the personal essay is dead

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over

By Jia Tolentino

There’s a certain kind of personal essay that, for a long time, everybody seemed to hate. These essays 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. The essays that drew the most attention tended to fall within certain categories. There were the one-off body-horror pieces, such as “ My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina ,” published by xoJane, or a notorious  lost-tampon chronicle  published by Jezebel. There were essays that incited outrage for the life styles they described, like the one about pretending to live  in the Victorian era , or  Cat Marnell’s oeuvre . There were those that incited outrage by giving voice to horrible, uncharitable thoughts, like “ My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing ” (xoJane again) and “ I’m Not Going to Pretend I’m Poor to Be Accepted by You ” (Thought Catalog). Finally, there were those essays that directed outrage at society by describing incidents of sexism, abuse, or rape.

These essays began to proliferate several years ago—precisely when is hard to say, but we can, I think, date the beginning of the boom to 2008, the year that Emily Gould wrote a first-person cover story, called “ Exposed ,” for the Times Magazine , which was about, as the tagline put it, what she gained and lost from writing about her intimate life on the Web. Blowback followed, and so did an endless supply of imitations. By September, 2015, online first-person writing was so abundant that Laura Bennett, at Slate, could refer to a “ first-person industrial complex ” in a takedown of the genre. “Every site seems to have a first person vertical and a first-person editor,” Bennett, who also cited Gould’s Times story as a turning point, wrote. One could “take a safari” through various personal-essay habitats—Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas—and conclude that they were more or less the same, she argued. While she granted that not all first-person writing on the Internet was undignified, there were far too many “solo acts of sensational disclosure” that read like “reverse-engineered headlines.”

The market, in Bennett’s view, had overinflated. She was right: a year and a half later, it barely exists. BuzzFeed Ideas shut down at the end of 2015, Gawker and xoJane in 2016; Salon no longer has a personal-essays editor. Jezebel, where I used to work, doesn’t run personal essays at its former frequency—its editor-in-chief, Emma Carmichael, told me that she scarcely receives pitches for them anymore. Indie sites known for cultivating first-person writing—the Toast, the Awl, the Hairpin—have  shut down  or  changed direction . Thought Catalog chugs along, but it seems to have lost its ability to rile up outside readers. Of course, The New Yorker and other magazines continue to publish memoir of various kinds. Just this week, The Atlantic published a first-person cover story by Alex Tizon, with the provocative headline “ My Family’s Slave .” But there’s a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay, written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers. The change has happened quietly, but it’s a big one: a genre that partially defined the last decade of the Internet has essentially disappeared.

What happened? To answer that, it helps to consider what gave rise to the personal essay’s ubiquity in the first place. Around 2008, several factors converged. In preceding years, private blogs and social platforms—LiveJournal, Blogspot, Facebook—trained people to write about their personal lives at length and in public. As Silvia Killingsworth, who was previously the managing editor of The New Yorker and took over the Awl and the Hairpin last year, put it to me, “People love to talk about themselves, and they were given a platform and no rules.” Then the invisible hand of the page-view economy gave them a push: Web sites generated ad revenue in direct proportion to how many “eyeballs” could be attracted to their offerings, and editorial budgets had contracted in the wake of the recession. The forms that became increasingly common—flashy personal essays, op-eds, and news aggregation—were those that could attract viral audiences on the cheap.

Sarah Hepola, who worked as Salon’s personal-essay editor, described the situation to me in an e-mail. “The boom in personal essays—at Salon, at least, but I suspect other places—was in part a response to an online climate where more content was needed at the exact moment budgets were being slashed.” When I worked as an editor at the Hairpin and Jezebel, from 2013 to 2016, I saw up close how friendly editors and ready audiences could implicitly encourage writers to submit these pieces in droves. For the first two years that I edited personal essays, I received at least a hundred first-person pitches and pieces each week.

But an ad-based publishing model built around maximizing page views quickly and cheaply creates uncomfortable incentives for writers, editors, and readers alike. Attention flows naturally to the outrageous, the harrowing, the intimate, and the recognizable, and the online personal essay began to harden into a form defined by identity and adversity—not in spite of how tricky it is to negotiate those matters in front of a crowd but precisely because of that fact. The commodification of personal experience was also women’s territory: the small budgets of popular women-focussed Web sites, and the rapidly changing conventions and constrictions surrounding women’s lives,  insured it . And so many women wrote about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and received not much in return. Most sites paid a few hundred dollars for such pieces at most; xoJane paid fifty dollars. When I began writing on the Internet, I wrote personal essays for free.

For some writers, these essays led to better-paying work. But for many the thrill of reaching an audience had to suffice. And placing a delicate part of your life in the hands of strangers didn’t always turn out to be so thrilling. Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame. Bennett pegged her Slate piece to an essay that Carmichael and I edited at Jezebel, written by a woman who had met her father for the first time as a teen-ager and engaged, under emotional coercion, in a brief sexual relationship with him. Bennett deemed the personal-essay economy a “dangerous force for the people who participate in it.”

By that point, writers, editors, and readers had become suspicious of one another, and the factors that produced the personal-essay boom had started to give way. Some of the online publishers that survive have shifted to video and sponsored posts and Facebook partnerships to shore up revenue. Aggregation and op-eds— the infamous, abundant takes —continue to thrive, although the takes have perhaps cooled a bit. Personal essays have evidently been deemed not worth the trouble. Even those of us who like the genre aren’t generally mourning its sudden disappearance from the mainstream of the Internet. “First-person writing should not be cheap, and it should not be written or edited quickly,” Gould wrote to me. “And it should be published in a way that protects writers rather than hanging them out to dry on the most-emailed list.”

There are still a few outlets that cultivate a more subtle and sober iteration of this kind of first-person writing, some of them connected to book publishing. There’s  Hazlitt , launched by Random House Canada, and  Lenny Letter , which now has a publishing imprint, and  Catapult , which describes itself as a book publisher with a daily online magazine. (The managing editor of Catapult is Nicole Chung, who previously worked for the Toast.) But the genre’s biggest migration has been to TinyLetter, an e-mail newsletter platform. Gould, who writes a newsletter called Can’t Complain, suggested that TinyLetters are doing what personal blogs did fifteen years ago: allowing writers to work on their own terms and reach “small readerships in an intimate, private-feeling, still public enough way.” Carrie Frye, formerly the managing editor of the Awl, also has a TinyLetter. She told me that it seemed like “writers—particularly female writers—had said, ‘O.K., I’m going to make an Internet on which my essays go out in pneumatic tubes to just who I want them to go to, and no one else.’ ”

It’s clear, in any case, that the personal-essay boom is over. If it had already peaked by the time Bennett wrote about it, in the fall of 2015, we can locate its hard endpoint about a year later, in November of last year. After the Presidential election, many favored personal-essay subjects—relationships, self-image, intimate struggle—seemed to hit a new low in broader social relevance. “I feel like the 2016 election was a reckoning for journalism,” Hepola wrote to me. “We missed the story. Part of why we missed it might have been this over-reliance on ‘how I  feel  about the day’s news’—and now the journalism world recognizes that we need to re-invest in reporting.” Killingsworth echoed this, talking about her work at the Awl and the Hairpin: “I want to encourage people to talk about mostly anything other than themselves.”

There’s been a broader shift in attitudes about this sort of writing, which always endured plenty of vitriol. Put simply, the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was. 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. Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject. (Even Tizon’s piece, which was published posthumously and uses his damning closeness to his subject as a way to elucidate the otherwise invisible captivities of the Filipino katulong servant class, prompted an immediate backlash —which then prompted a backlash to the backlash, mainly among those who think Western readers have misunderstood Tizon’s understanding of his own position.) Writers seem less interested in mustering their own centrality than they were, and readers seem less excited at the prospect of being irritated by individual civilian personalities. “The political landscape has been so phantasmagoric that even the most sensationally interesting personal essays have lost some currency when not tied head-on to the news,” Bennett said in an e-mail. “There just hasn’t been much oxygen left for the kinds of essays that feel marginal or navel-gazey.” These days, she tends to see pitches “that center on systemic rather than personal trauma,” she added, “or on orienting personal trauma in our berserk new reality.”

No more lost-tampon essays, in other words, in the age of Donald Trump. And yet I find myself missing aspects of the personal-essay Internet that the flashiest examples tended to obscure. I still think of the form as a valuable on-ramp, an immediate and vivid indication of a writer’s instincts—one that is accessible to first-time writers and young people who haven’t developed experience or connections. 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.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Naomi Fry

By Kyle Chayka

Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

The Personal Essay Isn’t Dead. It’s Just No Longer White

Recent criticism of the form's faults says more about the genre's historical whiteness than it does the talent of its new stars.

T he reports of the death of the personal essay continue to be greatly exaggerated. In 1905, a mere three centuries after Michel de Montaigne gave the essay its name, Virginia Woolf lamented its decline in “The Decay of Essay-Writing.” “There are, of course, distinguished people who use this medium from genuine inspiration because it best embodies the soul of their thought,” she wrote. “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.” The essay exists on a precipice, in other words. It leans only on the author’s experience and can be easily felled by a lack of rigour.

One hundred and twelve years after Woolf, the death of the personal essay was pronounced once again, this time by Jia Tolentino in a widely read piece in The New Yorker . Aligning with Slate ’s Laura Bennett, who wrote in 2015 of the “first-person industrial complex,” Tolentino accused the genre of trafficking in empty, sensational confession that lacked self-awareness or longevity. More recently (and more specifically), in the Boston Review , Merve Emre, an assistant professor in literature at McGill University, referenced Tolentino while eviscerating Indian Canadian author Durga Chew-Bose’s lyrical essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood for “peacocking” but saying nothing. Within the same review, she praised the cool precision of Mary Gaitskill and Deborah Nelson, two authors who happen to be white.

What Emre herself referred to as “the idle chirping of social media” flew not-so-idly her way with a pile of praise—even I congratulated her for voicing what I could not, for decoding a lack of profundity I had hitherto suspected but failed to parse, concluding I was simply too stupid to understand. This may have been one of the reasons few had openly criticized this kind of precious prose in the past, not to mention the social status of the writers who engage in writing such essays, causing peers who question it to do so on the DM so as not to risk their own upward mobility. (Surely, Emre’s position as a Canadian academic outside of New York’s literary circles insulates her, to a degree.) However, it was also noticeable that most of the praise for Emre came from white academics. Only a minority outside of this circle argued that “It” girl Chew-Bose was merely the writer of colour du jour to be sacrificed on the altar of white institutions or that writers like Gaitskill and Nelson were only the latest in a procession of Caucasian intellects.

