In Defense of the Personal Essay

"If everyone’s a critic, no one’s out there living."

Untitled, Mina Jarrett

Everett Yum is a 20-year-old junior at Yale University majoring in Comparative Literature. He writes Fifty-Fifty.

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I read Joan Didion’s The White Album in an airport terminal and several months later began writing an essay on the gossip around college decisions. Didion made me want to write essays. She does this to a lot of people. “There is nothing more Basic MFA Bitch than saying Didion changed your life,” writes Meghan Daum. I wanted to write because I wanted to uncover the truth, about myself, about others, about the world, to leave it bare the way Didion did with her dagger-like prose. I wanted to see the way she saw. I wanted to live through her writing.

I chose to write about college gossip because I was in my senior year of high school, it was on everyone’s minds, and Yale had just accepted me early. The topic was ripe. The school paper picked up my pitch, and I produced a verbose, baroque, and crudely Didion-esque piece on how college gossip was actually a good thing (it is not). “On December 16th, our ceremony of innocence drowned,” I start the piece. “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn, NYU, Cornell, Columbia, and Georgetown released their admissions decisions the night before, and many seniors relinquished any extant belief in the sacred and unbroachable — certainly in fairness.”

Really, I was trying to express a number of things between the lines: I felt anxious about my popularity, I lacked purpose after getting into college, I had a crush on someone who didn’t like me back. My angst didn’t directly make it onto the page, but rather I implicitly sought some form of love and approval without rendering myself truly vulnerable. I sought attention and a space for confession; I sought attention through confession.

Really, what reading Didion allowed was self-obsession, the ability to view life in terms that felt sufficiently intellectual and serious and cool without any genuinely rigorous introspection. This is the basic-MFA-bitch instinct, what Didion does to many writers, particularly young writers — especially college-aged writers who discover her in class. My friend Bella, after I asked her what made Didion such a revelation in the essay-writing courses we’ve taken at Yale, texted me: “I think for a lot of young people it’s the first time they read someone who’s able to vocalize some more complex thoughts about how the self fits into the world without using language that bars most people from understanding.” Because Didion’s prose is so deceptively simple, it seems accessible as a mode of self-expression.

Yale’s undergraduate writing scene — composed of the daily student paper and five or so literary magazines — is rife with unrigorous personal essays. We have the Yale Daily News’s “WKND” section, which publishes dozens of personal essays every month, and The Yale Herald’s “Reflections” section, which churns out another two or so a week. There are plenty of interesting, well-wrought essays published in these venues, but it’s an informal joke to say WKND or Reflections will publish anything the way a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. You can sum them up in brief phrases: “How Halloween taught me to love my body” or “How a middle school science project made me a feminist” — essays of a kitsch, superficial, college-application-essay-esque nature. I know because I was one of those writers: “How Thanksgiving and Christmas reveal the inexorable passage of time” was the gist of one of my Herald reflections.

Substack has recently been railing against personal and confessional essays. Last month, this publication published a piece by Owen Yingling called “Against the Confessional Essay” in which Yingling argues the recent wave of personal essays, especially on Substack, fail to artfully portray the self and put the author at the risk of social embarrassment. But even though I’m tempted to condemn these essays into an even deeper hell, I won’t. We should embrace personal essays because they can cut through our self-obsessions, and turning away from them can lead us into false senses of authority and seriousness.

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Philip Lopate, in the introduction to his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, writes:

The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue — a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship. At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.

The personal essay, according to Lopate, is able to bring the reader and writer close together, and, through that connection, the writer unveils something universal about being human for the reader. Lopate goes on to put forth a vision of the classical essayist, one who constantly self-doubts and speaks with levity and cheek. The personal essayist reflects and arranges the disorganized experience of living into something legible and complete.

“There is something heroic,” Lopate writes, “in the essayist’s gesture of striking out toward the unknown, not only without a map but without certainty that there is anything worthy to be found.” Here lies the true power of the form: by straying from the absolute, the personal essay can dismantle self-delusions and self-aggrandizements and uncover complex truths about human existence.

However, Lopate believes the personal essayist must have lived long enough to look back on the past with a sufficient resignation to the facts of life. “It is hard to think of anyone who made a mark on the personal essay form in his or her youth,” he writes. “It is difficult to write analytically from the middle of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out…The personal essayist looks back at the choices that were made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of personality.”

Basically, according to Lopate, a young person can’t write a good personal essay. I first read this introduction in an essay-writing class, and my professor reassured us that us college students could write something meaningful. For that class, I produced a mediocre essay about cross-country running that was later rejected by a campus literary magazine, and I thought of Lopate and how I would need to wait a couple of decades before I could write something worthy.

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In Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, the Danish prince watches an actor perform a soliloquy as Priam, the tragic mythical king of Troy. Hamlet later remarks to himself:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
…
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.577-80, 586-593)

Hamlet imagines his internal passions and sorrows executed by a masterly actor, how stunning and affecting his soul would be if it were articulated with enough art. It is this same effect of acting that Lopate hopes is evoked for the reader of a personal essay: feeling one’s life articulated through the artful representation of another’s. But Hamlet sees this performance, and then goes on to construct an elaborate madness to torment Ophelia and chastise his mother, in the process killing Polonius and driving Ophelia to suicide. He was already acting insane before this moment, but the player’s performance inspires him to an even greater insanity. Hamlet uses this performance as a license for an ultimately disastrous project of self-obsession, not unlike the young people (including myself) who read Didion and begin to hyperbolize their woes. Young people, insecure and overwhelmed by the prospects of the future, naturally place their lives on a gilded pedestal. The young person’s personal essay (in Hamlet’s case, his essay — his “trying” — is his performance of madness), in the most uncharitable view, serves to self-define and self-indulge. Lopate’s criticism that the young can’t write a personal essay, however harsh, is so demonstrated: only at a certain age does someone become so disaffected that they can finally claw a nugget of profundity out of the rubble of their ego.

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I’m not doing a good job defending the personal essay so far. But writers have been raising other problems with the personal essay. Yingling, in his criticism, raises the 2010s era of fourth-wave feminist, trauma-pornographic personal essays. He refers to Jia Tolentino, who chronicles the era in her 2017 New Yorker piece “The Personal Essay Boom is Over.” “These essays were mostly written by women,” Tolentino writes. “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.”

Yingling identifies the roots of the current boom of Substack personal essays in that tawdry and lurid era of personal writing. He says these present-day essays run the same risk of publicly embarrassing the author while eschewing the “broader justification” of political commentary (i.e. 2010s feminism) “that made these pieces artistically defensible.” He writes:

Left unrestrained in pursuit of simulated intimacy, the confessional essay flees from both the category of art and the act of writing itself. This is grounds, in my view, for us to remove its purest form from being considered an artistically valuable sort of writing. These pieces can only be art in spite of themselves.

Audrey Lee, in a Substack criticism titled “You Might Be Writing About Yourself Too Much,” also refers to that 2010s era and the Tolentino article, and then decries confession in writing because it lends itself to self-victimization. She argues for writing “externally” — that is, framing one’s life within the context of greater themes. As it happens, she praises Didion’s ability to write this way:

[Didion’s] writing aims to something much larger than herself, like how she might pray to a higher power. Writing about grief is about grief. Writing about Los Angeles is about Los Angeles. Instead of writing inwards, Didion fits herself into these larger narratives to outwardly address them.

Lee nails it: we should write away from the instinct of self-obsession. But I’m wary of the impetus of magnifying the self to the order of societal issues in order to legitimize the personal essay. When Yingling says politics made the 2010s essays “artistically defensible,” he implicitly suggests social commentary uniquely qualifies artfulness.

In fact, the genres of social commentary and cultural criticism dominate Substack right now: “It’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend these days,” or “Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter are destroying democracy,” or “Minimalism is for virgins,” or “We should stop writing essays about boyfriends and Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter and minimalism.” These pieces present themselves as cheeky with undeniable personal voices to them, while at the same time legitimizing themselves by anchoring on a social or cultural issue. Researching for this piece, I found it difficult to find examples of the strictly personal confessional essays Yingling and Lee criticize.

Instead, I mostly encountered these first-person, personal essay-criticism hybrids with trite takes masked with flowery and sometimes-clever language. Yingling and Lee implore writers to distance themselves from their writing in order to write effective personal essays. But what I observe right now is too much distance: Substack writers, through writing these pseudo-criticisms, get to assume a position of authority, which is then validated as “serious” and “legitimate” since it’s nestled within a trendy societal topic, while at the same time completely shielding themselves from vulnerability. They write with the certainty of relevance and importance.

