On Coming to the Essay

Both of my parents were journalists. I grew up on the West Coast. My mini-rebellion of sorts against my parents was becoming a fiction writer. I wrote three novels, between ’80 and ’92, and I was trying to write my fourth novel, but I just could not write that book as fiction. There were a lot of influences pushing me in this direction, not least of which was Phillip Lopate’s magisterial introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay and the interviews that Phillip gave when that book was published. At the same time, I was reading a lot of people like Renata Adler and George W. S. Trow. I was watching a lot of performance art and stand-up comedy. And with the poet Heather McHugh, my colleague at the University of Washington, I was watching a lot of documentary film. So I was reading a lot of anthropological autobiography; I was watching a lot of self-conscious and self-reflexive doc film; and I was watching and listening to a lot of people like Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Sandra Bernhard, Rick Reynolds, Richard Pryor. But in my creative writing courses I was still teaching Flannery O’Connor and Chekhov stories, and I realized I was deeply uninterested in the fiction I was trying to write and the fiction I was trying to teach and the fiction my students were writing.

This fourth book of mine, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, became my first book of wayward or collage-like nonfiction. Over the last twenty, twenty-five years I’ve been just doubling and tripling down on that particular gesture. My doc film Lynch: A History is cine-essay. As is the film version of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel. In, say, Macbeth, the conflict is, obviously, between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth and also, of course, between and among other people. The conflict is between different human beings. And the way I see the essay form is that there’s a drama or war or conflict in the breast of the actual author, speaker, narrator. And for me, in a way, it’s just necessity being the mother of invention. I’m simply better at exploring, rather ruthlessly, relentlessly, candidly and usefully, I hope, the drama within my own breast.