I JUST READ YOUR INTERVIEW ON MASK MAGAZINE, AND IT WAS LOVELY AND INSIGHTFUL. I AM JUST WONDERING IF YOU COULD EXPLAIN MORE OF YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE PERSONAL ESSAY? YOU HAVE WRITTEN PERSONAL ESSAYS BEFORE, LIKE ON THE GLOBE AND MAIL.
THANK YOU. I could, but it would turn into a personal essay. I think I’ve said before that all essays are personal, which is true insofar as you consider the origin story of the essay (were Montaigne’s essays anything but personal?) and the kind of person who is historically skilled as an essayist (a person whose chief argument is with herself). It’s like saying that all novels are romantic. It’s not a fact, but it’s truer than it looks if you know what “romantic” means—what I mean by it—in relation to narrative, which is that man alone among creatures can not only tell her own story, but can tell it with, as Faulkner said ages ago, an inexhaustible voice. In relation to the essay, “personal” means that the essayist does not want to speak for others, finding it hard enough to speak for her own mind, her own soul, whatever.
One problem with the “personal essay” is that it requires the essayist to speak too plainly and for too many people “as a woman,” “as a black woman,” “as a black queer woman,” rather than to write in a womanly style, a black womanly style, a black queer womanly style—a personal style, the thing I feel so passionately and contradictorily about. There are so many essays with no style which are subsequently not essays at all. Didion said style was character. Hardwick said style was fate. Someone else I’m sure has said what I believe, which is that style is argument (again, there is nothing more stylish than an argument raged against yourself, and there is nothing less stylish than an argument raged against people who don’t even care about you, which is one of the traps of what we now call “identity politicking” (never mind that in America all politics are identity politics)).
Another problem with the “personal essay” in our moment is that it mistakes the first person for the personal. An essay can’t just be about something that happened to you because you’re you. Everything has happened to someone; what new can you make of it is the question. There is nothing more personal than the connections you see between seemingly disconnected things, the ability to do so being, as I learned in an old episode of the X Files, “a mark of genius”; I just think it’s a mark of individuality, which is normal and easy to confuse with genius. Most geniuses are individuals, but most individuals aren’t geniuses, which is fine. We have enough geniuses. We need more and more individuals. There are a lot of people who know a lot, but knowing a lot is no reason to write an essay. Neither is feeling a lot. Neither is having learned a lot: a good essay is not a lesson but a relentless taking apart of the object(s).
The most personal essay and the longest I’ve written is yet to be published, because it’s all over the place, it tries too much, it’s too much of what I read and learn and research obsessively, too little about why I’m obsessed, in short because it’s a difficult realization of not why but how my brain works. The editorial response to this essay of mine is one, that it doesn’t properly work (I know; it’s my brain after all), and two, that it should be more about me and my life story and what it is in my life story specifically that impels me to think and watch and love and write about these things. I think the way I wrote this unpublished (and yes, not quite ready to be published) essay is as individual, specific, and crazy as the craziest stories of my life. I think if a) no one else would do it like me and b) I myself could not do it better, then I’ve succeeded.
I don’t mean that people should not tell stories from their lives in the form of essays. I’ve told stories from mine and always will. What I mean is to put an emphasis on form, as well as on style, because it’s form that gives meaning to experience; it’s not information, however personal. People in media complain that what we used to call “stories” we now call “content,” but a story is content, and an essay—a real essay—is totally, unbreakably a form.
(The interview in question is here at Mask Mag.)
(I could talk for much longer about what exactly are the forms of essays, but that would be a lecture for which I should probably be paid, except for the fact that I’m not that kind of professional. Most of my own essays I wouldn’t teach.)