Positioning Chew-Bose as an author who presents herself “as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others,” Emre slipped her work into the confessional form of personal essay—a particular sub-genre of the form that Tolentino interred in her New Yorker critique—which she claimed had already “muddied its coattails.” Yet while Emre has an evident distaste for both Chew-Bose’s work and confessional writing, the comparison fell flat—largely because Chew-Bose’s writing is not confessional. She is more concerned, successfully or not, with playing with the form, the words, the sounds, and the movement of a piece to provoke a momentary feeling rather than convey an overall thesis. Chew-Bose is only as confessional as her choice of rhymes is confessional, the personal and critical weaving through them like couplets. Emre’s preference for Gaitskill’s works, “circumspect in their claims to self-knowledge”—as well as her celebration of Nelson’s praise of equally detached white writers—seems more a matter of stylistic preference. In the same critical essay, Emre praised Gaitskill for the very openness she appeared to turn away from when discussing Chew-Bose, calling Gaitskill’s work a “graceful acceptance of psychic irretrievability—the impossibility of knowing what may or may not touch the imagination; what may or may not undo the soul.”

Contemporary confessional writing has mainly been the province of white, middle- to upper-class women such as Emily Gould, Nora Ephron, Meghan Daum, and Sloane Crosley, who observed their lives and lives like theirs. Theirs were bold self disclosures, the “I,” in all its gore, coming first. The style was more plain-spoken, allowing for light humour, irony, lyricism, but principally approachability. Then, around 2008, as Tolentino noted, with the arrival of Gould, the conversation expanded to include more explicit confession, culminating in the publication of essay collections by name authors including Lena Dunham ( Not that Kind of Girl ) and Lindy West ( Shrill ). But the conversation was still dominated by white writers who shared a common set of interests. Their essays centred on subjects like gross-out body breakdowns, convoluted sexual relationships, and the peccadilloes of urban life. Tolentino argued that in the wake of the recent election, this sort of personal was no longer political enough to survive. And the argument wasn’t wrong, it was just looking the wrong way.

T he personal essay isn’t dead, it’s just no longer white. Three years ago, Haitian American writer Roxane Gay rejuvenated the genre with her bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist . This year has seen the publication of comparable compilations by African American blogger Samantha Irby ( We Are Never Meeting in Real Life ) and BuzzFeed writer Scaachi Koul ( One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter ), a Canadian of Indian descent like Chew-Bose. I do not, however, include Chew-Bose in this trio, although she was published around the same time, because she does not engage in the same graphic self revelation. Rather, the texture of the text takes precedence in her work, not to mention, as Emre observed, she is overtly “apolitical, bereft of any common political or ethical position.” The same cannot be said of Gay, Irby, or Koul. The dismissal of Chew-Bose as a personal essayist, simply for her style and associating her instead with confession, negates the diversity of the genre’s voices, implying that women of colour are one entity that can only do one thing and not particularly well, at that. It says that their refusal to adhere to traditional literary standards, largely defined by white authors, speaks to their inferiority as artists rather than their innovation.

In Slate , Bennett has observed that the one positive outcome of the first-person flood was that the underrepresented were able to ride the wave. The array of perspectives—non-white, non-cis, non-heterosexual, non-wealthy—helped popularize intersectional activism, prioritizing diverse writers who interrogated the culture that refused to recognize them. At Book Riot , a blog that focuses on diverse literature, writer Morgan Jerkins, whose own collection of essays ( This Will Be My Undoing ) is forthcoming, confirmed that this genre was the one place non-white points of view like hers seemed allowed to exist. “For the most part, many of us have been trained to invoke the voices of dead white writers,” she wrote. “Now, we have the opportunity to recognize and examine our own voices through our lens at our own individual paces.”

That opportunity can be traced back to the first-person wave but also feminism’s fourth wave, in which pioneering personal writing by women of colour resurfaced. Women have long written from a personal perspective, their voices acting as their greatest weapon against oppression. The first examples of literature written by African American women, for instance, emerged from slavery. Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , exposed her abuse but also her strength. One hundred years of continued oppression later, and the civil rights movement turned writers into fervent activists. At this time, poet Maya Angelou’s editor challenged her to transform autobiography into literature. In response, she used the tools of fiction to construct her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , into a narrative about racism and trauma told through the experiences of her own life. Emerging from the myopic masculinity of the civil rights movement, black feminism informed activists including Audre Lorde, whose seminal collection Sister Outsider (1984) furiously explores intersectionality and helped form the template for contemporary feminism.

These influences are written all over the current hybridized form of intersectional essays, in which writers of various races, sexualities, genders, and abilities blend criticism, personal essay, and reportage—what better way to reflect their multi-faceted lives? Lorde’s activism, and that of the female writers of colour preceding her, have equally inspired the loud, confident voices and personalities that have commandeered invisible podiums online. More than their writing, it is the charisma of these women, broadcast by social media, that resonates—charisma that infuses their personal essays, parlaying their popularity into bestselling books.

A nd Roxane Gay is the most charismatic of them all. First published over twenty years ago, Gay only soared to prominence within the past decade when she, like Cheryl Strayed, entered the world of non-fiction. “My life until I began writing essays was a period of silence,” she told Bomb magazine. “I didn’t dare try and use my voice for fear it wouldn’t be heard and for fear of what I might say.” In 2012, before first-person criticism went mainstream, Gay wrote about the power of young women through the prism of The Hunger Games and her own rape at age twelve, including the piece in her 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist , inspiring many of us to play with personalized critique in a similar way.

“I think, especially in non-fiction writing, it’s demanded that women unburden ourselves, that we splay ourselves open and let you see our bloody guts,” she writes. “But to what end? I’ll show you some of my bloody guts, but there’s going to be, hopefully, when I’m at my best, a larger sense of purpose to the writing. You have to look both inward and outward.” Her book became a bestseller. Deconstructing popular culture and feminism through the intersections of her own life, Gay popularized the form. The tone, however—uplifting verging on evangelical—was familiar, a sort of Oprah for millennials. Because of this, though Gay is a writer first, her insight into the human condition in all its diversity, bolstered by her social media presence, has turned her into something of an inspirational brand. Her writing reflects a set of marginal experiences so rare in popular books that she herself has become an icon of the underrepresented—the same way an actor who plays a rare part becomes indistinguishable from it. It is thus unsurprising that, earlier this month, she launched an advice column at the New York Times . This is testament to the significance of the personal essay resurrected by writers of colour: it is not simply their ownership of the genre that matters but that it imparts on them a power and an authority they have for so long been denied.

Scaachi Koul’s raison d’être is the opposite of Gay’s: it is not succor but discomfort. She established a clear brand of irreverence in Canada—the Land of the Milquetoast—as a strident online voice, tweeting invectives in response to any and all sociopolitical inequities and authoring columns such as “Unfuck Yourself” and “Well That Sucked” at Hazlitt . In her first book, Koul addresses the complexities of her own gender and identity politics, though the abrupt tone that has become her hallmark on Twitter is diluted in long-form, losing much of its punch.

It follows then that the title of the essay collection, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , gets the biggest reaction, hewing with Koul’s terse public persona, an unapologetic subversion of two stereotypes: the innocuous Canadian and the submissive Indian. She dedicates the book to her parents but addresses it to her niece. “It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself,” she writes. With her, it is less about the writing, more about having written—the act of confession is her activism, a clarion call for other women of colour to see that it is possible and to do the same.

Harking back to the black feminist literary movement preceding them, and indeed reflecting marginal groups as a whole, the new personal essayists form a tight group. Relating to each other’s oft-sidelined experiences, they gravitate together, establishing power in numbers, ensuring they remain visible where they weren’t for so long. Samantha Irby was championed early on by Gay at the Rumpus and the duo, along with Koul, write on similar topics—writ large, the nuances of moving in non-white bodies through a patriarchal society. “I want to go unnoticed. I want to hide. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body,” Gay writes in her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body . In a similar vein, Koul explains in her collection, “I still shop to save my soul instead of just to cover my ass, and it typically ends the same way.”

Then there’s Irby. “There’s always some bag of dicks with a beer in his hand, a triple cheeseburger on his plate, and a cigarette in his mouth trying to talk to me about healthy eating,” she writes. Where Gay is the sage and Koul the contrarian, Irby is naked honesty. Her latest book of essays, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life , is all voice. It is disclosure at its juiciest, rich with lurid details and riddled with musically delicious expletives and shambolic jargon, the kind you only use with your friends. “He was sexy and everything,” she writes, “but I mean, he didn’t even know how to CC an e-mail to multiple recipients. I don’t have to be grateful for that shit.” Her confessions about everything from her Crohn’s disease, to the death of her parents, to her obsession with trashy reality television resonate precisely because she is not the ideal confessor.

Irby is not here to give advice or to make the world a better place, she is here to be your sister, whoever you are. Her work recalls that famous quote, often misattributed to C.S. Lewis: “We read to know we’re not alone.” In truth, the quote comes from Shadowlands , a 1993 film based on Lewis’s life, in which a student repeats the line, something his schoolmaster father used to say, to the fictional Lewis. But are those words any less resonant simply because their source is not the authority figure we established years ago? Are they any less meaningful because they have meandered through history, away from their ancestry? Critics who dismiss the voices that speak to the future risk being lost to the past. And writers of colour are the future, transcending everything—outside and inside—but their humanity. “My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m.,” Irby writes. “First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead.” No, you are very much alive.

Related Posts

Alice Munro, Nobel-Winning Author, Dies at Ninety-Two

May 14, 2024 May 14, 2024

Yes, It’s Okay to Throw Away a Book

April 19, 2024 April 19, 2024

How Should a Diary Be? Sheila Heti Scrambles Her Life in Alphabetical Diaries

February 9, 2024 February 9, 2024

The Walrus uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other purposes. Learn more or change your cookie preferences.

Before you go, did you know that The Walrus is a registered charity? We rely on donations and support from readers like you to keep our journalism independent and freely available online.

Read more…

When you donate to The Walrus, you’re helping writers, editors, and artists produce stories like the ones you’ve just read. Every story is meticulously researched, written, and edited, before undergoing a rigorous fact-checking process. These stories take time, but they’re worth the effort, because you leave our site better informed about Canada and its people.

If you’d like to ensure we continue creating stories that matter to you, with a level of accuracy you can trust, please consider becoming a supporter of The Walrus. I know it’s tough out there with inflation and rising costs, but good journalism affects us as well, so I don’t ask this lightly.

Will you join us in keeping independent journalism free and available to all?

In recent years, there’s been a big shift in how and where we get our information and engage with stories, media, and culture. More and more, this is happening online and often for free. With advertising and sponsorship dollars drying up, this leaves newsrooms facing an unsustainable business model.

The Walrus is not immune to these economic challenges and is working toward a more sustainable approach to journalism. Please support us during these uncertain times by making a donation today. As a highly trusted, independent media organization, we can’t do this alone. Your donation will support a small but mighty team that believes in ideas, accountability, and facts. By giving today, you won’t just help sustain Canada’s conversation; you will help change it as well.

Funding independent journalism isn’t easy. That’s why we need your help.

