Reading Essays

You see, the problem is that you’re not a writer…
CC-BY-SA Nina Paley

I read fiction. I make no bones about that.

I read the occasional memoir. I did a project on memoirs. But that was in college.

I read pages and pages of academic criticism. And many pages more. But that was also in college.

I started reading theatre. First Shakespeare, then Corneille, Racine, Molière, Hugo, Sartre and much more.

Long before, when I was reading Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie and J.K. Rowling, I started writing essays. I had no clue how they looked. I had no clue how they sounded. I’d read some of my mother’s essays and articles, but that was about it.

Through the years that followed, I moved on to Toni Morrison, Dickens, Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Margaret Atwood. And I kept writing essays.

Now, finally, I have begun to read essays. And finally, I have understood the true meaning of the writer as thief, searching constantly for shiny tricks and turns of phrase to carry away, hoard, reconfigure and sell.

I started with Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. My favorite thing about the book is its cover. Oh, the essays have punchy beginnings and, often, punchy endings. There are a few, just a few, which have that well-I-knew-that-but-I-just-didn’t-say-it feeling that the best essays often give me. But I see most of them as privileged whining. Still, I often learn best from the things with which I disagree deeply and fundamentally. I learned a lot from Meghan Daum. I learned that it takes a kind of bravery to put certain things in print. I learned that there’s value in writing unflinchingly about the unspeakable parts of the self. I learned that I will not write an essay thinking, “Even a bad reaction is a reaction.”

Now, I’m reading A Place to Live, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s translation of selected essays by Natalia Ginzburg. It’s reopened my eyes to what drew me to nonfiction in the first place–the innovative turns of thought, the eye for odd details, the mind on the page. Ginzburg uses no lengthy words. Ginzburg writes simply, with deep feeling.

There’s room for the innovative. There’s room for the amusing. I enjoy writing innovatively and with humor. But I aim to write simply, with deep feeling.

That’s the most difficult, most vulnerable kind of writing to do.