But they also shield themselves from artfulness, which is about craft and honest reflection, not truly politics and self-seriousness. Freddie deBoer, in his Substack post tracking essay trends from the 2010s to the 2020s, identifies “self-defensive meta-awareness” and “rhetorical detachment” as a dominant trend in present-day essay writing. Writers today choose to inure themselves to any potential criticisms and efface themselves from their writing to appear cool and put-together, even though vulnerability is a necessary part of the personal essay. How else can we challenge ourselves? How else can we make our individual experiences legible? It’s not lost on me that Tolentino ends her eulogy of the personal essay boom as follows: “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.”

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The writer Leslie Jamison ends a roughly 9,000-word essay with these lines: “I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.” Spanning fiction, poetry, film, cultural criticism, philosophy, and, crucially, personal experience, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” ends on those basic notes. Jamison’s thesis throughout the piece is similarly simple: however much female pain gets fetishized and exhausted, it’s still real, felt pain. Though Jamison readily admits her instinct to discount and disdain these traumas, both her own and others’ — “I’m tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it,” she writes — she knows the appeal of indulging in one’s own wounds but also identifies greater risks of steeling oneself from emotions in order to self-authorize. “I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it,” she concludes. “Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain.”

What I think Jamison in part responds to with this 2014 essay are the aforementioned gushing, self-centered, trauma-based personal essays of the 2010s. Specifically, she’s responding to the vitriol levied against the writers who are told to stop oversharing about their lives — to “plug it up,” as Jamison quotes Stephen King’s Carrie. Their essays don’t deserve hate or skepticism but empathy. Without indulging them, Jamison validates their pain, because it’s real pain.

This essay resonates every time I read it. I do feel my heart opened, which sounds sentimental and cliché, but I think that’s the point. I really do feel it, and it releases me from any inclination towards hesitation or shame.

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In regards to that essay on college gossip I wrote for my school paper: the paper’s faculty advisor read it and reportedly did not like it. When I heard, I crumbled. My ego really was that fragile: just one hearsay criticism made my writing feel worthless. I urged the three student editors-in-chief to pull the piece. They published it anyway, and I avoided reading it, as if it were radioactive, for months, maybe even a year.

I wrote about it for my very first Substack post this past June, calling out its mistakes and reflecting on how much I’ve improved as a writer since then. But shortly after publishing that Substack piece, my high school English teacher emailed me about it: “I’m glad to see you growing as a writer, although I will mount a defense for the pre-Yale Everett. There was something delightfully messy about your gossip essay. Your great risk now is ivy knowingness, so a little messiness might actually let a little air in.”

I’ve done many embarrassing things besides writing the gossip essay, and I’ll do many more, and I’m not going to say I’ve gotten past all that. My embarrassing moments still plague me. But they pass, and life turns out fine, and they remind me I’m not perfect, which is easy to say but harder to accept.

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While Lopate provides a clear model on what the personal essay can look like and achieve, I don’t believe we young people need to wait to write something worthy. Personal essays inherently expose pitfalls for narcissism and emotional indulgence, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the form. It certainly doesn’t mean we should seek out other forms, like pseudo-personal criticism and social commentary, which provide artificial legitimacy that only abets self-obsession. If everyone’s a critic, no one’s out there living.

In a 2009 interview at the Kelly Writers House, Joan Didion said: “If you go below the surface, you get it wrong. If you get the surface right, it tells you the rest.” She’s talking about literary surface, how merely describing the surface of things can be more faithful to reality than any attempted explicit analysis of what’s under the surface. In a separate essay, “Why I Write,” Didion recalls how in college she couldn’t deal in the world of ideas and could only operate within images — in particular, images that had a “shimmer.” “Certain images do shimmer for me,” she writes. “Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet.”

I think this imagistic, descriptive kind of writing can serve, and even save, the personal essays of young people. Our self-delusions and indulgences emerge when we try to actively make sense of ourselves, particularly without the retrospection age provides. Remaining at the surface holds our lives to the rigor of basic fact, preventing us from embellishing or obfuscating or omitting. We tell it as we saw it, and we can’t get it wrong.

In the end I return to Didion, because of course I do, I always will. Whenever I read her writing now, she seems like an entirely different author than the one I read in that airport terminal during my junior year of high school. She’s so much more grounded and emotional than I remembered, but, of course, she wasn’t the one who changed.