Notes on Reflections on Everything

All my essays are personal essays. I’m not inviting debate here, I don’t think all essays are personal essays, but I do think all of mine are. Perhaps that’s why I’m so defensive of the personal essay form. I would make a terrible journalist, probably, and by some metrics these same failings make me a terrible research student. I can’t write anything without putting something of myself into it.

It’s not that I am not also bored of the personal essay, in some ways. We are saturated with them, after all. Everyone’s pet hate du jour is the essays which come so often before recipes. ‘Everyone’ includes me too, and I really do just want to know how much flour for these lemon bars, I don’t care about the time your husband licked lemon juice off your stomach. It’s more fraught these days, too, all about the cultivation of the self — our opinions, our journeys, our brand. We are all a solid individuated ‘whole’, where even a fractured, splintered sense of self coalesces into a singular identity: Oh yes, she’s the one who tweets about having a ‘fractured, splintered sense of self.’ Nobody could be blamed for losing faith in the personal essay when the Instagram caption exists. The taxonomy of what makes something ‘personal’ and what makes it an ‘essay’ is one which becomes ever more blurred and ever more boring.

I write confessional poetry (I must confess, before moving forward) so perhaps my need to jump so clumsily to the defence of something so very everywhere and so often nothing to do with me comes from there. Or perhaps it comes from lapsed Catholic sensibilities; the Internet is the other side of the confession box, every tweet a supplication, every social media blocker a stand-in for ten Hail Marys. But, forgive me, I think it’s less personal than that. I mean to say I don’t think it’s just me, my preferences, that I find so convincing in calling the personal essay important. Vital, really. I have read so many people’s lives into mine, and carry them with me, a gaggle of conflicting voices braiding together to become the knot of my own. But as I said, more than personal, some essayists transcend the boundaries of their form and become proxies for a certain era, for time itself.

One such essayist is Joan Didion, most famous for her writing on Californian subcultures. I have read two books of essays by Didion and come to the conclusion that I am not a fan. She just doesn’t do for me what she does for others. One of those ‘others’ is Alice Bolin, whose collection of essays Dead Girls: Notes on Surviving an American Obsession exploded onto the scene (okay, my personal Goodreads home page) in 2018. I was excited, and then I was disappointed. There were a couple of essays in there which I found spellbinding (the title essay itself is very good, but thoroughly misleading as a title essay), but there were more that I found difficult to get through. Mostly, there was a lot of Didion. Bolin’s love for Didion, complicated and considered, sparks off the page; I made it through the majority of Dead Girls not because I was interested in what Bolin had to say about Didion herself but because of that loving complexity, the jaded reverence. There is a lot to be said for bearing witness to someone else’s relationship with the things they care about, the things they say have shaped them.

There is also a lot to be said for becoming aware that something will come to shape you. In fact, I think Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) has already done some shaping, if it’s prompted me to write this piece (and it has), when I haven’t been able to articulate all that much for months. It is uniquely exciting, ecstatically emotional, to find an essay which makes sense of a puzzle you didn’t know you were trying to solve. It feels like providence itself to find a collection of essays jostling side by side, every single one of them solving a different puzzle. Tolentino is doing for me what I know Didion does for others, but it seems reductive to say ‘she is my Didion’. Instead I just think I want to read every woman’s story for the rest of my own.

It is, naturally, women whose stories I mostly want to read. It is women’s voices we are all starved of, in the beginning, and coming to them — seeking them out — is a fucking revelation. We are always embarrassed, especially if we are women ourselves, to have not heard them all along. But it isn’t our fault. Tolentino writes, in an essay on the heroine novel, that ‘male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one, where ‘[female] literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman.’ To exist as a woman is to live in that tension between the human condition and the ‘female condition’, your own personal condition constantly torn between specificity and generalisation. What Tolentino writes on the novel (via de Beauvoir) could just as easily be said about the essay. It is the constant burden of women who write that they should have to grapple with the question of women’s writing. Men tell everybody’s story, we — supposedly — can only tell our own. It is here that I come to what I’ve been skirting around all this time, in a way.

In April of this year, my dad was diagnosed with a Grade 4 glioblastoma, the most deadly form of brain cancer. I have been wanting to write about it ever since, not knowing how, not knowing what constitutes exploitation; but knowing that when I read what others have written about cancer and grief and the complexities of family, I feel held. This essay is not that essay. I’m not sure I will ever be brave enough to write it. That essay will be jagged and bitter and the product of being an only child, having nobody to show it to beforehand, offer it up, ask ‘Is this how it feels to you, too?’ I have not found anything which sufficiently talks about anticipatory grief, either. Not for a twenty-five year old. Not for a daughter.

I wrote a poem about it at the end of April. He hasn’t seen it yet, but others have. At the Surrey Poetry Festival in June I stood in a small conference room filled almost entirely with people (poets) I know and said ‘My dad is dying and it’s all I can think about at the moment, so this is for him’. Weeks later, at Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall, I stood in a larger, ornate room filled almost entirely with strangers and said, simply, ‘This is for my dad.’ I want to talk about it all the time, and I never want to talk about it at all. I think I want to write about it more than I want to talk about it, but I needed the people at those festivals to know what that poem was about, in different ways. I didn’t want him missing from the room. Going forward, talking about my dad in any long, narrative way will always carry the weight of those questions: how not to erase him from his own story, and how to tell mine.

But all these are questions I think are always and increasingly vital. To read the personal essay is to come face to face with difference, to invite the heteroglossia of human connection into your hands and mind. There is something profound in the solidarity of reading another’s words without them present. So much of our politics is a cacophonous performance of social media presence that we forget that there are quieter forms of solidarity too. Tolentino, talking about the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, relates a moment of realisation among the women in the group, that ‘[difference] was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution.’ We do not always have to sit in the same narrative, we do not have to write the same essays. We can instead become dedicated to knowing how not to erase others from their own story, and how to — each of us — tell our own.

Tolentino, again, says ‘[feminist hashtags] have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else.’ I’m reminded here of my own feminist network, with whom I’ve cried and raged and stood in rapt silence bearing witness to the words of others. Some of those involved I know better than others, some I see once in a blue moon and think of every day, all of them are radically and beautifully not the same as me. To pursue totalising sameness as politics is to fail to grasp anything like true liberation. Being with others who grasp the importance of difference and of messiness feels a bit like reading all those essays, hearing all those voices, and still having my own.

I haven’t actually read The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion’s ‘grief book’ (to summarise and trivialise it somewhat). The excerpts I’ve come across have made me ache, in that slow sorry good way some things do. But I am not prepared for its entirety, for the ‘whole’ of someone else’s grief. I can only bear it in pieces, knowing nobody else has ever been exactly who I am right now scratching at me like a new tattoo. There are differences I have not yet steeled myself against, ways in which I want something to have already been written which describes precisely what I’m going through. It doesn’t exist, and it won’t unless I write it, which can be as profoundly lonely an experience as it can be relieving and kind. I want to offer this to you, not knowing that you’re there. I am reaching across the gulf of everything we haven’t felt together, hoping to brush fingers if not hold hands.

Related posts:

I could have stayed with the “civil” engineer who liked to beat my body and put it back together with loving words I could have stayed on the private island with the fisherman but I sensed something…

Anubhav leads the Hacker Materials Research Group, where his research focuses on applying computing to accelerate the process of finding new materials for functional applications. Anubhav leads the…

em um dia qualquer desta semana fui acordada pela obra interminável de um dos vizinhos do meu prédio. levantei, tomei meu café, brinquei com minhas cachorras e resolvi colocar uma playlist qualquer…