louis.

A 15-year-old boutique management and production company working with many of the most exciting new voices in the genre space, Aperture Entertainment’s roster includes New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix, Starry Eyes filmmakers Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kolsch, Kurtis Harder & Tesh Guttikonda ( Influencer ), Ezra Claytan Daniels (Monkeypaw’s People Under the Stairs ), Seth Fisher ( The Night Agent ), Justin Dyck & Keith Cooper ( Anything for Jackson ), Steven C. Miller (upcoming Werewolves ), and Maeve Fly author CJ Leede.

Must Read Stories

Lineup includes ‘saturday night’, ‘the piano lesson’, ‘conclave’; more.

Cuarón & Blanchett Debut ‘Disclaimer’; Press Pained By Lack Of Star Access

Barry keoghan joins ‘peaky blinders’ pic with cillian murphy & rebecca ferguson, michelle mendelovitz lawyers up after sudden exit from toymaker’s tv studio, read more about:, subscribe to deadline.

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

No Comments

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

First-Year Requirements

In addition to your UC application, we take both your academic record and your personal experiences into consideration during the review process . At UCLA, we seek students who have excelled academically and gained valuable perspective from the personal experiences that have helped shape their lives.

Read on to find out more.

The Criteria We Consider

When reviewing an application, we implement a holistic review process, which includes looking at some of the following criteria:

• Achievement in high school or college coursework
• Personal qualities
• Likely contributions to the intellectual and cultural vitality of our campus
• Achievement in academic enrichment programs
• Other achievements in any field of intellectual or creative endeavor, including the performing arts, athletics, community service, etc.

Academic Preparation

You must complete 15 A-G courses with at least 11 courses finished prior to the beginning of your last year of high school. To be competitive in the UCLA admission process, applicants should present an academic profile much stronger than any minimum UC admission requirements.  See below for a listing of the A-G requirements:

• 2 years history/social science
• 4 years of college-preparatory English
• 3 years of mathematics (4 years recommended)
• 2 years of laboratory science (3 years recommended)
• 2 years of language other than English (3 years recommended)
• 1 year of visual and performing arts (if available)
• 1 year of college-preparatory elective

Keep in mind that there is no single academic path we expect all students to follow. However, competitive applicants earn high marks in the most rigorous curriculum available to them.   Each application for admission is reviewed within the context of courses available to that student. If a particular required subject is not available, we’ll consider your application without it.

Standardized Testing (SAT/ACT)

UCLA will not consider SAT or ACT scores for admission or scholarship purposes.

If you choose to submit test scores as part of your application, they may be used as an alternative method of fulfilling minimum requirements for eligibility or for course placement after you enroll.

UCLA’s ACT number: 0448 UCLA’s College Board (SAT) number: 4837

Personal Insight Questions

These personal questions are just that — personal. This is your chance to augment the information elsewhere in your application and give us more insight into you during the review process.  Our hope is to hear your true, authentic voice in your responses.   As a first-year applicant, you may respond to four of eight questions. Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words. Which questions you choose to answer is entirely up to you. You should select questions that are most relevant to your experience and that best reflect your individual circumstances.

Frequently Asked Questions

Because we receive more applicants than we have room to accept, admitted students usually have academic achievements far higher than the minimum requirements. So, to be “competitive” is to be among the strongest achieving students to apply.

We look for students who take advantage of the academic opportunities available to them. If you have advanced courses, we encourage you to take advantage of them. The University of California adds extra weight to grades received in UC-certified honors, AP, IB and transferable college courses.

We do not require or accept letters of recommendation in our process and we do not collect transcripts at the point of application . However, once admitted, students are required to submit official transcripts f rom any high school or college they have attended . Some professional schools may request a letter of recommendation as part of their supplemental application process.

We do not offer admission interviews. Applicants are considered for admission based upon the information they submit in the UC application . However, some majors in our  specialty schools require a supplemental application as part of their admission process. Supplemental applications may involve an audition, portfolio submission and/or letters of recommendation. Find out more from the supplemental applications page.

Supplemental Applications

Of course, a strong academic performance combined with sustained, meaningful involvement in extracurricular activities is the ideal. But if it comes down to a choice between excelling in your coursework or your extracurricular activities, choose your academics.

UCLA will honor full IGETC certification from a first-year student if the requirements were completed before entering UC. Partial IGETC, however, will not be accepted from entering first-years at any UC campus and IGETC is not recommended for applicants to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.

By Vivek H. Murthy

Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general.

One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to her bone. She was rushed off to surgery. Thankfully, she’s now a healthy, spirited young girl, but the excruciating days we spent in the hospital were some of the hardest of my life. My wife, Alice, and I felt helpless and heartbroken. We got through it because of excellent medical care, understanding workplaces and loved ones who showed up and reminded us that we were not alone.

When I became a parent, a friend told me I was signing up for a lifetime of joy and worry. The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had. I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted. So many parents I encounter as I travel across America tell me they have the same experience: They feel lucky to be raising kids, but they are struggling, often in silence and alone.

The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness , workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support. That’s why I am issuing a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers and to lay out what we can do to address them.

A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.

Stress is tougher to manage when you feel you’re on your own, which is why it’s particularly concerning that so many parents, single parents most of all, report feeling lonelier than other adults . Additionally, parents are stretched for time. Compared with just a few decades ago, mothers and fathers spend more time working and more time caring for their children , leaving them less time for rest, leisure and relationships. Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.

All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do. Chasing these expectations while trying to wade through an endless stream of parenting advice has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .