(Note: I updated this post to reflect the fact that Leslie Jamison’s new book Splinters is a memoir-in-fragments and not an essay collection).
Back in 2017, New Yorker critic Jia Tolentino announced the the “personal-essay boom” of the 2010s was over.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate that what Tolentino and others meant when they wrote about this particular “boom”…partly because essays have been around since Montaigne and were never, at least by any historical standard, all that popular.
(Also: When I heard “personal essay” I thought of Didion, Baldwin, Orwell, Alice Walker, or Cheryl Strayed—in other words, literary essayists).
But here Tolentino was talking about a very particular kind of writing—first-person pieces that were deeply confessional, ones that prized self-exposure but not always the more rewarding pleasure of self-awareness.
For Tolentino, these were “essays [that] 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.”
These were also essays that appeared almost exclusively online; they were highly popular with editors not because of any fealty to the form, but because they were cheaper to commission than reported pieces, and because the warm waters of the confessional essay supercharged the hurricane-force gusts of Internet outrage.
In other words…you could thank good old-fashioned capitalism for this boomlet.
As for their supposed demise?
Tolentino argued that the early Trump years had shifted political and cultural concerns away from the topics most of found in these essays…though it’s worth noting many of these personal essays dealt with sexual assault—a topic that very much became political in the wake of #metoo.
More likely, if such essays disappeared, it’s because the places they appeared in—websites like Jezebel, xo Jane, Vox First Person, Buzzfeed, and Gawker—are ones which, thanks to the ongoing decimation of every sort of magazine and newspaper, no longer exist. (Capitalism again, cough, cough).
Then, too, it feels important to point out that it was all too easy to dismiss confessional essays precisely because they were written by women or other marginalized writers—groups all too often criticized for believing in the power of their personal stories.
Or as
wrote at the time in Salon:While Tolentino claims that the internet made the personal essay worse, she ignores the ways that the internet has empowered women to share stories on a far greater scale than ever before.
Either way, as with Mark Twain, rumors of its death may be greatly exaggerated.
For one thing, “death of the essay” stories are nothing new, with writers popping up every few years—probably going back to Montaigne—to complain about the great decline of essayists.
Don’t believe me? Here is Virginia Woolf grumbling in 1905 about the sorry state of her contemporaries:
There are, of course, certain distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought. 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.
And just this past month it’s felt as if confession essays are everywhere you look.
First there was the publication of Leslie Jamison’s memoir-in-fragments Splinters, the first book in which she’s eschewed her trademark “essayistic pivots between criticism and reportage” for more strictly personal, close-to-the-body writing.
Not only has there been there wall-to-wall coverage of Jamison herself, but essay-like excerpts from Splinters have appeared in lots of places.
Then there was Emily Gould’s powerful, unapologetic “The Lure of Divorce,” a Cut essay that chronicled Gould’s struggle with bipolar disorder and a resulting stay in psychiatric care. But Gould was also strikingly honest about her misguided actions, from the resentment at her husband’s “bigger” writing career to the fact she launched a GoFundMe to divorce him while in treatment (!)
In her transparency around her complicated, contradictory self, Gould joined a long line of brilliant, “messy,” and deeply confessional women—Elizabeth Wurtzel, Lucy Grealy, Joyce Maynard, even Sylvia Plath spring to mind—who have raised close readings of the self to an art form.
The fact the piece generated so much outraged commentary—much of it aimed at Gould’s behavior, rather than a breathtakingly-crafted essay—suggests that the critics are back; and with them a new wave of confessional essays.
Perhaps neither went away in the first place.
great essay.
Loved this. My first published pieces were on “xojane.” Not a prestigious site, but one that resonated as being open and relatable to people in pain.