There's another genre of personal essay that the essayist can't consciously do (I think), but which the editors of national magazines (or the NY Times style section) are able to unerringly sniff out like some kind of hunting dog:
The reflective essay by the woman -- and it's almost always a woman, for whatever reason -- who doesn't realize she's the villain of the piece. You know the genre, "My husband was clinically depressed and the children were annoying, and so I realized that after living for everyone else all my life, it was time to do something entirely for me, so I had an affair, then told my husband I was leaving him, and since my kids are resilient, they'll be fine."
That sort of essay can be incredibly successful, but it takes a very particular combination. You need someone who's a good writer, highly literate, and lacking enough in self-awareness that she gives all the clues she's an unreliable narrator without seeing them herself. You *also* need an editor who has a very keen sense of, "This, *this* will absolutely generate hate-clicks! Let's run it!"
The villain or the piece OR the moron of the piece. E.g. The "finance expert" from The Cut who somehow got caught in the most ludicrous scam (shoebox money lady).
Not a personal essay, but one of the higher-ups at my company once sent out an office-wide email warning against a crypto ATM scam he had fallen for. I think it was everybody's favorite email of the year.
The danger of writing a piece like that is that fine, you get your hate-clicks, but then you are "I left my husband and children for some dude" lady and I think that's usually it for you. CHH has thousands of paid subscribers. Lena Dunham is on her fourth book, David Sedaris is up to fifteen. Do the blitheringly un-self-aware types ever leverage their hate-clicks into careers?
I bet most of those people are happy in their narcissistic clouds though. I have a both a first order desire to care for my children and a strong second order desire to keep feeling that way, but objectively moving to Thailand and becoming a hedonist invested in my personal spiritual voodoo and local women is probably a fun life if you are a selfish jerk.
A subspecies of personal essay so many people *want* to think other people will read but that they won't - how backpacking in Tuscany/Bali/Costa Rica helped you discover yourself. People try to preface recipes on the Internet with these and that will usually lead to me skipping out on both the recipe and the essay.
So maybe everyone else already knows this, but I recently learned that the reason online recipes always have annoying rambling stories in front of them is for search engine optimization— Google ranks you higher the longer your post is, or something. Learning that has made me much more forgiving of these types of stories; turns out the writers don’t want to write them any more than I want to read them!
It's not just SEO - you can't copyright a recipe so there needs to be something to copyright. Still, there's a better way to do this. I like it when people are describing the traditions surrounding the dish, the occasions on which it's served, variations from the recipe presented, serving suggestions, or childhood memories about it. That kind of context makes it more fun. I do NOT need to hear about how fulfilling your expensive trip to this other culture was for the writer.
My favorite recipe writer is probably J. Kenji Lopez-Alt because he describes the why of each step, which is enormously helpful if you try and improvise somewhat.
In addition to this, I think there's also the issue around not being able to copyright recipes, but being able to copyright the annoying rambling opening.
The piece about the neighbors extorting two grand from you is still one of my favorites. It's weird and specific to you, but it's incredibly relatable. Who hasn't had a strange or outright bad neighbor? Seriously, a banger.
I know what you mean you mean about half-honest, half-coy pieces. I'd rather read any "Am I the Asshole" Reddit post than that. Yes, they are all fake, but they at least elicit a reaction from me!
If you aren't going to be honest, then at least be entertaining.
There's this great book called StoryGenius that has defined what makes a good story for me, and now I see that everywhere.
People are looking for stories to help them figure out how to navigate life. The ones that seem to pull on that feeling the most are the ones that everyone wants to read.
I suppose the same goes for personal essays. Even more so actually. Like, everyone has an anxious feeling that everyone hates them, even if it's tucked away in a distant corner of their mind. When you write about that actually happening, people want to see what they can learn from it.
Lots of the train wreck essays from The Cut are from people we don't get and would prefer to stay away from, but holy shit, how do they perceive things? And what can I add to my toolbox to ensure i can keep well clear of people like this? That's what keeps me reading.
