What I Am Not Yet, I Am
Thomas Larson
3.2
Like all glacial movement, literary time moves slowly: Any turn from the Christian drama in life-writing would have to wait for the plays of Shakespeare, the essays of Montaigne, and the novels of Cervantes, all to large degree heretical writers. Strangely, too, it is not until 1782 that we have the first secular autobiography, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And one hundred years later, Tolstoy’s post-Christian mashup, Confession, a religious-cum-spiritual-cum-philosophical polemic whose goal is to free the author from his religion by throwing out the supernatural impulses and keeping the charitable practices, a true reformation of one author’s belief. Click here to continue reading.
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Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person
Amanda Ake
3.2
In the first pages of her newest essay collection, I’ll Tell You in Person, Chloe Caldwell writes about scribbling “skip” on pink sticky-notes that she placed over parts of her first book before handing it to her dad. I drew huge brackets around that paragraph in my copy, because the thought of sharing my writing with family members has always caused me intense anxiety. At age twelve, I burned my first manuscript in my family’s wood fire. When I handed the loose pages to my older sister, whose additional two years allowed her to add wood to the 500 degree stove, all I felt was relief. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone, especially my closest loved-ones, seeing a piece of my written work that I was not absolutely, one hundred percent proud of. Click here to continue reading.
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Interview with Gail Griffin
Renée E. D'Aoust
3.2
In the most natural way, we try to get our hands and heads around grief by thinking, “She’s not suffering the way I am,” or “My loss isn’t as great as his,” or “They didn’t know her the way I did so they can’t be hurting as much” or “I shouldn’t feel so sorry for myself; look at what they’re going through.” I’ve done it; I’ve heard others do it. Grievers, in their lonely travails, are trying to fit the enormity that has broken into their lives into some kind of context where it takes its place, so they begin to compare. Were Maggie’s friends hurt more than Neenef’s? Were his friends worse off because their friend was not only gone but a murderer? I wish we could somehow escape that trap and simply accept that every grief is different, that grievers have disparate needs, and that whatever hurts needs healing. I wonder if that competitive tendency masks other feelings—anger or resentment that can’t find voice. I tried hard in Events to see the complexity of grief clearly and give every feeling legitimacy and space. Click here to continue reading.
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On Best American Essays 1989
Alysia Sawchyn
3.2
I picked up The Best American Essays 1989 because it was published the year of my birth. Self-interest collided with the embarrassing realization that I know little about the time into which I was born. Thinking about the 1980s in America, I came up with rough strokes of excess and their attendant backlash: MTV and the Judas Priest trial, shoulder pads, the AIDS crisis and Ronald Regan’s unwillingness to provide assistance, big hair, and crack cocaine. And the 1980s as a decade of creative nonfiction? Embarrassingly sparse: Annie Dillard--An American Childhood and the sun crawling behind the earth’s shadow in “Total Eclipse”— Cynthia Ozick’s essay “Drugstore in Winter,” and Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. Click here to continue reading.
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