The Personal Essay's Resurgence
For better or worse thanks to Substack and all the rest
This post discusses the following:
History of the personal essay.
Asks what makes an essay memorable and therefore good?
Explains why I think “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese is a good example of mastery of the form.
Provides links to online items, some free and some not.
Ends with a curated bibliography for further reading.
*Trigger warning: There are a lot of lists in this post. If you hate lists—sorry (not sorry?).
The Essay is Surging
I suspect that since the pandemic people have returned to reading work that probes the relationship between the self and its world out of a desire to derive meaning from being. The questions "Why am I here?" and "What can I do about it?" speak to the emotional and psychological burdens of uncertainty.
Through reading the works of others and writing about our own experiences and thoughts we seek to make sense of them in a social context. In other words, readers connect to writers and writers connect to their readers through shared recognition evidenced in the essay.
However, much of what I read online isn’t memorable. The demand for instant gratification and speed results in a lot of half-cooked essays being posted. Most of the examples I discuss here come from the ancient analog world of print, in which speed to publication is an oxymoron.
I have also linked to some fine writers whose essays appear on Substack and are memorable. This is by no means an exhaustive list for the simple reason that the best stuff is paywalled. My links are to free posts.
Much of what I’ve seen on Substack lacks research, depth of insight or the literary skills needed to elevate an essay from mediocre to memorable. It’s too easy to click publish before a piece has reached a safe temperature to feed to others. My own guilt is evident, too, which is why I’m slowing down and posting less frequently. I’m taking the time to revisit what I know about craft, form, and story. I do this by reading like a writer.
Writing something that sticks to memory and, therefore, stimulates both emotion and intellect, requires time for reflection and rewrites.
With this in mind, I recently reread “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese, first published in 1966 in Esquire and collected in a volume of Talese’s essays titled, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays. It’s a wonderful piece that is memorable for many reasons I’ll get into below.
Origins of The Personal Essay
The personal essay as a literary form can be traced back to classical times. We know that ancients in Europe and Asia wrote them, including Seneca and Kenko, because their work survives for us to read.
The origins of the form as we know it today is credited to the Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne, who lived from 1533 to 1592. Born to a noble family he was educated only in Latin during his early life, which meant that for a time he couldn’t communicate with anyone who didn’t understand Latin. His French developed later. This seems to me a sign that he was destined to become a writer, given the sense of isolation this situation would have created. He had no choice but to cultivate a life of the mind early.
Following a career in the law, serving the King, and later as Mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne retired to his library to write his Essays (Essais in French, meaning “attempts” or “trials”) at the age of 38.
Montaigne didn’t believe that doing so was narcissistic or solipsistic, but a way of communicating a common humanity between himself and readers everywhere. He chose to write in the vernacular French of the day rather than Latin in order to reach as many people as possible.
His curiosity, self-deprecating voice, and focus on the minutiae of daily life made him popular reading at the time and also relevant to our time. His insistence that we look to our personal experiences and learn from them has been a powerful model for not only writing the personal essay but for living a meaningful life.
Following Montaigne’s time, the essay grew into a mainstay of newspapers and pamphlets throughout Europe, the UK, and later throughout North America. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from 1729 is perhaps one of the most well known from that time.
Later, in the English tradition we also have the works of Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell spanning more than a century to review and consider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, H.L. Mencken, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, M.F.K. Fisher, and Elizabeth Hardwick are but a few of the writers whose work grew an American body of literary essays over the same period of time.
While Canadians such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondaatje, Miriam Toews, and Ian Brown are but a few who’ve turned to personal essays to make cultural and personal connections on all manner of topics.
Other parts of the world brought us astonishing work from the likes of Helen Garner, David Malouf, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Natalia Ginzburg, Ivan Turgenev, Lu Hsun, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Aminatta Forna, who’ve served up insights into their own experiences across cultures, histories and geographies.
The global nature of the essay as a literary genre can’t be denied. Writers on every continent have turned to it as a way to develop their own knowledge and understanding of what it is to be a person walking in this world.
The American writers who reignited the essay’s popularity in the middle of the last century rose up during the 1960s together with something called the New Journalism, a term coined by Tom Wolfe to describe a kind of nonfiction writing that favored the writer’s subjective point of view while reporting on some aspect of the wider world. The balance these writers struck between inner subjectivity and external realities is deeply affecting to me, even though much of what they covered occurred before I was born or when I was very young.
Yet, their work remains relatable over time. I attribute this to the subjective sensibilities they brought to their material, which is what enlivens historical events that may seem inconsequential to a new generation. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Nora Ephron were the writers most closely associated New Journalism.
Following in their footsteps came other writers who also brought their own sensibilities to the essay but often in the more discursive style of Montaigne. Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, David Sedaris, Jo Ann Beard, Margaret Renkl, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino and Ta-Nehisi Coates are but a few writers of this century who’ve mastered the form in their unique ways. Each writer is wholly singular in their sensibilities on the page. No one else could write their stories their way, arriving at the same conclusive understandings.
Characteristics of the Best Personal Essays
When I say “the best” essays, what I really mean are those I remember forever. The examples I give throughout this discussion are works worthy of revisits.
The most memorable essays are conversational in tone, told by a trustworthy narrator who is both reliable and sincere. Readers believe they are receiving the writer’s best understanding of the situation being written. When the writer engages in speculation she lets us know it.
These essays are democratic, valuing experience over status. There is an implicit assumption that there is a universal humanity being expressed, discovered, and addressed.
The authors are good at interrogating their ignorance and using their own weakness or failures as subjects worth investigating in order to understand the self. Self-contradiction is common within an essayist’s body of work. In his anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate gives the example of Edward Hoagland, who’s a gentle naturalist in one essay, delicately rubbing a turtle’s tummy, while in another he’s into raunchy sex that causes pain.
In the case of Joan Didion, her cool is mitigated by her nerves; while David Foster Wallace’s depression contrasts with his lively curiosity and deep empathy for others, including lobsters.
Contrariness is a common technique to make a personality interesting. By objecting to some shared value and exploring this opposition, an essayist creates tension—a reason to read—and this can open a fresh view towards the subject.
Self-righteousness and polemic are literary death. No one will stick with a writer whose position is one-sided to a fault. It’s better to challenge one’s own assumptions in order to discover how one arrived at them than to simply enumerate them. Sometimes a socialist will discover her inner capitalist in the process, and this tension becomes the point.
The essay resists a prescribed structure. The writer determines the form and style with each piece. Sometimes solemn and at other times cheeky, the form, tone and style will vary to suit the situation and the story.
In their text, Tell It Slant, Miller and Paola devote a whole chapter reviewing the many possible forms or structures personal essays can take. One example is Jo Ann Beard’s piece, “The Fourth State of Matter,” which I’ve linked to in the bibliography. Inspired by her experience of a mass shooting in her own workplace at The University of Iowa, the essay actually braids this main plot together with three subplots: her divorce, her dying dog, and a squirrel in her attic. Part of the reader’s journey is understanding how all of these fit together as she presents scenes, images and metaphors braiding these strands into a satisfying whole.
“In the final analysis, the personal essay represents a mode of being. It points a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world…[Montaigne’s] recognition that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one had to make oneself up from moment to moment (Lopate, xliv).”
Reading only the best work and reflecting on its content and structure will no doubt spark your own work.
To paraphrase Emerson, first we read, and then we write.
Reading “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese
One of the reasons I love this essay is that, we learn a great deal about Talese himself without the use of the word “I” coming up once. He is simultaneously in the piece and outside of it. His empathy for the world’s most famous and possibly wealthiest celebrity at the time is remarkable. He is the interpreter of Sinatra’s malady.
Talese weaves a complex, nuanced and vivid picture of life as it was for Sinatra and his entourage in the form of story. This isn’t a static portrait at all, but a story that builds from scene to scene to a final inevitable and irreversible conclusion. Backstory is sewn into the front story when the reader needs to know it and not before or after.
Frank Sinatra, rich, famous, and still working hard at age 50 can be brought down by a common cold. The front story occurs over the timespan of Sinatra’s cold. The backstory covers his whole life, how he came to be the big man brought low by a micro-organism that briefly robs him of his voice, the thing responsible for his fame and pays the salaries of some 60 people associated with Sinatra, Il Padrone.
Talese engages in deep immersive reporting. He witnesses most of the front story and the backstory was corroborated through interviews with scores of people who knew Sinatra, including family, friends, colleagues, employees and others. Using all of this material he wove a unified story in his own voice, showing the ordinary humanity within the great celebrity, the wealthy high status guy with possible mob ties, varied business interests, multiple ex-wives and girlfriends and children, who was sentimental, loyal, loving and stood up for others.