Yeah it would be like if David Chase was, in his spare time, a mob hitman. The Sopranos would still be a good show about bad people even if the author is one of those bad people so depicted!
This was excellent, your point about how readers hate "half-self-awareness" especially. I usually reflexively say that writing is not therapy, but you make a strong case for the main way it *can* be therapeutic: in pushing the writer toward greater self-knowledge if, like you, they genuinely want to improve their craft.
Imo you should teach a creative nonfiction class (you could do it asynchronously online if you want to maintain your anonymity). You'd crush it.
“I thought that my story about dating a guy in my teens who was obsessed with my mom would be huge because it was just such a weird thing, but it wasn’t significantly more successful than any of my other personal essays!”
How do you measure the success of your articles? I’m a subscriber, and I click in nearly every new article you post, even if I don’t finish reading it because it lost my interest.
So how do you know if one article is more successful than the other? Number of likes and comments?
I’ve got an enduring guess as to your first name! Purely vibes based, no sleuthy stalking. Honestly still chasing the high of thinking PinkPantheress was “probably called Vicky or something”
One of the things that is worth considering why a particular "big personal essay" is written is how much the publication or editor is actively green lighting or encouraging said essays to be written because previous personal essays got tons of buzz and more important clicks. We may be "hate" reading said essay and making fun of how non-self aware or quite frankly deranged the writer comes across...but to the magazine or publication in question the only they compare about is did you read it or are you talking about it on your substack in a way that might get your readers to read it.
There are a lot of "downstream" consequences to the fact that newspapers/publications have a lot more data as to what stories actually get read (it's tragic in many ways, but there's a reason so many news orgs have slashed the budget for international news generally) and one "downstream" consequence is getting the same variations of the same story getting written over and over again because it's clear we're reading them. This was something I sort of came to realize when there became a zillion "trips to Trump country" stories. The thing is, a lot of these stories were reasonably well written, often had interesting quotes or anecdotes and sometimes even real political insight. But man they became...repetitive. To the point there became almost a template to these things; a description of traveling to some small town that sounds like the writer is on a safari when in fact they drove west on Interstate 80 for two hours, a conversation with an older man right around retirement age at a diner talking about how he doesn't like this or that Trump did but is still with him, a picture accompanying the article of the older man staring plaintively out the diner window, details about how the local factory closed 25 years earlier, various observations of a town in decline etc. Point being, these articles got churned out with such regularity they became fodder for derision given how derivative and cliche they became. But here's the thing, you know why they kept being written? We kept reading them. Same reason there is endless articles about campus controversies my entire life**.
An exchange from the movie "Private Parts" worth keeping in mind at all times
Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for - are you ready for this? - an hour and twenty minutes.
Pig Vomit: How can that be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given? "I want to see what he'll say next."
Pig Vomit: Okay, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Pig Vomit: But... if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer? "I want to see what he'll say next."
The hate watchers, the hate listeners, the hate readers can bizarrely be the target audience. And likely is part of why these "personal essays" are crafted the way they are crafted.
** There is no aspect of American life covered wildly out of proportion to its actual importance to American society then "controversies" at elite colleges; protests, a professor saying something beyond the pale, student group statements etc. Forget you're actual feelings at what ever "controversy" you're thinking of, the actual "controversary' does not deserve nearly as much coverage as about 50 other things happening in the country that day.
I’ve written a best-selling tell-all memoir — in my mind.
Various things hit me all day long that I could turn into essays. I have had the same thoughts about Sedaris, whom I absolutely adore (he once told me a family secret at a book-signing!) I could tell some compelling stories that would be made good by my framing of them, but I don’t wish to expose myself and people close to me in that way. So I keep these stories — and my framing of them — to myself.
I’ve considered publishing such pieces under a pseudonym, but I’d want to claim them.
There's are types of fictional comedy that has mostly disappeared that fit the mold of what CHH describes here as a good personal essay, without the downside of airing your dirty laundry in public, especially screwball comedies. Bridget Jones's Diary is written as basically a memoir, without the author necessarily having to personally own Bridget's personal screwups in the text itself. Once audiences lost their taste for screwball, the gap got filled with a lot of bad celebrity autobiographies that weren't funny enough to get over how annoying they were.
