The Great Seduction of the Personal Essay
The love affair that I just can't shake after nearly two decades.
College kids normally fall for things like booze and drugs. I fell in love—hard and fast—with personal essays.
There I was, sitting in those shiny back-breaking chair/desk combos, staring out the window that overlooked a campus that I hated. I’m old enough now to say that I went to college at a time when they allowed smoking on campus, so I looked out to see body parts peeking through the billowing clouds. An ear, an arm, some legs. I considered all the ways I could just disappear into the smoke.
I was young. I started college when I was 17 and I don’t think I was ready for the whole ordeal. Plus, the real kicker: my first love dumped me the first week of college. I had already spent years doodling my first name next to his last name, so, naturally, we were supposed to live happily ever after as high school sweethearts, build a perfect life, etc. etc. etc. Instead, he went to his first college party and he called to let me know that he had fallen in love with a girl named Freedom.
My life was over, or some sort of sad love song like that. It wasn’t exactly the school’s fault that I hated the campus and eventually transferred. I can still see that classroom with the green chalkboard where I started flirting with personal essays.
The professor gave us our final assignment: Polish and submit a personal essay to the Modern Love column in the New York Times.
Honestly, I can’t tell you what I wrote in that essay. Not because I don’t want to tell you, but because I genuinely can’t remember what I cobbled together nearly two decades ago. What I do remember is that my professor was very surprised that my essay wasn’t accepted. That’s when I realized that I had a knack for this, this being writing my life story.
At that point in my young life, I had never tasted a sip of alcohol. Take that to mean whatever you want it to mean. My drug of choice? Writing. I heard the whisper of the alluring personal essay…
Welcome! Come on in. Relax. Take a sip. You’re safe here. Stay for a day or a week or longer. You can dance with one essay for years and years. There’s an endless supply of layers to undress.
Here, you can tell it exactly like it is. You can hash out every raw detail of your life and spin it into whatever you want it to be. Here, you get to write the beginning, the middle, AND the glorious ending to your story. You get to decide exactly when the heartbreak started and ended. You’re in the driver’s seat. You’re in charge.
It’s your job to tell us what it all means. Or not.
Do you want to talk about it? Let it fly. Do you not want to talk about it? Great, skip that part. You get to decide how to paint every character. You get to decide how to wrap it up with a bow—or not. You weave every thread together, all the characters and conversations and scenes of your life, and you have the power to shape it exactly the way you imagine it in your mind.
No one can tell you that you’ve remembered it incorrectly or that’s not the way it went down. It’s your story to write. Imagine the possibilities.
You are the great puppeteer. You hold the reins to every lover, and you control exactly how they walk and talk and move in the world that you’ve created.
And when you’re done, when it feels complete and satisfying and otherworldly because you’ve hit the perfect note, end the scene in the exact place you want it to end.
Feel the magic of a stranger reading your story and saying, “That’s me. You wrote my story.”
For much of my life, I hid in my journals. I had no control over what happened around me, how it all unraveled.
Suddenly, sitting in Personal Essay 101, I held the keys. I could make a reader laugh or cry or yell with one single word change. I could sift through a memory and replay it 17 different ways to make it finally make sense.
And the best part, there was no one way to write the personal essay. I could tell it forwards or backwards or even sideways. I could braid together two seemingly disconnected stories in a way that blew my mind.
I could write about my life, or I could write about my life through the lens of a banana. (Spoiler alert: My obsession with creative nonfiction endured through the end of college when I was inducted into an honors literary society. My next-future-heartbreak and parents came to the ceremony to listen to a reading of my most treasured piece of work at the time. About a banana. But also, not at all about a banana. They seemed confused. They still gave me flowers.)
When I started devouring essays that broke the rules, I felt this rush of adrenaline. I’d look around the room, panting like I’d just run the New York City marathon, wondering, “Did you SEE that?!”
I still do that today whenever I read anything that
writes, and there’s no sign of stopping me anytime soon.Who doesn’t want to feel in control at 17? At 27? At 87?
Who doesn’t want to make sense of the past and turn a mess into a beautiful full-circle tapestry?
Yes, please, sign me up for that high.