This Is a Personal Essay
A personal history with a personal genre
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As a Queer Latinx With Sexually Induced Sneeze Syndrome, Dating (and Allergy Season) Looks Different for Me
The personal essay is back, baby! Thanks in part to The Cut, friend and syndicator of ¡Hola Papi! In February, the outlet published two back-to-back pieces that made a splash on social media. One, by author and essayist Emily Gould, detailed a mental breakdown that almost led her to divorce, and another, by resident financial advice columnist Charlotte Cowles, recounted in lurid detail her experience of being scammed out of $50,000.
Group chats lit up with snippets, and writers did what writers do best: Talk about other writers. Personally, I delight in the days when everyone I know is reading the same thing—when everyone holds a slightly different opinion, there are agreements and disagreements, and the source text becomes an arena for play.
My enjoyment was dampened a bit, though, by people on social media. In Gould’s case, most critics weren’t even grappling with the text at all. Right-wingers predictably had a problem with a woman writing so salaciously about her husband and the intimacies of their marriage. But there were also those (ostensibly not of the incel persuasion) who took issue with the very idea of disclosure, with revealing private details via essay in the first place. It left me wondering if culture had shifted in regards to what we want personal essays to do, and how we respond to them.
“The CIA couldn’t waterboard this out of me” has become a popular retort on social media to confessional writing of any kind. Other go-to dismissals include “have you considered journaling?” I find these responses depressing, yet more examples of the glorification of incuriosity presently permeating digital life—Cringe. You’re weird for this. Couldn’t be me. I’m not reading all that. It’s considered cool, for some reason, to outright declare, “this is beneath me.”
And yet I can’t pretend I don’t understand why the pendulum has swung in this direction. For many years, the personal essay flourished in an uncritical environment where it fed on a steady diet of unearned plaudits—Brave. Urgent. This is so important. Thank you for this. I experienced this firsthand. I was a personal essayist at the time. I still am and, seeing as these are my wares, I’m invested in figuring out what the genre’s future holds.
Where does the personal, the confessional, the “I” fit, what does it do in current times?
I Was Traumatized by a Coyote Attack as a Baby. I Found Healing in the Furry Community
As with any medium, the personal essay has enjoyed its ups and downs: peaks and valleys that map roughly onto the form’s perceived usefulness at different times. In the early days of 2017, when the personal was more political than ever, thanks to the attendant proliferation of social media, the personal essay became a way to show one’s work on how an individual was navigating social upheaval during the Trump Administration.
It was an era defined by a fear of the amorphous other on both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, immigrants with their foreign customs and values, masked members of Antifa, agents of the deep state whose names were classified, redacted; on the left, the enigmatic Trump voter, who either lived in a remote rural enclave, or a McMansion in Florida, and was either expressing rage at a corporatist establishment that had it coming, or was a garden variety racist, depending on who you asked. Either way, they walked among us.
Regardless of where one sat, one was fed a steady stream of statistics and charts attempting to demystify the why and how of it all. Why would a Latino vote Republican? Why would a white woman prioritize her race over her gender? Why would a poor person vote for a rich person? How did we get here? How do we fix it?
There was an increased interest in demographics, in how identity informed behavior. Popular culture responded with an appetite for interiority. The personal essays of that time, whether they reckoned with Trumpism or didn’t, offered up the personal as a cipher to decode the befuddling movements of broad groups of people, boiling them down to the thoughts and experiences of an individual, “I.”
BuzzFeed’s roundup of “The Most Moving Personal Essays You Needed To Read In 2017” offers a glimpse into the digital literature that defined that period (BuzzFeed was, at one point, a major proliferator of this style of writing, but has since shuttered both BuzzFeed Reader, its more literary outfit, and BuzzFeed News).
“To Understand The Rust Belt, We Need To See Beyond Whiteness,” read one headline for an essay about growing up non-white in coal-country Pennsylvania, a swing state that had recently become the subject of media focus following the presidential election. “Does Desiring White Guys Make Me a Traitor to my Race?” asked another headline. “White Women Drive Me Crazy,” read yet another, as if in response.
Some hack by the name of John Paul Brammer, who was doubtlessly salivating all over a Word document at the prospect of transmuting his past sufferings into a byline and a pittance, was also included in the roundup for his essay, “If Public Schools Don’t Survive, Kids Like Me Won’t Either,” a condemnation of then secretary of education Betsy DeVos’ disdain for public schools and support for charter schools.