At the point in his life being chronicled, age 50, Sinatra is struggling to remain relevant. He’s competing with The Beatles in 1965 for the attention of young people. His values aren’t shared by the young bucks taking over Hollywood, as evidenced in a scene with Harlan Ellison, a hot young screenwriter at the time, whose wardrobe choices offend Sinatra.
Talese never says, “Sinatra was having a hard time coping with a changing cultural landscape.” Instead he gives us the scenes and we come to this understanding as readers. From sentence to sentence we are engaged in causal relationships that build a story with tension rather than a mere character study.
He shows us Sinatra’s contradictions: pettiness and generosity; toughness and vulnerability; desire for both attention and solitude. It’s a story that renders Sinatra’s life meaningful.
Careful word choices also move the story and deepen meaning at the same time. At one point Talese describes the “tense tight pants” of a Hollywood starlet. This deliberate choice of adjectives evokes understanding of the culture of LA. These skinny, beautiful women are anxious, worried about their status, who’s in or out, on the way up or down. And so is Sinatra.
Later, the ending reinforces the beginning: Frank Sinatra was an only child craving attention who grew to be a man with too much attention, desperate for solitude from time to time and also the relevance only the public can bequeath. His voice made it all possible and a common cold could take it away, but at least he can be alone for a few days while he recovers.
The essay is pure brilliance, and I hope you dig it up at your local library, a used bookstore or through Esquire’s archives online, which require a subscription to access.
Now, on to the meat of this post, a reading list and bibliography to support your own learning as you read like a writer.
Reading Lists
Links to Substack Essayists
Amazement Seeker by Rona Maynard:
Rona writes beautifully about a variety of subjects from her dog, to her family, art and things that happened.
How To Evolve by Ros Barker:
Ros’s Stack is devoted to helping readers tell their own stories both through writing prompts and challenges and also with her own terrific essays that pack a punch.
“You Can Just Leave” at Club Reticent by Valerie
The strength of this piece lies in its prose and brutal honesty.
The Villager by Tom Cox
In this essay Tom writes about his father in a way that brings him to life on the page.
Sonia Witak —
Witak writes about conservation and its relationship to colonialism and myth making in the first essay. It’s a long and terrific read with a solid argument and plenty of supporting evidence that is interesting and thought provoking. In the second she writes with clarity and feeling about choosing to remain childless. Two very different subjects are handled with grace and taste.
Memoir Land publishes a round up of personal essays from around the web every Monday here:
Bibliography of Essays and Books
Essays Available Online
Beard, Jo Ann. "Maybe It Happened." O, The Oprah Magazine.
https://www.oprah.com/omagazine/jo-ann-beard-memoir
Beard, Jo Ann. "The Fourth State of Matter." The New Yorker, June 24, 1996.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter
Berry, Wendell. "Feminism, The Body, and The Machine." Collected in What Are People For?
https://religioustech.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Berry-Wendell-Feminism-the-Body-and-the-Machine.pdf
This provocative essay from 1989 challenges feminist and capitalistic perspectives on marriage and domesticity.
Clune, Michael. “The Anatomy of Panic: A Personal History of Anxiety.” Harpers, May, 2023. https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-anatomy-of-panic/
Forna, Aminatta. “Where There Is No Hospital: How a Book Can Save Lives.” Orion, March 10, 2022. https://orionmagazine.org/article/where-there-is-no-hospital/
Sedaris, David. “A Long Way Home." The New Yorker, November 25, 2024.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/25/a-long-way-home
Smith, Zadie. "The Fall of My Teenage Self." The New Yorker, November 27, 2023.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/27/the-fall-of-my-teen-age-self
Books
Beard, Jo Ann. The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard. 2021.
Beard's approach differs significantly from the New Journalists, with writing that often reads like fiction.
Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? 1990.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 1968.
Didion, Joan. The White Album. 1979.
Gutkind, Lee. The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction. 2024.
Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. 1994.
Lopate, Phillip. The Golden Age of the American Essay 1945-1970. 2021.
Miller, Brenda and Suzanne Paola. Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Third Edition. 2019.
Montaigne, Michel. The Essays. Available from Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3600
Talese, Gay. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays. 1997.
The title essay was first published in Esquire in 1966.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. 2016 reprint.
I studied with Lopate at Bennington. Just now getting my essay collection published (2027, actually), and it was the hardest/best work I've ever done. And hey, AI can't tell our personal stories. Wonderful post. Self-righteousness as literary death ... indeed.
Hey! We agree on something. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is an extraordinary essay and one I teach often.