On the Personal and Political in the Essay

I think there is a sleight of hand that happens with writing personal essays. For most essayists that I know, myself included, the question of course is always: How much of your personal life are you going to reveal and divulge in an essay? Especially when you are writing about the people in your life, how you are exploring those people and allowing space for those people to still have a life of their own outside of how you characterize them. For me, that is a political question in and of itself: Who gets to be observed and who gets to be an observer, who gets to have an interior life, or is afforded an interior life, on the page, and who is not?

When I create pieces of nonfiction, I’m hyperaware of that and I try to acknowledge both the power I have as the author and also the fact that I am drawn to writing about people who, historically, in western literature, on the page, are denied interiority or are usually there as props, or as comic relief, or as examples of the worst of the worst. By which I mean, that’s usually how black women and girls are positioned in most literature if we’re written about at all. And so, knowing that’s sort of a loaded history of how the ideas that I embody appear on the page in western literature, I’m pretty cognizant of that and the essay as a way of writing against that whole lineage, that whole tradition.

On the Personal Essay in the US

For the last couple of years in the US, personal essays have been really derided. And there’s a lot to say about the economy of the personal essay right now, especially in online spaces, and, you know, we’re seeing, on the backs of personal essays by women in particular, a lot of online media empires were built in the 00s and into the teens too. So for the last fifteen years or so there was a rise in online publishing that was really on the back of personal essays being published oftentimes by women writers who had been unpublished before and who were really encouraged to be as base as possible in the personal essay.