In the collective, the personal essay of 2017 (a milieu that extended to 2020) was a way to put a face to the impersonal, to name things: Who is the enemy? Who is to blame? Who should we be afraid of? Who should we listen to? Race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic class featured prominently in most of these pieces, as they were a means for placing a singular voice in tandem with a chorus. It often went unsaid, but was covertly understood: I speak for this bloc.
Helpfully, this was a time when intersectionality, a concept coined by scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, was en vogue to describe how different forms of oppression, such as sexism and colorism, intersect and compound each other. For many personal essayists (and careerists)—and please excuse my cynicism here—it was a concept that further edified the self, which was not one thing, but many things all at once, granting an individual experiencing more than one axis of marginalization an even more credible, complex self to write about. It cast past hardships, the stuff personal essays are made of, in a more compelling light. Some element of the adversity, after all, had gone uninterrogated.
Revelation was key. The author began in a state of unhappiness, dissatisfaction that stemmed from a lack of self-acceptance or external validation. Then, something happened: a face that looked like their own flashed across the TV; or someone said something cruel to them and they’d decided they’d had enough; or a relative died, but not before giving the author the key they needed to overcome their plight—an heirloom recipe, a phrase in their mother tongue, a story from their own lives. These were, at their core, stories about a downtrodden individual triumphing over a rotten society. They were energizing for marginalized people experiencing fatigue, and felt productive for cis straight white people (the piñatas in these stories) looking to feel helpful.
For all my criticisms, I’ll always hold nostalgia for that era of writing. I was new to New York, and feeling incredibly “individual.” I was starting to snag bylines, to build a career, and it felt like I was cutting my teeth in an industry I’d always wanted to be a part of. But it was also a time that showcased both the possibilities and the limitations of the form.
At their best, these pieces really were illuminating, and made good on the premise of highlighting oft-ignored perspectives on American life. The best personal essays place the author squarely in the chaotic context of their time and make sense of it all in an approachable, honest, intimate fashion. This much hasn’t changed over the centuries
For young writers who didn’t have family connections or a fat inheritance, the genre was an open door, a way to draw attention to your voice. Often married to trendy progressive politics, the personal essay was for a subset of “cool,” burgeoning writers a way to introduce themselves to the industry. Outlets like the aforementioned BuzzFeed, as well as sites like Mic, Teen Vogue, and Them, published newcomers, green writers who were just getting their feet under them.
But at their worst (the more common variety), these essays were hectoring, self-indulgent, saccharine shortcuts to pathos. Let’s not pretend that many personal essayists didn’t know exactly what they were doing. It was a time when the self was sacred and unimpeachable. When “lived experience” was good as gold, or at least worth $300. It was the perfect environment for middling talents seeking little more than a blue verification check on Twitter (RIP to that whole thing) and applause from people who didn’t really read the piece, but nonetheless would reliably call it “important” or “necessary.” You could really make a name for yourself back then with self-righteous bitching.
It’s also telling that criticism of the genre rarely strayed farther than “the writers are being used for their trauma,” itself a very personal-essay-ish narrative placing the author squarely in the role of the victim, denying them any agency in the process.
Yes, there were many things that irked me about the “important” personal essays of that time, some of which I wrote. But nevertheless, I do find myself missing it on occasion. Our current era is one in which the personal has failed, and there’s ambient skepticism around the project of identity as a useful ideological framework. The pandemic saw the personal become a sort of villain or liability—most people were sick of their own reflection within the first few weeks, and personal decisions were sorted into a simple binary of “righteous” or “selfish.” Your actions as an individual, it turns out, affect the community, and the health of the community comes first.
2020 also saw a bubbling over of frustrations relating to racialized violence, particularly in terms of policing of Black people. Social media feeds were awash with videos of public executions, police beating and arresting people, and while I wouldn’t dismiss anyone’s pain, personal essays did tend to gravitate toward smaller, more mundane experiences with systems of oppression (Vox’s explainer for microaggressions, which essentially describe minor moments of insensitivity, went up in 2015).
The scale and scope of the brutality, its bluntness, its utter lack of nuance, rendered many of the subjects that personal essays thrive on a bit twee by comparison. Personal essays excel at making you take a second look at something and seeing it in a new light. The author impresses upon the reader a canniness for subtext and synthesis. There’s a certain alchemy in taking a popular noodle dish, or a yoga class, or an expensive new coat, and turning it into commentary on grief, or liberation, or class anxiety. There was little room for such things, however, in the direness of those days.
