1. “The Art of the Impersonal Essay”- Zadie Smith, New Yorker
The word “essay” derives from the French “essayer,” meaning “to try.” To write an essay is to try to communicate, to try to transport your ideas into another person’s mind. In one of my writing workshops, my red-haired professor once called an essay the “story of an idea.”
Most of us remember essays as dreaded exercises from our school years. Essays evoke academic drudgery; a stuffy, pretentious tone; rigid rubrics; neat, tidy outlines. The simple 6 letter word triggers flashbacks of cortisol-fueled nights trying to finish our 10 page Great Gatsby composition the night before the deadline.
In academic settings, the essay obeys a strict 5 paragraph structure. Each body paragraph follows a predictable pattern. The personal 1st person “I” is rejected in favor of the more objective, cooly composed 3rd.
In her erudite, elegant “The Art of the Impersonal Essay,” the incomparable Zadie Smith retraces her fraught relationship with the essay form—beginning with her anxiety-inducing A-level exams. One instructor’s six arrow model gave her a formula to follow. Though the rigid structures we learn in school can often feel restrictive, Smith found they made the overwhelming project of setting ideas to paper more manageable. “What had seemed an impossible task transformed into a practical matter of six little arrows.”
In our oversharing era of shocking, confessional essays, Smith wonders: should “I”—the writer behind the words—figure in a piece? Or should the writer operate behind the curtain, present but invisible like a mysterious, miraculous piece of machinery?
Though essays will always be limited by the writer’s opinions and beliefs, Smith imagines a great essay is less a confessional booth and more a common space. The essay is the equivalent of a public square, a site for discussion and debate. The essayist is a speaker on a soapbox: they must minimize “I” to build solidarity among “we.” “I” should be present not in the foreground, but the background of the essay.
Though I—too—was trained in academic settings where “I” was strictly forbidden, I think “I” occasionally has a place in the essay. Some of the best writing is deeply confessional (after all, whose guilty pleasure isn’t reading The Cut’s provocative personal essays?). The most viral pieces are often shocking or surprising disclosures with click-bait worthy titles.
“You Want to Marry My Husband?”
“The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger”
“My Friend Chooses How & When to Die”
As a reader, you may not have had the particular experience of being scammed by a stranger or losing a friend to assisted suicide, but you can relate to the universal experience of humiliation, of loss and grief. The particular “I” is often a portal to the universal “we.” Still, Smith’s essay was an interesting read.
2. “Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies”- Jia Tolentino, New Yorker
If the literary world were Us Magazine, last month, Elizabeth Gilbert would be splashed on the cover. In her incisive essay “Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies,” Jia Tolentino examines both Gilbert’s latest memoir, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, and her significance as a cultural icon.
Gilbert first catapulted to literary superstardom in 2006 with the publication of Eat, Pray, Love, her much-beloved memoir that traced her mid-thirties journey of self-discovery across Italy, India and Indonesia.
Though I always mocked her blockbuster memoir, I haven’t been able to entirely resist Gilbert’s charms. I’m one of the ten million views on her iconic Ted Talk “Your Elusive Creative Genius.” At least once a year, I reread her generous guide to creative living, Big Magic.
Gilbert’s exuberant enthusiasm and endless positivity are endearing. As Tolentino writes, her name evokes “watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling.”
But All the Way to the River is not just gelato and spaghetti. In her latest memoir, Gilbert tells the story of her doomed love affair with her best friend Rayya. When Rayya is diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer and given six months to live, Gilbert confesses her love, leaves her husband—in characteristically dramatic fashion—and boards an “end-stage rocket ship to the romantic stratosphere.”
All the Way to the River detonates with explosive (sometimes downright disturbing) revelations. Though Rayya is a recovering heroin addict, Gilbert enables her descent into drug-laden debauchery, providing her with enough cocaine and clean needles to alarm William S. Burroughs. At one point, Gilbert plans to kill the “love of her life” when she isn’t dying fast enough.
Needless to say, All the Way to the River paints a rather unflattering portrait of Miss Gilbert.
Tolentino is at her sharpest when she’s examining Gilbert’s contribution to the culture. Gilbert is a master of self-narration: she paved the way for Oprah-approved, soulful self help (would we ever have Cheryl Strayed or Brene Brown without the smash hit success of Eat, Pray, Love?). It’s largely because of Gilbert (and perhaps another self-indulgent writer, Carrie Bradshaw) that today’s young women view their lives as stories worth sharing on social media. In Gilbert’s universe, every stumbling block is a step on your healing journey, every boundary (no matter how selfish) is protecting your peace, every devastating break up is a path to self-love.
Tolentino sees Gilbert not just as a writer but as a symbol for how we mythologize ourselves, believing our mundane day to day lives are worthy of being broadcast to thousands of strangers on social media. As Tolentino writes, “Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women…have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.”
Gilbert speaks to our self-centeredness. She’s the embodiment of “main character syndrome”: in the saga of her life, other people are the supporting side characters to her starring role. Her personal relationships are just grist for the memoir mill.
Is it possible that Gilbert only destroyed her marriage and confessed her love for Rayya for the plot? Could she have heard “6 months to live” and thought, “This would make an excellent memoir”?
Maybe I’m cynical, but Gilbert seems like the sort of person who would seize a chance to cast herself in the starring role of someone else’s story.
If “I couldn’t help but wonder” is Carrie Bradshaw’s refrain, Gilbert’s is “and then I realized.” Gilbert is always on the edge of epiphany but after so many dramatic, destructive relationships, you can’t help but wonder: has she really learned anything?
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