Advertisement

Supported by

January’s Book Club Pick: Jia Tolentino on the ‘Unlivable Hell’ of the Web and Other Millennial Conundrums

• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Maggie Doherty

• Aug. 4, 2019

TRICK MIRROR Reflections on Self-Delusion By Jia Tolentino

In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead. “The personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,” she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker’s website . Five years ago, readers salivated over “it happened to me” essays posted daily on women’s websites. But after the 2016 presidential election, such pieces started to seem petty, self-indulgent, naïve. Still, Tolentino, who once edited this kind of writing for The Hairpin and Jezebel, found herself occasionally nostalgic for the authorial voices that developed during the personal essay’s heyday. “I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability,” she wrote. “I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”

Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Tolentino has made her own foray into self-study in her absorbing first book, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.” The book is a collection of nine original essays, some of which have their roots in writing she’s done for The New Yorker; each is a mix of reporting, research and personal history. Her voice here is fully developed: She writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet-honed humor. She is the only writer I’ve read who can incorporate meme-speak into her prose without losing face.

Unlike the digital personal essayist in her description, Tolentino considers the modern self not as something to be exposed or exploited, like a mineral deposit, but as something to construct and critique. She finds her subject in what she calls “spheres of public imagination”: social media, reality television, the wedding-industrial complex, news coverage of sexual assault. Tolentino wants to know how Americans, particularly those of her generation, have adjusted to life under late capitalism. What happens to people when they are forced to compete for the smallest bit of security? Who do we become when we’re always being watched?

[ “Trick Mirror” was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list . ]

The brief answers to these questions are: not very good things, and not very good people. The book’s first essay, on the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” that is the internet, makes a good case for the degradation of civic life in Mark Zuckerberg’s America. Posting on Facebook or Twitter “makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard,” Tolentino argues, in part because so many jobs require online engagement — which in turn lines the pockets of tech moguls. We often confuse professing an opinion — posting, liking, retweeting — with taking political action. Meanwhile, social media makes us feel as if we’re perpetually onstage; we can never break character or take off our costumes. Channeling the sociologist Erving Goffman, Tolentino explains how “online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.”

The work of being yourself online is relentless, exhausting. Women, she suggests, are especially familiar with this kind of “self-calibration.” Some, like Kim Kardashian, manage to profit off self-exposure , while other women (or sometimes the very same) endure digital harassment. Even as online movements such as #MeToo have forged female solidarity, they have also pressured women to be vulnerable, to cede control of their own stories — in the same way, not incidentally, that the online personal essay industry once did. And if the personal essay is dead, the internet is still very much alive. Tolentino concludes that only “social and economic collapse” could rid us of this digital plague.

This kind of fatalism, dispiriting but perhaps fair, runs through the book. (In the introduction, Tolentino describes writing the book in the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018, a period that included the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the Kavanaugh hearings, and that produced so much despair.) In an essay on exercise culture and “optimization,” Tolentino notes how her own exercise regime, which consists mostly of expensive barre classes, is both “a good investment” and “a pragmatic self-delusion” — she is training herself to “function more efficiently within an exhausting system” from which she cannot escape.

Later, in an essay on scam artists and confidence men, she depicts capitalism as the ultimate scam — one exposed once we reckon with the arbitrariness of success, or even of survival. We’re not all Billy McFarland, the scammer behind the Fyre Festival , but, in a country transformed by financialization and the gig economy, we’re all making risky bets. Tolentino persuasively compares betting on stocks to crowdfunding money for medical emergencies: “if you’re super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you’ve got hustle … you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident.” Overwhelmed by the injustice she sees around her, she reflects on her own “ethical brokenness”: “I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional — to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.” You can refuse on principle to use ridesharing apps or to rent from Airbnb, but you might end up panicked and sweating on another broken-down subway train, late to a job that doesn’t cover your travel expenses but that expects that you, like a savvy scammer, will figure something out.

These are distinctly millennial sentiments, the complaints of a generation that has come into political consciousness only after investing so much in false meritocratic promises. Tolentino’s earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life-writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self-satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre. Though she never presumes to be anything like the voice of a generation, Tolentino is a fair representative: Now 30, she graduated from college into an economic recession, watched her parents sink into debt and from the age of 16 has worked multiple jobs simultaneously. In many ways, “Trick Mirror” is a cri de coeur from a writer who has been forced to revise her youthful belief in American institutions.

Several of the essays are about losing faith: in institutionalized religion, in the American dream, in the fundamental kindness of others. In “Ecstasy,” a lovely meditation on selflessness in all its forms, Tolentino writes movingly about leaving the evangelical church in which she was raised. In her post-religious life, she has sought and found bliss elsewhere: during late evening walks, at music festivals, on drugs. It’s the book’s strongest essay, as well as its least vexed. In it, Tolentino dwells more easily among contradictions: “I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.” She writes beautifully about her desire for self-transcendence and how it led her to writing, a tool she uses to understand herself.

As a reader (and a fellow millennial), I could have done with more essays like “Ecstasy,” in which contradiction felt enriching, or generative, rather than imprisoning. I credit Tolentino for examining her complicity in the structures she critiques, but at times I wished she would go easier on herself, or that she’d keep working to transcend the contradictions she observes. I’m not sure that criticism is always a form of amplification, as Tolentino fears it is, or that the line between feminism-as-politics and feminism-as-branding is as “blurry” as she at one point suggests. She has realized that moral purity is a “fantasy,” but she might also acknowledge a more hopeful truth: Though the shearing forces in our lives inevitably compromise us, they need not paralyze us. “I am complicit no matter what I do” can be both a realization reached after rigorous self-reckoning and something like a dead end. Just because you can’t fix climate change with your own consumer choices doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done.

With this in mind, Tolentino’s insistence that we move beyond the personal may be her most trenchant political insight. “Feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective,” she writes in her essay on scammers. Elsewhere, she underscores the importance of building solidarity among different social groups. What she likes about a drug like Ecstasy, she explains, is that it literally produces empathy. While on it, you care about more people than you would think possible: “It makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group.” Ecstasy expands our understanding of the collective. This is a productive self-delusion, the kind of fantasy that inspires rather than cripples. It is a personal experience that Tolentino gracefully politicizes — an ephemeral feeling that, if we take it seriously, we might use to bring about a better world.

Maggie Doherty’s first book, “The Equivalents,” will be published in March.

Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion By Jia Tolentino 303 pp. Random House. $27.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

“The Light Eaters,” a new book by Zoë Schlanger, looks at how plants sense the world  and the agency they have in their own lives.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

Sharples’s intent was to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, which he said “could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity.” Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days , is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer . “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before. He probably didn’t imagine there was much to think about.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus , but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust .

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences. Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Read: The humanities are in crisis

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major ?

The case for the value of humanities in a technologically determined world has been made before. Steve Jobs always credited a significant part of Apple’s success to his time as a dropout hanger-on at Reed College, where he fooled around with Shakespeare and modern dance, along with the famous calligraphy class that provided the aesthetic basis for the Mac’s design. “A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem,” Jobs said . “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed . The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language, but also because there is more than just the possibility of disruption here. Natural-language processing can throw light on a huge number of scholarly problems. It is going to clarify matters of attribution and literary dating that no system ever devised will approach; the parameters in large language models are much more sophisticated than the current systems used to determine which plays Shakespeare wrote, for example . It may even allow for certain types of restorations, filling the gaps in damaged texts by means of text-prediction models. It will reformulate questions of literary style and philology; if you can teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must be able to inform you, in some way, about how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

The Personal Essay is Dead, Long Live the Personal Essay

In the wake of the mid-2010s ‘personal essay boom’, writers are shaping and stretching the personal essay form to share stories that refuse a traditional telling., by kylie maslen 30 mar, 2020, more like this.

In a feature on essayist Maggie Nelson for The New Yorker , Hilton Als writes of the power of experimentation within Nelson’s The Argonauts:

It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves—the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight—that makes her readers feel hopeful.

Through work that has transcended the traditional, Nelson has inspired many emerging writers to explore the essay form. Following in the footsteps of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Wayne Koestenbaum, The Argonauts , Als writes, combines ‘memoir, literary analysis, humour, and reporting with vivid instances of both the familiar and the strange’.

The subtitle of Ellena Savage’s debut essay collection Blueberries (Text Publishing) poses the question: ‘What kind of body makes a memoir?’

For Savage, the question forms a platform from which to interrogate the personal in two respects: bodily history within memoir through exploration of trauma, gender and sex, as well as how a collective body of work might be considered within literary sub-genres.

This line of enquiry is also pursued in two other recent publications—Tanya Vavilova’s We Are Speaking in Code (Brio Books) and Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena (Allen & Unwin) . All three carry the weight of their author’s experiences, voicing their doubt over which form—if any—is best suited to share these stories. The solution for all three writers is to take the memoir format and bend it, shape it, make it fit best for them. The results make not only for thought-provoking reading but also an interesting marker in the history of the personal essay.

It’s possible to see Maggie Nelson’s influence in the way Savage’s central ideas are marbled through her collection. Sara Marcus writes for the Los Angeles Times that in The Argonauts Nelson is ‘circling away and back again to central questions about deviance and normalcy, family-making and love’. One of Savage’s most cogent lines of enquiry is the nature of being an artist: the class implications, the lifestyle required, the ways in which it is both a distinctive profession and utterly ordinary. An artist is not above human experiences—they simply express them in their own way.

One of Savage’s most cogent lines of enquiry is the nature of being an artist: the ways in which it is both a distinctive profession and utterly ordinary.

Blueberries’ opening essay ‘Yellow City’ sees the essay form melded to provide for internal monologue and doubts as Savage’s sexual assault is relayed (a technique Osborne-Crowley also utilises in I Choose Elena in documenting her violent rape); in ‘Holidays with Men’, two columns provide the reader with dual narratives, each one a critique of the other, which play on the feminine and masculine; and the bullet point format of ‘Turning Thirty’ amplifies the relentless pressure to achieve arbitrary adult milestones such as ‘How did I get here without first learning to wear pastels?’

A traditional autobiography often does not make room for struggle found in the everyday. For a memoir to sell, publishers often believe it must be extraordinary: the life of a celebrity, a high achiever, or an ordinary person in exceptional circumstances (such as the recent case of the Australian doctors who worked on the highly-publicised Thai cave rescue ). Tanya Vavilova’s We Are Speaking in Code, however, utilises the contemporary idea that the essay writer can be a shape-shifter. In her case this is also highlighted from the collection’s subtitle: ‘Living on the Fringe with Grace, Humour and Lucid Rage’.

Vavilova’s book speaks of migration and language gaps, gender and sexuality, trauma and chronic illness. By creating a collage of these experiences and questions, We Are Speaking in Code allows Vavilova to write about ‘the fringes’ of her subtitle in ways that an orthodox memoir would flood. Working through vignettes and juxtaposing paragraphs, Vavilova has the freedom to disclose the personal at her own pace; the form doesn’t pressure the author to be cohesive, and it allows the reader to create their own tempo: to pause in the gaps of language Vavilova has with her family members and sit in that place without words—a task difficult to achieve on the page.