What’s more, in the intervening years following 2020, we became privy to just how adept corporations, politicians, and grifters were at aestheticizing protest into something that gelled just fine with the general capitalist project. To see the trappings of identity politics reappropriated so easily in the service of the very system that gave rise to the school of thought in the first place no doubt left many questioning the premise of the whole idea. It’s worth mentioning that worship of the individual—the fascinating, unique, singular self—is very American, in its way, and Americanism was, justifiably, in its flop era.
Finally, in the Trump years when progressive personal essays thrived, there was an available underdog narrative that lent the pieces an air of urgency and legitimacy. There was a freakin’ Cheeto in the White House, as they say. It’s not like these essays were screaming “Vote!” But when Trump was voted out, and Biden voted in, and many of the horrors continued apace, or even intensified, it took the wind out of the sails for a certain brand of online politics that once garnered easy engagement. Used to be, one could add “oh, and abolish ICE” to a tweet about stanning Carly Rae Jepsen and do serious numbers. On X, under the Biden Administration, where ICE is alive and well? Not so much.
It’s not all bad news. I have my own criticisms of identity politics, and of the essentialism it so often retreats into. I have seen some of my peers shrewdly accrue soft capital by linking themselves with the material suffering of communities they only associate with on a cosmetic level. Sometimes I think, good, the evil baby needed to go out with the bathwater.
And yet…
I Found Chicana Joy in Selena Quintanilla’s Music. Even Though Yolanda Saldívar Was My Cousin
I write about myself. Why this is my preference, I’m not totally sure. Perhaps it’s that, for me, a good writer is someone who notices things. I’m most impressed by writers who call attention to the quotidian—private judgments about fashion trends, subtle shifts in manner of speech with strangers, the stealthy rise of a certain food item’s ubiquity—things I recognize in my daily life, but haven’t thought twice about. I admire writers who crack open mundane, unassuming moments to reveal their golden yolks. That’s something I aspire to in my work.
Within the nearly limitless possibilities of writing, I don’t really want to be an early colonist on Mars or a teenager with psychic abilities or a swoopy-haired twink caught up in a lurid affair with his married, heteroflexible English professor who admires him in a Hellenistic way. I want to be a person who notices things. Writing about myself, I suppose, is when I feel closest to that.
It could also be that writing about myself is just what I know. My writing career began in high school. There was this teacher, we called him Doc, because he had a PhD, which was unusual in a school with such low test scores that it risked losing accreditation. Doc took an interest in me. He entered me in statewide, then national essay contests, which I started winning, giving me my first real taste of validation. Validate a teenager one time, and you run the risk of defining a good chunk of the rest of their lives.
In any case, the prompts for these essays were almost exclusively personal in nature: Write about a time in your life when you were brave. Write about a moment when you realized you were different. Write about an experience that changed the way you see the world. I became adept at reading between the lines of these prompts. I realized very quickly that the organizations behind these contests, like most people walking this earth, didn’t give a fig about my experiences. They cared about how expertly I could use those experiences as vehicles for their agendas.
It was incredibly unlikely, for example, that the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, an organization dedicated to the victims of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, wanted to hear about how much one missed one’s deceased grandmother’s cooking, unless she was in the Murray Federal Building the morning of the attack or had dated Timothy McVeigh. The prompt for that essay contest, which I won, was an Abraham Lincoln quote: “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” We were to write about a time in our lives when we witnessed courage in action.
I trawled my memories. I remembered visiting the memorial as a kid on a field trip back when I was in Catholic school. All of us, Sister Teolinda included, were ushered into a small room where we took our seats. The lights were cut, and actual audio of the bombing was played, starting with ho-hum court proceedings from across the street, a judge speaking in a lazy Okie accent, that was quickly succeeded by a deafening explosion and blood-curdling screams. The lights flickered as the blank wall before us lit up with photographs of the victims when they were alive.
“My goodness,” Sister Teolinda muttered as multiple fourth-graders, myself included, cried and covered our ears.
This experience didn’t give me much material to work with (I had exercised zero courage in the museum). I had, however, seen the Survivor Tree out front, an American elm that had survived the blast and become a symbol of resilience. A lightbulb went off. There was an actual tree to write about in response to a prompt that also featured a tree. I would compare myself, the first responders, and the people of Oklahoma to this tree, to this living thing that had endured something terrible, but continued to grow.
The prize for this contest was fat. In addition to one thousand dollars, which was quite a lot for a 10th grader, the winner and one parent were flown to D.C. to attend an OKC Hornets basketball game (they were not yet the Thunder), go on a tour of all the monuments and museums, eat several expensive meals and, later, be honored once again at another basketball game in Oklahoma City, where we were brought out on the court, our faces displayed on the jumbotron.
