I run a course – an intimate course, I should add, as intimacy is the subject of this blog post – on how we might monetise the long and tedious and emotionally draining process of writing a long form memoir by thinking about publishing some of our chapters as essays. Or, more precisely, because this is what I did when I first ventured into exploring the personal narrative – I wrote the essays first and got them published, and then looked at ways to add a narrative and link them all together into some kind of book-length venture – This is how Sins of My Father came about.

Anyway, to cut to the core – the course sold out pretty quickly and now has a waiting list and a few people asked me whether I can give some advice of how to do this, so I might be scrabbling a bit here, but I will give it a go:

Phillip Lopate in his introduction to The Art of The Personal Essay contradicts the general view that the personal essay is some kind of subcategory of the essay, and instead wants us to celebrate it as ‘one of the most approachable and diverting types of literature we possess.’ Its hallmark, he reminds us, is intimacy, ‘the writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom.’ He also, quoting Holman and Harman’s A Handbook to Literature, characterises the ‘informal’ essay (as opposed to the traditional essay, which is not a personal essay) by ‘the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humour, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme, freshness of form, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic.’ I love this last definition – there is something so liberating about tackling a big topic with a personal framework, because selection then is up to you as narrator – you can choose which details to select, because it is seen through your lens, and your lens can’t possibly encompass absolutely everything!

The conversational and confessional also allows the writer to set up a relationship with the reader, a kind of dialogue, and, what I have realised the more essays that I have written, the writer also sets up a dialogue between her essays. The essays are linked – of course they are because they come out of the same person – but it’s this relationship that they have with each other that then forms a body of work. Each of my essays has dug deeper into the subjects that interest me: what started with ‘It’s Only Skin‘, progressed into a research-led essay about intergenerational relationships in the 1980s, where the ‘I’ the personal was more in the selection of detail and research topics rather than a direct reference on the page, and yet my personality (I hope) is still very much in this essay.

And then there is the question of what goes into an essay rather than a memoir? Why choose the essay form in the first place? Joan Didion comes to mine, and her essay ‘In Bed‘ – short and sweet, but deeply invested in interrogating what it feels to be suffering from a migraine. Of course there are writers – and very good writers – who have made whole books from a condition like this, Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia comes to mind. And Marina does this by testing her role as writer and researcher to the limits, seeing insomnia, not simply as a personal hinderance, but flipping our understanding. Benjamin explores not simply the sleeplessness, not the lack, but the active pursuit of sleep, as a state of longing.

A brilliant example of an essay that manages to be true to its essay form, but also betrays itself to a certain degree because I could so imagine this essay being the condensed version of an entire book, is Scott Russell Sanders’, ‘Under the Influence‘, about his dad’s alcoholism.

I’m going to go now and leave you with the opener and a link to the essay, here. If you are considering writing the personal essay, you must read this. A triumph in emotional punch, brevity and originality.

‘My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food – compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, aged sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsakes on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue so long as memory holds.’