While Nelson’s influence is of course most apparent in Vavilova’s chapter ‘The Mean Reds: An Ode to Maggie Nelson’ (which also follows the vignette pattern of Blueberries ’ titular essay) it’s the essays that concern Vavilova’s relationship with—and grief over—her Russian grandmother ( babushka ) that use experimental devices best. Listening to recordings made just before her death gives Vavilova a way to connect to the babushka she was always some distance from, either geographically or linguistically. Vavilova quotes a friend, also of Russian lineage, who says: ‘In my family, we don’t speak a language where we can share complicated things.’

Vavilova has the freedom to disclose the personal at her own pace; the form doesn’t pressure the author to be cohesive, and it allows the reader to create their own tempo.

As she listens to her grandmother’s tapes, Vavilova painstakingly works to bridge gaps in history, knowledge and language. While her comprehension of Russian outweighs her ability to speak or write her native tongue, the recordings bring Vavilova a sense of the moments that her and her grandmother could never freely speak of before her death. The recordings—converted from cassette tape to CD-ROM to USB—allow Vavilova to listen to her babushka’s voice over time, and also speak importantly to form: that movement is necessary. Tradition can block access: in this case the inability to listen to a cassette tape, as well as Vavilova’s inability to express her lines of enquiry in a more conventional essay collection. What it feels like to be queer in one country, while the country in which you were born still outlaws homosexuality and being ‘out’ frequently attracts vigilante violence. The conflicts between difference and deviance are constantly questioned. On leaving her babushka after a trip back to Russia for her thirtieth birthday, Vavilova writes:

All I know: we are happiest in the forest behind her house, sitting on a park bench, reading our books, hers in Russian, mine in English, in companionable silence under the same shining sun.

Leaving now, I feel unmoored like a small, rusty boat.

Hollow but somehow cut up, too.

Sometimes, what you have does not feel like enough.

By using the personal as a vehicle to discuss the theoretical nature of psychology, queerness and migrant identity, Vavilova—like Savage—creates a form of personal essay that is firmly planted in cultural critique. It speaks to a form which has evolved from the early 2010s ‘personal essay boom’ propagated by sites such as Gawker , xoJane , the Toast , the Awl and the Hairpin . Speaking to Jia Tolentino for the New Yorker in 2017, Sarah Hepola—who worked as Salon ’s personal-essay editor— says that to her, the 2016 US presidential election was ‘a reckoning for journalism’:

We missed the story. Part of why we missed it might have been this over-reliance on ‘how I feel about the day’s news’—and now the journalism world recognises that we need to re-invest in reporting.

While Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena is formed out of a combination of the personal confession and journalistic reporting, the book’s central incident of violent rape is not framed as the story itself; rather it follows the emerging trend, identified by Slate features director Laura Bennett in the same Tolentino article: stories ‘that centre on systemic rather than personal trauma’. In doing so it moves away from the clickbait-style essays of the past, into a broader view that provides a cultural critique. This creates a framework for discussion as to how such an incident fits within political infrastructure, prejudices and privilege: a strategy that Savage, Vavilova and Osborne-Crowley all employ.

I Choose Elena is at once personal, but it does not miss the full story—that of systemic disbelief of women’s trauma, both in legal and medical establishments.

Originally an essay published by the Lifted Brow , Osborne-Crowley reports diligently on research proving what is known about how trauma affects the body. She speaks of her own experiences with endometriosis, vaginismus and Crohn’s disease and how it relates to her PTSD. ​ I Choose Elena is the most fluid of the three works discussed here, drawing on all of Osborne-Crowley’s skills as a journalist, essayist, creative writer and legal researcher. The account is at once personal, but it does not miss the full story—that of systemic disbelief of women’s trauma, both in legal and medical establishments.

The personal essay was in many ways reinvigorated by the release of Leslie Jamison’s 2014 collection The Empathy Exams . Essayists, Jamison says , connect with readers because of their ability ‘…to bring together very different kinds of expression—personal and critical and journalistic—without getting dismissed for their subjective stances or excessive first person’. These are writers, in other words, whose voices have been historically marginalised or undercut. While the works discussed in this piece have come from (white) women writers, the personal essay is not only the domain of writers who identify as women—Wayne Koestenbaum was an enormous influence on Maggie Nelson; Hilton Als and Hanif Abdurraqib are both significant contemporary writers in this area. All writers—noticeably—are queer (Koestenbaum and Als), or people of colour (Als and Abdurraqib).

What the personal essay offers is a home to the outliers, to Vavilova’s people ‘living on the fringe’. A safe space to speak to the personal and how it relates to society more broadly. A place to develop as an artist by bending the rules. A form open to interrogation of the ideas and concerns of the day. But as those writers who have guided the way (Didion, Sontag, Koestenbaum) have shown, while the subject matter may ​evolve when it comes to the personal essay, change is the only constant.

We Are Speaking in Code, Blueberries and I Choose Elena are all available now from your local independent bookseller.

Kylie Maslen is a writer, critic, and author of the essay collection Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness (Text Publishing). Her work has appeared in the  Guardian, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Adelaide Review, Crikey  and  Junkee , among other outlets. She was the 2018 KYD   New Critic Award winner, and her essay ‘I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Not Okay’ was longlisted for the Lifted Brow & RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-fiction. She lives in Adelaide on Kaurna Country.

More from Kylie Maslen

Liked This? Try These...

Books Roundup: The House of Youssef , Pills, Powder and Smoke, Meet me at Lennon’s

Ellen cregan kylie maslen chloë cooper.

Pub Talk: Catriona Menzies-Pike on What Makes a Great Critic

Catriona menzies-pike alan vaarwerk.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg on Trans Masculinity, Privilege, Channing Tatum and More

Oliver reeson.

Race, Feminism and Politics: A Conversation with Sisonke Msimang

Alice cottrell.

Shelf Reflection: Amani Haydar shares her bookshelves and favourite reads

Amani haydar.

Harry Potter and the Disappearing Pages

Olivia muscat, you have 0 free articles remaining., we hope you enjoy this one free article per month. kyd relies on membership to fund its content. please consider joining today from as little as $49.95 per year..

If you’re already a member, click here to log in

Want to keep reading?

KYD members enjoy full digital access and many other benefits , including writing opportunities, and discounts on courses and mentorships.

Become a member today from $49.95 .  

Ⓒ 2024 Kill Your Darlings | Privacy Policy

Design by The Company You Keep | Build by Cinch

• Debut Spotlight
• New Australian Fiction
• Write for KYD
• Tips on Pitching
• Awards & Prizes
• Manuscript Assessments
• Mentors Program
• Online Courses ⬀
• Memberships
• Online Writing Courses ⬀
• Gift Vouchers
• Member Benefits
• Writing Opportunities
• Pitch, Publish, Promote
• Contributors

Podcasting is the new personal essay

The personal essay isn’t dead. It’s just found new life.

Earlier this year, The New Yorker’ s Jia Tolentino took a critical look at the once-popular personal essay in a widely read piece, “ The Personal Essay Boom is Over ”: “There’s a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay, written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers.” The genre, which was once a hallmark of the internet, has essentially disappeared, she wrote, citing the demise of Gawker, xoJane, and BuzzFeed Ideas. Tolentino wasn’t the first person to declare the genre dead. Virginia Woolf beat her to it with her 1905 meditation, “The Decay of Essay Writing.” And so did Laura Bennett, who wrote a takedown of what she called “ the first-person industrial complex ” for Slate in 2015.

Personal essays are alive and well today, just in a different form. The most exciting personal essays today, arguably, are being delivered via microphone and recorder. “First-person writing has long been the Internet’s native voice,” Bennett wrote two years ago. Today, first-person narratives are literally becoming the internet’s voice.

RELATED:  TV reporter quit to drive for Lyft, do a podcast

Podcasts are a natural home for these stories. Even journalistic storytelling, like what you might hear on This American Life or Radiolab , is usually rooted in a host’s anecdote from their own lives. With audio, you are not simply reading a person’s story, but hearing them tell it in their own voice, which adds a layer of intimacy and humanity that escapes the traditional personal essay. Some mimic the format of the medium (like Modern Love ). Others tweak or adapt it. Some are confessional. Others, more restrained. Some are universal. Others, hyperpersonal.

As you prep for your upcoming holiday road trips, arm yourself with stories that are happy, sad, relatable, emotional, and exceedingly personal. Here are a few shows and episodes to get you started.

Radio Diaries

You can’t get more personal than a podcast with the word “diary” in its title. Radio Diaries is the embodiment of the personal essay in audio form. It tells extraordinary stories about the ordinary people you may come across in your everyday life. Since 1996, Radio Diaries has been putting recorders in the hands of its subjects to help them tell their own stories. Each episode is a non-narrated, firsthand account that helps the listener see what it might be like to inhabit another’s life. One great example is its award-winning episode, “ Majd’s Diary ,” which chronicles two years in the life of a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia. In her audio diary, she uses the microphone to capture her thoughts about everything from late-night loneliness to arranged marriage to covering herself in front of men.

Recommended episode(s): “ Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl ,” “ Strange Fruit: Voices of a Lynching ,” “ Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man ”

ICYMI:  Is the podcast boom good for journalism?

The Heart has always had my heart. Kaitlin Prest, its host and creative director, recently announced the show would be on hiatus starting in 2018, which means you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on past shows before digging into her team’s new project(s). This year, the show launched a special miniseries that epitomizes everything I love about The Heart . Called “No,” it’s about personal boundaries, sex, and consent told through the experiences of Prest herself. She relives and even reenacts situations from her past in an extremely intimate, visceral, sonically dynamic way. It’s like a memoir come to life. This four-episode miniseries is required listening now, as sexual misconduct, power dynamics, and consent are at the forefront of public conversation.

Recommended episode(s): “ No ,” “ Mariya ”

Hope Chest describes itself as a “personal essay audio series,” but it’s really about the relationship between Stacia Brown , a writer and podcaster, and her young daughter. Its five episodes tackle topics like the struggles of single parenting or raising a black daughter in America today, all told beautifully through the lens of Brown. It’s confessional, contemplative, and creative, and a must-listen for anyone interested in mother-daughter relationships. Her fourth episode (see below) is a self-reflection on how women define themselves, and it’s a great place to start.

Recommended episode(s): “ Woman to Will-Be Woman ”

As Many Leaves

BBC Radio 4 is rife with audio documentaries—some reported features, others personal narratives. And it doesn’t get more personal than this 28-minute story from public radio reporter Sally Herships. In the fall of 2013, Hership’s now ex-husband emailed her saying he was never coming home again. Through audio diaries, conversations with family and friends, and even old recordings with her ex-husband, the documentary captures Hership’s grieving process in the aftermath of her ex’s disappearing act. It’s a raw and powerful glimpse into an experience usually hidden from the public—and one most people go through (in some form or another) in their lives.