I learned a lot in my time as a high school essayist, but perhaps no lesson was more important than this: I discovered that the self was made of wet, elastic clay, able to take on many different shapes and forms, and that there were rewards to be had for those who could style it in a way that was pleasing to others. I learned that, in personal writing, as is the case in fiction, people primarily show up to see themselves.
I Lived My Whole Life Thinking You Couldn’t Talk to a Horse. Then I Met the Famous Mr. Ed
To me, it’s fascinating that I see 2017 as the peak of the personal essay, a time when you could really come up on the scene by working within the genre, and yet one of the great contemporary contributors to the form was, at the same time, declaring it dead. In May of that year, Jia Tolentino, for The New Yorker, wrote that “the personal essay boom is over.”
“Put simply, the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,” Tolentino wrote, in a mirror opposite to what I felt to be true at that very time. “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.”
In her piece, Tolentino associates personal essays with an era of writing I’m familiar with, but barely got to participate in, writing that defined 2010 through 2015. This period was dominated by Thought Catalog, xoJane, and The Odyssey, which published such seminal classics as “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina” and “You May Have Worn The Prom Dress With Him, But I Get To Wear The Wedding Dress.”
I regularly cite the latter, published in and then wiped from The Odyssey, as one of my favorite pieces of all time. It’s a nasty, vindictive little thing in which the author takes aim at her fiancé’s high school girlfriend, reminding her that she may have gotten to dance with him for one night, but she means nothing to him now. If there was such a thing as a Personal Essay Museum, I would display this one prominently in the foyer, as a science museum might have a complete T-Rex skeleton. Isn’t that the bones of the thing, laid bare?
The personal essay, like any kind of writing, is a mere vehicle. If you want, it can be little more than a blunt object with which to beat your readers over the head about how great you are, about how your enemies are worthy of contempt. Sometimes, though, in reading my own work, and in reading the work of my peers, I wonder, I worry if that’s all any of it is, if it’s all the wedding dress piece in the The Odyssey, and there are just those who are better at dressing it up than others, who have learned how to get away with singing the song of the self by making it sound so, so beautiful.
As for how Tolentino, a writer whose work I admire, could have come away with such a wildly different reading of the zeitgeist, I suppose it comes down to us having different lived experiences.
I Used to Be Homophobic. Now I’m Gay
When we praise personal writing, we often pat the author on the back for “owning their story.” I have an essay collection filled with stories from my life, and I still regularly write about myself, and so I’ve heard much about “owning my story”, and hearing it always feels uncomfortable. Because I know better.
The truth is, stories, like the self, can shift and adapt. They can take on any number of forms, depending on their environment. The author reflects the time they live in. The author is a keen observer. The author reads between the lines, picks up on subtle shifts in culture, and whether the author chooses to break the rules or dutifully adhere to them they are at least aware of them. The author, a sensitive creature, may not even be aware of this, might absorb it through osmosis, by living, by watching. The author is clever, a little evil.
I can abide by the idea that I’m doing something valuable, something interesting, something worthwhile, but not that I’m doing something brave. I’m scratching an itch. Morality is a tertiary concern. Nor am I really trying to own my story. If anything, it’s the other way around.
Invariably, bad personal writing is self-edifying, while good personal writing is self-destructive. Bad personal writing is indulgent, needy, whiny. Many personal essays have little more to say than “check out this cool, interesting thing happened to me, the coolest, most interesting person alive,” or “my trauma is bad, but also sexy, in a way,” or “why would this happen to me, a delicate newborn foal wobbling so blamelessly through life?”
Bad personal writing is most interested in rendering the subject, the self, as uniquely precious. Hallmarks of bad personal writing include humblebrags. There is often a lot of sex, descriptions of strangers’ carnal desires for the author, who is a receptacle of unwanted affections, as well as cartoonish acts of cruelty from whatever group is responsible for all the world’s ills at the time.
Personal writing, at its best, is not an exercise in self-portraiture. It’s the evil opposite of that. It’s ripping yourself open and hosting an open house in your corpse. My favorite personal essays are candid about mistakes and personal failings without insisting on self-awareness every few sentences. It’s delusional to believe anyone should care about what you have to say at all, and so I like a healthy dose of delusion in these pieces.
I find it relatable.
Your fake clickbait headlines made me laugh out loud, especially coyote/furry. As someone who put myself through college by winning right-wing essay contests, I admire your ability to read the room at a young age.
Thought Catalog was my jam during college (early 2010s) and without some of those personal essays and the forum to host them, I would have not known there were others out there dealing with similar things to me. Just knowing that made it easier.