It's Not the End of Anything (For Fuck's Sake)

A writing student sent the following message to me and some of her comrades this week:

I just read an article in the New Yorker about the end of the personal essay—did you all see it? And what did you think? Memoir really interests me but am I too late???http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over

If you haven't read the article, please, go ahead and skim it. I will wait.
Done?

Let me tell you what happened to me when I read it:
Reading it made me angry. Angry at the need to declare something is over. Angry at the assumption that all personal essays are alike. Angry at the conflation between sensationalization/confession versus reflection/contemplation. Not angry at my student - let me be clear - but at the industry, and the way people write about it.

Despite not finding a NYT post from a couple of years back about how memoir was over as a genre, or that boom done, I know I have read at least one other such opinion piece, and they tire me. Why do people need to stick in a fork and decide something is done? Good grief. The only thing done is time, and not even that is as done as we sometimes wish it were.

Finally, what this opinion piece does is lump together a bunch of different kinds of personal essays - crisis pieces, especially - and completely does not include very deep and powerful examples of steady, long-running people working in this genre. People who survive fashion, who are dedicated to deep exploration.

Milky Way Mammograms

Orion's Belt, Madison WI, 2010

I wanted to highlight both a student writing - still in rough form - and a passage from Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby this week.

The student writing is by a woman named Alison, who had a breast cancer scare in November. Solnit's passage is from her own breast cancer scare, and is in the first of two chapters called Breath.

How beautiful it is to use such cosmic, large scale imagery for such a small scale, intimate occurrence!  This shows one of the most powerful aspects of well-written memoir: the more personal it is, the more universal it is. In addition, Alison really brings in the personal - pears and hot cocoa - and intimate, to connect us directly, sensually, with the cosmic. One of Solnit's themes is apricots in her book, and she, too, brings "down" that cosmic imagery into the everyday magic of fruit.

I hope you enjoy these writings. They are depictions of painful experiences, rendered beautifully onto the page so we can celebrate and also feel their poignancy. Our poignancy: as human beings.

Alison's Writing

My breasts are ripe pears, freshly peeled on the monitor. Looking inside, they are space-
nebulae, the Milky Way, and a very long Orion’s Belt.