RELATED:  Equipment you’ll need to start your own podcast  

As the name implies, Millennial is a show about millennials, or, well, one millennial: Megan Tan. An aspiring public radio reporter, Tan used the podcast to document the intimate details of her post-college life. Millennial started, quite literally, in her closet and followed her as she tried to jumpstart a career in public radio while navigating everything else twentysomethings deal with: love, family, friendships, and so on. Eventually Tan’s podcast caught the attention of podcasting network Radiotopia , and it became her full-time job (which, as Millennial fans know, was a dream come true). In subsequent seasons, she merged her story with the stories of others. Tan discontinued the podcast this past August, after realizing there was a disconnect between what the podcast was and what it was trying to become. The final episode, “ Saying Goodbye ,” is a reflection on this tug-of-war. Listeners wanted more Megan, but for her, that was untenable.

Recommended episode(s): “ Welcome to Millennial ,” “ Long Distance Love Story ,” “ Becoming More of a Somebody ”

The voice of journalism, since 1961

• Privacy Policy

Support CJR

• Become a Member

The "personal essay boom" is dead. Long live the personal essay!

In a world where women's voices are still being shut out, the confessional essay remains a vital form, by arielle bernstein.

In the fifth episode of Jill Soloway's Amazon series "I Love Dick," titled "A Short History of Weird Girls," we listen and watch as various characters from the show share their most intimate moments of sexual discovery, from protagonist and filmmaker Chris staring dead-on into the camera and recounting humping her stuffed animal as a little girl, and townie artist Devon explaining how she always watched and identified with Dick, the swaggering cowboy of a visual artist and titular object of obsession, when she was young, to Dick's institute curator Paula sharing how she was appalled when she saw her mother’s tampon string, to art historian Toby explaining her fascination with hard-core pornography and history of sexual abuse. As each woman shares her unique experiences, we see the image they have of themselves flickering and glowing, flashing in and out of color, both fragment and flame.

So many essential pieces of feminist film and pop culture draw on different types of collaging — from Maya Deren’s experimental films (which Chris’ character in "I Love Dick" hilariously pushes to the side in favor of big-budget male directors like Steven Spielberg) to the now classic (and controversial) "Vagina Monologues," Eve Ensler's play which is meant to repeat, reimagine, add, delete and combine women’s personal stories. Indeed, two of the most unique and talented female artists today are master collagists: Beyoncé’s expert combining of personal home videos, old family photos, current events, interviews and fragments of poetry in order to tell a story that is both deeply personal and profoundly political , and Lana Del Rey , a singer, musician, and artist obsessed with layering historical found footage alongside masterfully constructed selfies.

Women have always been criticized for sharing their stories, and the more real and uncomfortable they are, the more critics are likely to pathologize the sharer. In some ways, it is miraculous that the book "I Love Dick," written by the real-life Chris Kraus, was ever made into a TV series. From the time it came out, critics complained that it was too attention-seeking and emotional. In a 2015 essay for the New Yorker, Leslie Jamison considered the way that Kraus appealed to a certain type of woman: “I mainly heard about it from smart women who liked to talk about their feelings.”

The fact that smart, intellectually engaged women have the potential to be just as messy, and self-involved, and sex-obsessed, and hungry as anyone else is what drives Soloway’s "I Love Dick," which doesn’t stop at simply exploring Kraus’ story, but instead expands and develops a tapestry of female characters, their needs and wants and fears and dreams. In an early scene, Sylvère, Chris’ husband, is dumbfounded when he learns that Toby, a fellow scholar, focuses on hard-core pornography in her work. “You’re such a child,” he tells her. “I mean, why are you obsessed with porn? Look at you. You’re just so beautiful. So achingly beautiful.”

Sylvère's assumption that young, beautiful women shouldn’t be interested in messy, gross, strange, “unladylike” things is at the heart of our culture’s discomfort with women sharing personal stories. On the one hand, he’s transfixed and tantalized by the idea that a young woman would be intrigued by porn. On the other, he’s disgusted by it. This response sums up our collective concern too about personal essay writing, a concern that seems to be shared by men and women alike.

In a recent essay for the New Yorker, “ The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over ,” Jia Tolentino describes a shift in the demand for personal essays where women air their dirty laundry and notes that in a world where there are now so many tangible political and cultural concerns, there seems to simply be less space for women to lament about things like their sex lives and grooming habits.

Though Tolentino clearly has great tenderness for the genre, I am wary of the ways that reducing personal essays to the realm of younger, inexperienced writers trying to catch a break in the online publishing market isn’t really fair to the genre as a whole. It also implies, wrongly, that women sharing their experiences is not, in and of itself, a pretty radical thing. In an essay for Forward Magazine, “ Taking It Personally: A Defense of the First-Person Essay ” Susan Shapiro responds to Tolentino by demonstrating how the genre tends to be dismissed precisely because it is a space where marginalized groups have been able to draw attention to issues outside the mainstream:

As a feminist, memoirist and writing professor with successful students, I wish younger women would have more awareness and less condescension for the revelations of their rising star sisters. White men with big books and bylines get exalted, while smart, witty authors like Emily Gould and my former student Cat Marnell get bashed for their ambition and acclaim. Why is Marnell’s dazzling addiction memoir “How To Murder Your Life” (Simon & Schuster) such a target? Is it uncouth for a woman to admit to wild adventures without proper repentance, while making good money? That’s something addiction authors Bill Clegg, Augusten Burroughs, Jerry Stahl and Peter Hamill were never criticized for.

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. Certainly, in some cases, this has led to half-baked essays that are mere clickbait, but it has also encouraged women to embrace messy storytelling. In particular, I’m interested in the way that the embrace of “provocative” online writing has contributed to a renaissance of female filmmaking that doesn’t strive to be subtle. The female gaze is front and center in shows like "I Love Dick," "Broad City," "Girls," "Insecure," "Chewing Gum" and "Fleabag," provocatively insisting that hunts for tampons and a good laugh and a good fuck are not mere distractions, but actual parts and pieces of being a person in the world.

Where Tolentino sees the end of a boom, what we are instead experiencing is an evolution — of writers being encouraged to not simply mine personal feelings for a quick click, but to make connections between the personal and the political more explicit. This is definitely true in "I Love Dick," which refuses to sanitize female desire, and which, like Beyoncé’s "Lemonade," mines the tremendous possibility in seeing how our individual experiences connect to larger human stories.

At the end of season 1 of “I Love Dick,” Chris gets her period and walks alone into the desert, blood running down her legs, having almost consummated a sexual relationship with the object of her affection, which, to some critics, keeps the focus on Chris’ debasement. Maxine Swann excitedly posits in the Guardian that Chris is “a radical loser,” messy, obsessive, and hedonistic. Alexandra Schwartz of the New Yorker writes that “Soloway’s show has the goofball-loser shtick down pat” but worries that Chris’ character doesn’t go beyond this slapstick performance.

I wrote this essay just a few days after seeing “Wonder Woman,” a film which I also loved, and, which, like many other women, I found to be both heartfelt and empowering. In a world where women’s rights the world over are constantly under attack, seeing Diana save the day was both inspiring as well as a marked return to centering a “likable” female character — strong, sensitive, kind and powerful, liked by men and women alike.

In our current political landscape, it may be tempting to return to these wholly “positive” depictions of female power. In Vogue, Bridget Read laments that "I Love Dick" doesn’t add anything new to a culture that is obsessed with female debasement. “I’m used to being a woman and watching a version of myself flail around on screen, being funny and sexy and gross. So now what?”

It’s understandable that in our current climate, some women would feel frustrated by an insistence on depicting the female experience as intrinsically complicated. I’ve written my own critiques of writing that seems inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory, or else reduces women into cardboard cutouts of “unlikable” characters. But, to me, "I Love Dick" and the best kinds of female confessional writing and filmmaking are not merely playing with what it means to be a difficult woman; they actively insist that readers and viewers reimagine how we think about difficult female characters, ushering us into a potential world where Chris’ character is allowed to be both a lonely and impulsive woman bleeding through her clothes, and a brave cowgirl striding into the sunset with the promise that she will complete her emotional journey. It’s insisting that our stories, no matter how messy or small, connect to other women’s experiences, and that, in a world where women’s stories are still being shut out or shut down, sharing these stories is never merely personal.

Arielle Bernstein's work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The Millions, and RogerEbert.com, among other publications. She teaches writing at American University. You can follow her on Twitter @NotoriousREL

Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Related articles.

• History and Mission
• What is Mockingbird?
• Grace in Practice
• Relationships
• Year In Review
• Another Week Ends
• Sermon Archive
• Video Archive

The Power of the Personal Essay

In her piece for newyorker.com, “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over,” Jia Tolentino laments the death […]

In her piece for newyorker.com , “ The Personal-Essay Boom is Over ,” Jia Tolentino laments the death of a genre of writing that was, for a spell, ubiquitous. “A genre that partially defined the last decade of the Internet has essentially disappeared,” she writes. The Toast, Hairpin, Gawker, and other sites showcasing the noble attempts of young writers to mine their experiences and explore what they had to say have since disbanded or stopped receiving first-person pitches. The audience has shrunk for these essays, and Tolentino is sad to see them go.

The online personal essay has its faults. The form’s popularity contributed to the growth of what Elif Batuman called the “wound culture,” in which writers capitalized on painful pasts in ways that were cleansing at first but sometimes proved alienating in the long run. Unknowns wrote deeply confessional pieces for little compensation and were hung “out to dry on the most-emailed list,” as Emily Gould puts it to Tolentino. Discussion of feelings reigned, and, Tolentino notes, when they started disconnecting from the facts on the ground, the genre’s relevance came into question. She cites November 2016 as the real reckoning point for personal essays. In the age of Donald Trump, she continues, “Writers seem less interested in mustering their own centrality than they were, and readers seem less excited at the prospect of being irritated by individual civilian personalities.”

One of the effects of this season for me has been the ever-present hunch that I inhabit one big echo chamber. And, of course in many respects I do. I consistently seek out only familiar faces at a social event, news outlets with the tone I like, restaurants where I know how to order. Sometimes reading can draw me out of this privileged space, but lots of times it simply reinforces preconceived notions, like-minded people assuring me I’m right to shun and discount others.

Tony Tulathimutte put the urge to pen a personal essay humorously in  Private Citizens . “‘You never wanted a kid,’ Henrik said. ‘You said that to raise a kid was to get PTSD after catering to some helpless idiot for eighteen years in the hope that he wouldn’t eventually blame you for his miserable life on some blog.’” Tulathimutte’s characters are of course touching on the real trend among young people to air grievances online, and I have to admit some identification with his “helpless idiot.” Yet, writing about one’s experiences is an excellent way to gain perspective on them. To rehash the terms of an unpleasant encounter or sidestep the critiques of a friend or professor can lead to, in a successful essay, gaining a new hold on the past.

The other project of the personal essay, then, is that of becoming something else. There’s potential for maturation and discovery in drawing a portrait. But we usually don’t stand still long enough to paint an accurate picture. For young writers employing youthful terms to reflect on the not-so-distant past, revisiting those words in a few years can be awkward and painful. I cover my head with a blanket and peer out with one eyeball when I look back at tweets from high school.

