Personal essay

• Vs academic:
  • Stepping away from academic with the understanding that not everything can be proven, thus ‘essay’: try
  • Author will interrogate ignorance - what do I not understand and why?
  • Tries to get away from stiff voice and harness the everyday
  • more vulnerable/less formal
• Self-righteousness is the enemy of the personal essay
  • If you’re critiquing others, you had better be critiquing yourself, too.
  • Not didactic, interrogate yourself
  • The writer has to come in with a little extra humility, even if it’s something of a put-on
  • Self-deprecation is how to keep from alienating the reader (to an extent)
  • (If you want to not do this, satire is the path)
  • The reader forgives self-absorption in return for the warmth of candor
  • Can tilt comedic b/c of this
• Poetry and personal essay in conversation with each other
• Can cross over into fiction with reliable narrator (viz Nick in Great Gatsby)
• Writing exercise:
  • Timeline 1: Yearly highlight of writing
  • Timeline 2: Timeline of loss

  • Write for 10 minutes from that point of view:

    Whenever my partner reads one of my books, she tells me afterwards that she can always tell what I was thinking about when I was writing. For Toledot, she said she could tell that it was fallout of 2021 being “the year where all my friends die.”

    It’s become something of a joke, and with Nevi’im, I preempted her by asking once she’d finished, “So, what do you think I was thinking about?”

    “I would probably say “the way that relationships shift and settle over time” / “the way that changes in the circumstances of one’s own life can color the people around them”, and to what extent both of those are and are not “okay”, how one gets to interact on one’s own terms, but also knows that that can and will cause pain to the people around them.”

    It’s not not true.

    That’s not how things worked prior to that, though, at least not totally. Back in 2020, was when I published ally. That didn’t start as a book, but as a serial of sorts. Sure, it was this whole hypertext project of branching subjects, but I would come out with one subject at a time, perhaps once a week or so, until I’d amassed however many there are now. She didn’t have the option of telling me what she thought I was thinking about when I was writing each of those installments; she didn’t need to. Each of the installments was about a concrete thing. Each of the installments was explicitly what I was thinking about.

    That’s the danger in memoir, I suppose.

    That was when I was at my most vulnerable, back in the end of 2019 and into 2020. That was when I was most willing to pull together my fears and talk about them. I couldn’t talk about them one on one (a fact that led to at least one fight with my partner, who said, “I don’t like learning these things from you telling the world; I wish you’d tell me directly, first.”). I could only broadcast them, because in a crowd, you’re anonymous. I’m a no-one when I’m posting writing to be read by the world, because at that point, I disappear.

    I think that’s sort of what I wanted. There was catharsis in publishing this or that about sexuality or depression, sure, but what I wanted to do was to disappear into the crowd, to stop being Madison for a little bit, and just be a person: a nameless, faceless person among however many billion other nameless, faceless people. I got depressed. I felt happy. I felt pride and shame, I was just a person, despite me wearing that mask of individuality or visibility.

    I posted the rest of my stuff on Patreon after that, but my partner stopped reading stuff in installments and would only wait until she got her copy of the book to read it through. I wonder how much of that was a defense mechanism after so many months of deafening vulnerability.

    (Continue into essay for PS blog?)