If earning a fresh perspective on the past and growing into something new are the goals of the personal essay, Durga Chew-Bose achieves them both with grace in Too Much and Not the Mood . One of my favorite essays, “Since Living Alone,” was first published on Hairpin, a website that Tolentino references in her piece, and it stands out as an exemplar of the form. To make her aims clear, Chew-Bose quotes from an essay on Marguerite Duras by Edmund White in the New York Review of Books . “Her work was fueled by her obsessive interest in her own story and her knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event,” White writes. Chew-Bose then points out the number of times White uses “her.” “In less than thirty words, a tally of four hers .” I was unsure at first what she meant to gain by noting this, dropping the clause in at the end of a paragraph with an ambivalent tone. But she’s criticizing him for gendering her so coarsely and for implying that a knack for improving the facts has to be a bad thing.

Chew-Bose confronts painful and ugly facts with a grace and beauty that make reading her a joy. The essays are brimming with sad, blissful moments of recognition. Bliss, she writes in another essay, being “a measure of prosperity I can only feel in its truest form, privately.” Edmund White’s critique connects to an instinct shared with the many detractors of the personal essay whose anger at its frivolity borders on moralizing. Some of Chew-Bose’s lines are intentionally grating to this sensibility. She writes in “Since Living Alone” about how being on her own has given her the strength to start looking out for number one. This isn’t the territory of serious writing, White might grumble; however, Chew-Bose’s skirmishes with sentences on her screen yield an essay of fully grasped ideas. She seizes herself back from its other entanglements, turning her half figments into complete images, the forest and its trees, and it’s exactly the vital project of the personal essay that must be kept alive today. To connect this thread with the gospel, there’s a true story whose consequences free us from guilt and shame over the past and our tendency to mess things up. In writing about these ugly elements of ourselves, we can secure distance because we truly are absolved by Christ’s death on the cross.

One especially artful aspect of “Since Living Alone” is the fruit that mark its beginning and end. She uses a banana to trick an avocado into ripening in the beginning, and she concludes by slicing into a juicy pear. Other images play off of the fruit. She describes herself as a fetal position sleeper, like the avocado playing little spoon with the banana. “Being Someone’s Someone is cozy in theory—a snug image like two letter Ss fitting where the convex meets its concave,” she writes, evoking the tender fruit again. Recalling her words now, I think of curling up in bed with a book or falling back into the couch of my childhood home, knowing those cushions that bear the imprint of my growing body will catch me. Her images are so warm and bodily that they take me there. But the pear in the essay’s final image has a different connotation. Her friend leaves a pear in her fridge after a party, and, to make it feel more like a gift, she “sliced Katherine’s pear in four fat slices that I then halved so as to begin the year with a sense of plenty.” This is Chew-Bose giving us a gift. By living alone, she was able to gain distance, to become an authority on the things that were taking up her time and to grow into something else, to be fruitful. I’m glad the online personal essay gave her to us, but I trust her voice would come through no matter the outlet.

5 responses to “The Power of the Personal Essay”

Great piece. “One of the effects of this season for me has been the ever-present hunch that I inhabit one big echo chamber. And, of course in many respects I do.” I am right there with you. The whole social media posting thing too…great. Death. Its much safer to not just not post much on social media, but then, there is no resurrection, eh? Over the last few years, I have become very “stream of conscious-y” on Facebook. And ive recently got into the habit of just deleting everything every morning. That’s about how quickly I wish what I have to say is forgotten at least. Anyway, “loved” the article. Vote for personal essays! And man I got a good laugh at that parenting bit (I got 2 idiots myself).

I’ve done that whole deleting dance too. “Death” is right! Thanks, Sean

Beautiful piece of writing here, David

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Another Week Ends: Divine Accidents, Sunday Scaries, Workism, Artificial Obligations, Drama-Free Romance, and StoryMakers CJ Green
• When the World Tastes Like Cold French Fries David Peterson
• Another Week Ends CJ Green

Sign up for the Mockingbird Digest

5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

by Sarah Kliff

It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks, I've stumbled upon writers who were contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi's experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto's contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he'll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — "weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough" — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he "probably won't live long enough for her to have a memory of me." Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it's become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund's essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. "Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?" she writes. "Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?"

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto's cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto's essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it's also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto's essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. "Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six," Lopatto writes. "My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months."

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

"Letting Go" is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — "Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die" — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It's a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What's tragic about Monopoli's case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli's last days played out.

Most Popular

Why are whole-body deodorants suddenly everywhere, if trump wins, what would hold him back, take a mental break with the newest vox crossword, what the death of iran’s president could mean for its future, the known unknowns about ozempic, explained, today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

More in Politics

Biden promised to defeat authoritarianism. Reality got in the way.

Blood, flames, and horror movies: The evocative imagery of King Charles’s portrait

Why the US built a pier to get aid into Gaza

The controversy over Gaza’s death toll, explained

Why a GOP governor’s pardon of a far-right murderer is so chilling

The Republican Party's man inside the Supreme Court

Why Trump's running mate could be the most important VP pick of our time

Rent control for child care?

Introducing Vox’s next chapter

Vox’s new membership program, explained

Massive invasive snakes are on the loose and spreading in Puerto Rico

• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

Categories:

• Coping With Grief

You may also like

What is a 'Good Death' in End-of-Life Care?

11 Popular Websites About Death and End of Life

18 Questions About Death to Get You Thinking About Mortality

15 Best Children’s Books About the Death of a Parent

An editor’s perspective: the personal parenting essay is not dead

By Lauren Apfel @ laurenapfel  

O n May 18th, 2017 the  New Yorker  declared the online personal essay  dead and buried . Cause of death was, apparently, a multi-organ failure. Slashed budgets and a need for increasingly click-bait content that left writers cold and over-exposed. A saturated market that led sites to seek out other sources of revenue. And the final nail in the coffin: a sea-change in the political climate that made the airing of individual laundry—dirty or otherwise—feel woefully irrelevant.

But what about the personal parenting essay? As the co-founder and editor of a relatively new digital parenting publication, the pulsing heart of which is the first-person narrative, I’d argue (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

On May 23, 2016, a mere year before Jia Tolentino delivered her death sentence, Randi Olin and I launched  Motherwell . In one sense, the timing seemed ideal. We were riding the crest of a wave. First-person writing on the Internet was ubiquitous enough for it to be described by  Slate , in late 2015, as an “ industrial complex .” Parenting writing was no exception.

To glance, even casually, around the Web was to believe it. Other parenting publications were thriving: the confessional, blogger-style sites such as Scary Mommy and HuffPost Parents with their  millions  of actively engaged social media followers; the newsier broadsheet parenting blogs at  The New York Times  and  The Washington Post  with their undeniable clout; and the more literary venues such as  Brain, Child Magazine , where my co-founder and I started our careers, and whose online presence had been growing like a wild flower under our tender loving care.

The problem, insofar as there was one, with parenting writing in the years preceding Motherwell’s launch was not a lack of outlets or interest. It was a lack of depth. In November of 2014, I wrote an article for  Time   addressing this issue  with a sweeping defence of the “mommy blogger.” In the brief spell I had been on the scene, I contended, there had been a palpable uptick not only in the quality of writing about parenthood, but in a recognition of its cultural importance. Call us what you will, I said then—and I believe it to be just as true today—but those of us who are chronicling our experiences raising the next generation of tolerant citizens, those of us who are thinking deeply about what it means in the 21st century to be both a woman and a mother, we are indeed doing serious work.

The Internet agreed with me. Big, venerable sites were now courting, and featuring, parenting essays, written mainly by women.  Slate ,  Salon ,  Vox ,  Aeon ,  The Atlantic.  New sites and parenting verticals were popping up on a regular basis. So in this sense, we were certainly riding a wave with Motherwell, capitalising on the surge of—and desire for—intelligent commentary on parenthood.

And then, six months after we went live, Trump happened.

The energy of the Internet changed overnight. It became at once frenetic with emotion—anger, fear, disbelief — but also overwhelming and oddly stultifying as a result. It felt, at least in my liberal bubble, almost sacrilegious to post anything not on the subject of political outrage. Publishing an essay about breastfeeding or the empty nest seemed, at this point, the literary equivalent of plucking idly at a fiddle as Rome burned all around.

And yet, while there was definitely outrage to be expressed and action to be taken, for moms and dads life trudged on. The little kids still woke at 5:45am, needing to be fed and entertained. The bigs kids still needed to be driven to band practice and gymnastics, all the while kept informed in a suitably soothing way. Trump was President, the doomsday clock was inching ominously towards midnight, but people were still parenting, their parenting concerns now ricocheting wildly between the mundane and the profound.  How do I find time to take a shower with a baby and toddler in tow?   How do I explain to my eight-year-old that the leader of the free world is a person who grabs pussies and builds walls?

As a publication, the balance between these poles was a delicate one to strike, particularly in the immediate wake of the election. We didn’t want to ignore the political situation entirely, to step clear out of the fray,  and we didn’t . But at the same time, it felt necessary to carry on with our original vision of running personal essays about parenting topics that didn’t hinge on the new world order. People were still weaning their babies and  waiting for their teens to leave home , after all.

In the  New Yorker  article, Tolentino concludes, “No more lost-tampon essays in the age of Donald Trump.” And maybe that’s fair enough. We might not be writing about tampons gone missing anymore. At least for a time. But I have no doubt that we will continue to write, in one way or another, about bruised nipples, about maternal ambivalence, about how to rear children who believe love is love.

Because parenting writing is a unique species of personal essay. The thing about kids is that we keep having them, and as long as we have them, we will keep wanting to talk about them. The rawness, the radicalness of the felt-experience of parenthood, of motherhood in particular, hits each generation anew like a blast of icy air. And even though parenting will always be spring-loaded with its own end date—that’s the other thing about kids, damn them, they grow up—as one generation of writers ages out, another crop will inevitably take its place, regardless of which direction the political wind is blowing.

With the rise of the online mother-writer over the last 10-15 years—fostered by voices such as Dooce and Ayelet Waldman and Lisa Belkin—women gained an unprecedented space to come to terms with the isolating and often crippling expectations of modern motherhood. Which is exactly why the personal parenting essay will not die. Because the first-person narrative serves here not as an opportunity for navel-gazing, but as a lifeline. A hard-won platform, a vehicle to assert the inherent value of mothering and, above all else, a mark of our shared humanity—at a moment when we need it most.

Lauren Apfel is co-founder and executive editor of Motherwell. She likes to write about parenting on a regular basis and believes strongly in providing a platform for others to do the same.  Connect with her on  Facebook,   Twitter  and  Instagram . 

Get Motherwell straight to your inbox.

Join us on Facebook.

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Awesome article, Lauren. Moms have to write, no matter what they say. It high time society understands our point. And strongly believe, we women can move mountains if we unite. Thank you. Dita

Love this Lauren. You are so talented.

I love this. Keep those personal parenting essays coming!

At its best, the first person parenting essay is an essay and not a profanity/easy joke-ridden rant. Essays about parenting will never fall out of favor because the role of parent is so enormous and confounding. But the cheap, ‘look at me, my kid put a diaper on his head this morning and I’m so stressed out’ excuse for an essay ought to be saying goodbye. Not that humor is bad, nothing is better than humor well-written. Nothing is better than anything well-written – an essay written with thought, depth, insight, and skill is a thing of beauty.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Discover more from

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection Essay

Terminal illness, end of life issue.

While dying is part of human life that surrounds each person, some encounters with death are more influential than others. My mother’s passing was an experience that impacted my view of life and end of life care the most. She died before her 60th birthday – her terminal illness was discovered very late, and she passed away less than a year after receiving the diagnosis. Such a rapid change in my life left a mark on my memory and reshaped my view of life and death.

It was difficult for me to come to terms with her death – the period between the diagnosis and her passing was too short. I was in denial for a long time and had trouble accepting what had happened. Looking back at this time, I see how the end of life is not always expected, and why the children of terminally ill loved ones require the attention of medical professionals as well.

End of life care for my mother took a toll on me, and I had to reevaluate my aspirations to see whether I treated life as an endless path. Now, I reflect on the feelings I had in order to remind myself that the end of life cannot be fully preplanned and that each case is unique in its own way. Moreover, I try to remember that one’s existence is finite. In some cases, the best solution is to provide as much comfort to someone and make sure they are making choices to the best of their ability and knowledge to have a happy and dignified time.

I also considered how my mother might have felt at the moment of diagnosis and during her last year. It is incredibly challenging for one to understand what knowing that you will die soon means. Such clarity is not always desired, but I believe that it is vital for people to know about their current condition because it affects their decision-making in healthcare and life, in general. Death is a part of each human’s life, but every step toward it does not feel final because it can come at any moment.

Knowing one’s diagnosis changes the way people and their loved ones think. Although I can only imagine what my mother felt, I understand what the families of terminally ill persons are going through.

If I were diagnosed with a terminal illness and were given a prognosis of six months or less to live, I would try to accept it in good faith before making decisions. Death is inevitable, but it is impossible to be fully prepared for it, even when you think that you are. So, I would look into myself to search for peace with this news in order to take advantage of the time that I have left.

I would feel sad because I would not see my loved ones and miss them dearly. Thus, my priorities for what should be done would change. I would try to see my family and friends as much as I could and spend time with them, making memories for them and myself. I would like to leave some mementoes behind and focus on the good times that we would have together. Planning for several months ahead is difficult when the exact date of death is unknown, so I would do my best to make the most of each day.

However, it is also vital to think about one’s inner comfort and peace. Coming to terms with my passing would be critical to me – it provides some type of closure and allows me to let go of worries related to everyday life. People may cover their fear of dying with activities and concentration on planning and socialization. In doing so, they may overlook their own satisfaction with life, denying themselves a chance to reflect. As such, I would spend some time searching for some last unanswered questions and unachieved goals that could be completed in the short span of time that I would have.

Finally, I would concentrate on my present and my loved ones’ future. I always strive to remember that life is endless in a way that it continues for other people. Although I will eventually die, some of my friends and my family members will continue living long after I am gone, facing problems and challenges that are inherent to humanity.

Thus, I would try to make plans to alleviate some of these issues. Most importantly, I would organize the provision for my child to finance the education – one of the most necessary, but expensive, parts of one’s coming to adulthood. If possible, I would review our housing options, savings, family and friends support network, and address other household and healthcare concerns.

Doctors and nurses in end-of-life care carry a significant burden in working with patients and families dealing with ethical and moral dilemmas. Some of these issues are also regulated legally, although the lines of what is legal or not are much less clear than in other cases. For me, one of the moral dilemmas that I had struggled with was the patients’ and relatives’ differing views on treatment planning. In some situations, the client’s family members may not pursue the same goals as the person under care. These aims can be guided by religious or personal views on health and death. Others can be motivated by financial problems, strained relationships, emotional health, and a multitude of other reasons.

For example, in a hospital, a family may not want the patient to know the diagnosis as it could scare or sadden them. In this scenario, I turn to the some of the medical principles as the basis for my value system. I would highlight the importance of fidelity – people have the right to known about their prognosis and diagnosis (Karnik & Kanekar, 2016). I think that truthfulness is a necessary part of end-of-life care and support, even though telling someone their diagnosis is difficult.

In some situations, children want to keep their parent alive as long as possible and request all possible procedures, while the client denies care and seeks comfort to spend the last days with dignity. Here, the principle of autonomy would guide my practice – people reserve the right to make decisions to the extent of their capacity (De Panfilis et al., 2019).

Moreover, it is vital to remember that rigorous treatment does not equal beneficence in all scenarios. I try to approach each case individually and acknowledge that every person has the right to control a part of their destiny through healthcare or outreach for support, and the duty of caring professionals is to inform our clients of all the choices they can make and what outcomes they can expect. In the end, medical science advances continuously, but death remains an unchanging aspect that requires person-centered thinking.

De Panfilis, L., Di Leo, S., Peruselli, C., Ghirotto, L., & Tanzi, S. (2019). “I go into crisis when…”: Ethics of care and moral dilemmas in palliative care. BMC Palliative Care , 18 (70), 1-8. Web.

Karnik, S., & Kanekar, A. (2016). Ethical issues surrounding end-of-life care: A narrative review . Healthcare, 4 (24), 1-6. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, September 19). Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-dying-and-bereavement-reflection/

"Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection." IvyPanda , 19 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/death-dying-and-bereavement-reflection/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection'. 19 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection." September 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-dying-and-bereavement-reflection/.

1. IvyPanda . "Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection." September 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-dying-and-bereavement-reflection/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Reflection." September 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/death-dying-and-bereavement-reflection/.

• Suicide, Bereavement and Grief
• Theory Sessions: Reflection on Loss and Bereavement
• Parameters of a Children’s Book That Talks About Death and Dying
• Organizational Behavior: Employees Conflict
• “In Pursuit of Excellence”: Self-Improvement
• “In Pursuit of Excellence”: Book Review
• Self-Care Progress Plan: Personal Experience
• There Are Two Ways To Judge People — Both Are Useless

How to Approach a Personal Essay on Death

If, however, you stumble upon the necessity to write a personal essay on death , or due to some reason you choose to write one on your own when given a choice of topic, there are a few things you should take into account before you start working.

First of all, remember that death is an extremely sensitive and delicate topic. There are almost no taboo topics today, but this one certainly looks like a one of the few that remain in this position. Modern western culture embraces life, yet every human knows that one day he is going to die, as well as all those he knows and loves. It is a frightening thought for most people, but it can be made bearable if one pushes this prospect into some unspecified future. To mention death is to remind about its inevitability.

That is why you should approach the matter carefully, making sure you are not going to insult or make anybody uncomfortable. Death as a topic gives you a lot of opportunities to produce strong and lasting impression, but your handling of the theme should be, above all, tasteful.

Nevertheless, you should always remember that the main distinctive feature of a personal essay as a genre of writing is, obviously, its personal nature. You are not only allowed, you are expected to provide your own opinion, your own examples, your own experience in this piece of writing. Repeating some humdrum statements like “Death is a very difficult issue” or “Everybody looks at death differently” isn’t enough. Personal essays are called this way for a reason – and if you have to write one about death it, most likely, means that those who have given you this task want to see how well you can work when given such a disturbing, unpleasant, greatly intimate topic.

Writing a personal essay presupposes the use of examples. As all people encounter death at some point of their life, be it death of a loved one, of a friend, relative, an acquaintance or a pet, it at the same time simplifies the matter and makes it more difficult. Don’t be afraid to write what you really think: the people who have given you the task expect to hear something original, unique from you.

Our statistics

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• What Is Cinema?
• Newsletters

On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic

By Jesmyn Ward

Illustration by Calida Rawles

My Beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the children, to be a househusband. He traveled with me often on business trips, carried our children in the back of lecture halls, watchful and quietly proud as I spoke to audiences, as I met readers and shook hands and signed books. He indulged my penchant for Christmas movies, for meandering trips through museums, even though he would have much preferred to be in a stadium somewhere, watching football. One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.

In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu. Five days into our illness, we went to a local urgent care center, where the doctor swabbed us and listened to our chests. The kids and I were diagnosed with flu; my Beloved’s test was inconclusive. At home, I doled out medicine to all of us: Tamiflu and Promethazine. My children and I immediately began to feel better, but my Beloved did not. He burned with fever. He slept and woke to complain that he thought the medicine wasn’t working, that he was in pain. And then he took more medicine and slept again.

Two days after our family doctor visit, I walked into my son’s room where my Beloved lay, and he panted: Can’t. Breathe . I brought him to the emergency room, where after an hour in the waiting room, he was sedated and put on a ventilator. His organs failed: first his kidneys, then his liver. He had a massive infection in his lungs, developed sepsis, and in the end, his great strong heart could no longer support a body that had turned on him. He coded eight times. I witnessed the doctors perform CPR and bring him back four. Within 15 hours of walking into the emergency room of that hospital, he was dead. The official reason: acute respiratory distress syndrome. He was 33 years old.

Without his hold to drape around my shoulders, to shore me up, I sank into hot, wordless grief.

Two months later, I squinted at a video of a gleeful Cardi B chanting in a singsong voice: Coronavirus , she cackled. Coronavirus . I stayed silent while people around me made jokes about COVID, rolled their eyes at the threat of pandemic. Weeks later, my kids’ school was closed. Universities were telling students to vacate the dorms while professors were scrambling to move classes online. There was no bleach, no toilet paper, no paper towels for purchase anywhere. I snagged the last of the disinfectant spray off a pharmacy shelf; the clerk ringing up my purchases asking me wistfully: Where did you find that at , and for one moment, I thought she would challenge me for it, tell me there was some policy in place to prevent my buying it.

Days became weeks, and the weather was strange for south Mississippi, for the swampy, water-ridden part of the state I call home: low humidity, cool temperatures, clear, sun-lanced skies. My children and I awoke at noon to complete homeschooling lessons. As the spring days lengthened into summer, my children ran wild, exploring the forest around my house, picking blackberries, riding bikes and four-wheelers in their underwear. They clung to me, rubbed their faces into my stomach, and cried hysterically: I miss Daddy , they said. Their hair grew tangled and dense. I didn’t eat, except when I did, and then it was tortillas, queso, and tequila.

The absence of my Beloved echoed in every room of our house. Him folding me and the children in his arms on our monstrous fake-suede sofa. Him shredding chicken for enchiladas in the kitchen. Him holding our daughter by the hands and pulling her upwards, higher and higher, so she floated at the top of her leap in a long bed-jumping marathon. Him shaving the walls of the children’s playroom with a sander after an internet recipe for homemade chalkboard paint went wrong: green dust everywhere.

During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it, terrified of the terrible commitment at the heart of me that reasons that if the person I love has to endure this, then the least I can do is stand there, the least I can do is witness, the least I can do is tell them over and over again, aloud, I love you. We love you. We ain’t going nowhere.

As the pandemic settled in and stretched, I set my alarms to wake early, and on mornings after nights where I actually slept, I woke and worked on my novel in progress. The novel is about a woman who is even more intimately acquainted with grief than I am, an enslaved woman whose mother is stolen from her and sold south to New Orleans, whose lover is stolen from her and sold south, who herself is sold south and descends into the hell of chattel slavery in the mid-1800s. My loss was a tender second skin. I shrugged against it as I wrote, haltingly, about this woman who speaks to spirits and fights her way across rivers.

My commitment surprised me. Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time. On most days, I wrote one sentence. On some days, I wrote 1,000 words. Many days, it and I seemed useless. All of it, misguided endeavor. My grief bloomed as depression, just as it had after my brother died at 19, and I saw little sense, little purpose in this work, this solitary vocation. Me, sightless, wandering the wild, head thrown back, mouth wide open, singing to a star-drenched sky. Like all the speaking, singing women of old, a maligned figure in the wilderness. Few listened in the night.

What resonated back to me: the emptiness between the stars. Dark matter. Cold.

Did you see it? My cousin asked me.

No. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it , I said. Her words began to flicker, to fade in and out. Grief sometimes makes it hard for me to hear. Sound came in snatches.

His knee , she said.

On his neck , she said.

Couldn’t breathe , she said.

He cried for his mama , she said.

I read about Ahmaud , I said. I read about Breonna.

I don’t say, but I thought it: I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds wander their pandemic rooms, pass through their sudden ghosts. I know their loss burns their beloveds’ throats like acid. Their families will speak , I thought. Ask for justice. And no one will answer , I thought. I know this story: Trayvon, Tamir, Sandra .

Cuz , I said, I think you told me this story before.

I think I wrote it.

I swallowed sour.

In the days after my conversation with my cousin, I woke to people in the streets. I woke to Minneapolis burning. I woke to protests in America’s heartland, Black people blocking the highways. I woke to people doing the haka in New Zealand. I woke to hoodie-wearing teens, to John Boyega raising a fist in the air in London, even as he was afraid he would sink his career, but still, he raised his fist. I woke to droves of people, masses of people in Paris, sidewalk to sidewalk, moving like a river down the boulevards. I knew the Mississippi. I knew the plantations on its shores, the movement of enslaved and cotton up and down its eddies. The people marched, and I had never known that there could be rivers such as this, and as protesters chanted and stomped, as they grimaced and shouted and groaned, tears burned my eyes. They glazed my face.

I sat in my stuffy pandemic bedroom and thought I might never stop crying. The revelation that Black Americans were not alone in this, that others around the world believed that Black Lives Matter broke something in me, some immutable belief I’d carried with me my whole life. This belief beat like another heart— thump —in my chest from the moment I took my first breath as an underweight, two-pound infant after my mother, ravaged by stress, delivered me at 24 weeks. It beat from the moment the doctor told my Black mother her Black baby would die. Thump.

That belief was infused with fresh blood during the girlhood I’d spent in underfunded public school classrooms, cavities eating away at my teeth from government-issued block cheese, powdered milk, and corn flakes. Thump . Fresh blood in the moment I heard the story of how a group of white men, revenue agents, had shot and killed my great-great-grandfather, left him to bleed to death in the woods like an animal, from the second I learned no one was ever held accountable for his death. Thump . Fresh blood in the moment I found out the white drunk driver who killed my brother wouldn’t be charged for my brother’s death, only for leaving the scene of the car accident, the scene of the crime. Thump.

This is the belief that America fed fresh blood into for centuries, this belief that Black lives have the same value as a plow horse or a grizzled donkey. I knew this. My family knew this. My people knew this, and we fought it, but we were convinced we would fight this reality alone, fight until we could no more, until we were in the ground, bones moldering, headstones overgrown above in the world where our children and children’s children still fought, still yanked against the noose, the forearm, the starvation and redlining and rape and enslavement and murder and choked out: I can’t breathe . They would say: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

I cried in wonder each time I saw protest around the world because I recognized the people. I recognized the way they zip their hoodies, the way they raised their fists, the way they walked, the way they shouted. I recognized their action for what it was: witness. Even now, each day, they witness.

They witness injustice.

They witness this America, this country that gaslit us for 400 fucking years.

Witness that my state, Mississippi, waited until 2013 to ratify the 13th Amendment.

Witness that Mississippi didn’t remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag until 2020.

Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.

They witness our fight too, the quick jerk of our feet, see our hearts lurch to beat again in our art and music and work and joy. How revelatory that others witness our battles and stand up. They go out in the middle of a pandemic, and they march.

I sob, and the rivers of people run in the streets.

When my Beloved died, a doctor told me: The last sense to go is hearing. When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.

I hear you.

I love you.

We love you.

We ain’t going nowhere.

I hear you say:

— Ta-Nehisi Coates Guest-Edits THE GREAT FIRE , a Special Issue — Breonna Taylor’s Beautiful Life , in the Words of Her Mother — An Oral History of the Protest Movement’s First Days — Celebrating 22 Activists and Visionaries on the Forefront of Change — Angela Davis and Ava DuVernay on Black Lives Matter — How America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers Stifles Reform — Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair now and get full access to VF.com and the complete online archive.

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn ward is a two-time national book award winner for fiction. in 2016, she edited the anthology *the fire this time.*, cocktail hour.

By signing up you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Erin Vanderhoof

By Joy Press

By Dan Adler

By Greer Sinclair

Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

View all posts

• Undergraduate
• High School
• Architecture
• American History
• Asian History
• Antique Literature
• American Literature
• Asian Literature
• Classic English Literature
• World Literature
• Creative Writing
• Linguistics
• Criminal Justice
• Legal Issues
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• World Affairs
• African-American Studies
• East European Studies
• Latin-American Studies
• Native-American Studies
• West European Studies
• Family and Consumer Science
• Social Issues
• Women and Gender Studies
• Social Work
• Natural Sciences
• Pharmacology
• Earth science
• Agriculture
• Agricultural Studies
• Computer Science
• IT Management
• Mathematics
• Investments
• Engineering and Technology
• Engineering
• Aeronautics
• Medicine and Health
• Alternative Medicine
• Communications and Media
• Advertising
• Communication Strategies
• Public Relations
• Educational Theories
• Teacher's Career
• Chicago/Turabian
• Company Analysis
• Education Theories
• Shakespeare
• Canadian Studies
• Food Safety
• Relation of Global Warming and Extreme Weather Condition
• Movie Review
• Admission Essay
• Annotated Bibliography
• Application Essay
• Article Critique
• Article Review
• Article Writing
• Book Review
• Business Plan
• Business Proposal
• Capstone Project
• Cover Letter
• Creative Essay
• Dissertation
• Dissertation - Abstract
• Dissertation - Conclusion
• Dissertation - Discussion
• Dissertation - Hypothesis
• Dissertation - Introduction
• Dissertation - Literature
• Dissertation - Methodology
• Dissertation - Results
• GCSE Coursework
• Grant Proposal
• Marketing Plan
• Multiple Choice Quiz
• Personal Statement
• Power Point Presentation
• Power Point Presentation With Speaker Notes
• Questionnaire
• Reaction Paper
• Research Paper
• Research Proposal
• SWOT analysis
• Thesis Paper
• Online Quiz
• Literature Review
• Movie Analysis
• Statistics problem
• Math Problem
• All papers examples
• How It Works
• Money Back Policy
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• We Are Hiring

The Death of My Father, Essay Example

Pages: 3

Words: 761

Hire a Writer for Custom Essay

Use 10% Off Discount: "custom10" in 1 Click 👇

You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

Two years ago, just a few weeks before Christmas, my roommate, who was clearly upset, sat me down on the couch in our living room and broke the news to me that my father had died earlier that afternoon.

My father had been ill for a long time.  He had a long history of cardiac disease which was exacerbated by the fact that he was a chronic smoker, was overweight, and did not much care either or exercise or for healthy food (something which, I am sorry to say, I seem to have inherited from him!).  I knew he was in the hospital in New York, where his second wife was taking care of him as he prepared to have cardiac surgery to try to repair the damage that a lifetime’s worth of misuse had done to his heart.  He never made it through the surgery, dying right there on the operating table in spite of the surgical team’s attempts to save his life.

When my roommate first told me the news, I remember almost having difficulty putting the words together in that simple sentence to give it meaning. “Your father is dead” is not a difficult sentence to say, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. And then the sharpest pain hit me as the words drove home and I remember bursting into tears and crying on my into a pillow for a long time.  I remember being offered a glass of wine to calm my nerves down – it was a blood-red Cabernet Sauvignon – and it tasted bitter and sweet and lovely all at once.  I remember calling my brother – he was half-way across the country, going to graduate school in Michigan, and I hadn’t seen him for a while since we had both been so busy with school – and I remember him saying “This sucks”, which summed up the situation pretty nicely.  I remember we cried together, and I drank more wine, and a sick and sour sort of feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.  I also remember I went to bed and slept really heavily that night.

It was financially impossible for me to get to the funeral on such short notice, and my father had decided to be cremated and to forego any kind of memorial service, so there wouldn’t have been anything to attend even if I had been able to go.  But I took the next couple of days off and I remember, those first few days, feeling very tender, as though I had been sunburned and the skin had just peeled off.  I slept a lot those first few days, and ate very little, and took several walks out in the woods on my own.

My father and I had been estranged for a long time. He had been abusive and I was glad when he and my mother divorced and he was finally out of my life. I did not have any contact with him for a long time after the marriage broke up.  But in the last few years of his life, we had started emailing back and forth and even had had a few phone calls. He was planning to visit me next fall for  vacation, only he died before we got to see each other again.

That has been two years ago now.  I do not feel raw like I did when I first got the news, but it is not something I like to think about, either.  I do, though, have all the emails from the last few years that we sent back and forth to each other and I have a box of photographs that my mother sent me of the two of us when I was just a kid, before things went sour. Eventually, I will be brave enough to read through those emails and look through those pictures. But it is something that I know I am not ready for yet. In a way, though, I think part of me is almost looking forward to it, as I feel like it will cauterize a wound that has never quite closed up for me.  And I know that his death has given me a lot more sympathy for other people who are grieving, since I know now that it can take so many forms – some pretty conventional, some wildly inappropriate – and that even though you feel you have “gotten over it” with the passage of time, you know that it is always somewhere just below the surface of your skin.

Stuck with your Essay?

Get in touch with one of our experts for instant help!

Interview With My Great-Uncle, Essay Example

Ethical Dilemmas: Community Charities, Inc., Essay Example

Time is precious

don’t waste it!

Plagiarism-free guarantee

Privacy guarantee

Secure checkout

Money back guarantee

Related Essay Samples & Examples

Voting as a civic responsibility, essay example.

Pages: 1

Words: 287

Utilitarianism and Its Applications, Essay Example

Words: 356

The Age-Related Changes of the Older Person, Essay Example

Pages: 2

Words: 448

The Problems ESOL Teachers Face, Essay Example

Pages: 8

Words: 2293

Should English Be the Primary Language? Essay Example

Pages: 4

Words: 999

The Term “Social Construction of Reality”, Essay Example

Words: 371