I've read a bit a David Sedaris and one essay by Lena Dunham. I didn't find Sedaris the least bit annoying and I found Dunham insufferable, I think the difference is that Sedaris writes with the intent of telling an entertaining story while Dunham expects you to be entertained because she's telling you a story.
The unlinked I’m-very-hot essay makes me think of some of the writing done when EmRata decided to show everyone she was an intellectual - granted, EmRata is indeed hot but that’s something that’s probably less profound to everyone else, as it’s not actually surprising that hot people exist and are liked and/or resented for being hot
There's another genre of personal essay that the essayist can't consciously do (I think), but which the editors of national magazines (or the NY Times style section) are able to unerringly sniff out like some kind of hunting dog:
The reflective essay by the woman -- and it's almost always a woman, for whatever reason -- who doesn't realize she's the villain of the piece. You know the genre, "My husband was clinically depressed and the children were annoying, and so I realized that after living for everyone else all my life, it was time to do something entirely for me, so I had an affair, then told my husband I was leaving him, and since my kids are resilient, they'll be fine."
That sort of essay can be incredibly successful, but it takes a very particular combination. You need someone who's a good writer, highly literate, and lacking enough in self-awareness that she gives all the clues she's an unreliable narrator without seeing them herself. You *also* need an editor who has a very keen sense of, "This, *this* will absolutely generate hate-clicks! Let's run it!"
The villain or the piece OR the moron of the piece. E.g. The "finance expert" from The Cut who somehow got caught in the most ludicrous scam (shoebox money lady).
Not a personal essay, but one of the higher-ups at my company once sent out an office-wide email warning against a crypto ATM scam he had fallen for. I think it was everybody's favorite email of the year.
I was astounded by how many people responded to that story like, “see?! It could happen to YOU!” Sorry, no, it can’t. Not like that.
Oh, like you've never put $50k cash in a shoebox and handed it to some guy in a van who said he was an undercover CIA agent.
Thanks for that, I had forgotten shoebox lady.
God i love that piece
The danger of writing a piece like that is that fine, you get your hate-clicks, but then you are "I left my husband and children for some dude" lady and I think that's usually it for you. CHH has thousands of paid subscribers. Lena Dunham is on her fourth book, David Sedaris is up to fifteen. Do the blitheringly un-self-aware types ever leverage their hate-clicks into careers?
I bet most of those people are happy in their narcissistic clouds though. I have a both a first order desire to care for my children and a strong second order desire to keep feeling that way, but objectively moving to Thailand and becoming a hedonist invested in my personal spiritual voodoo and local women is probably a fun life if you are a selfish jerk.
A subspecies of personal essay so many people *want* to think other people will read but that they won't - how backpacking in Tuscany/Bali/Costa Rica helped you discover yourself. People try to preface recipes on the Internet with these and that will usually lead to me skipping out on both the recipe and the essay.
So maybe everyone else already knows this, but I recently learned that the reason online recipes always have annoying rambling stories in front of them is for search engine optimization— Google ranks you higher the longer your post is, or something. Learning that has made me much more forgiving of these types of stories; turns out the writers don’t want to write them any more than I want to read them!
It's not just SEO - you can't copyright a recipe so there needs to be something to copyright. Still, there's a better way to do this. I like it when people are describing the traditions surrounding the dish, the occasions on which it's served, variations from the recipe presented, serving suggestions, or childhood memories about it. That kind of context makes it more fun. I do NOT need to hear about how fulfilling your expensive trip to this other culture was for the writer.
My favorite recipe writer is probably J. Kenji Lopez-Alt because he describes the why of each step, which is enormously helpful if you try and improvise somewhat.
In addition to this, I think there's also the issue around not being able to copyright recipes, but being able to copyright the annoying rambling opening.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/flesh
The piece about the neighbors extorting two grand from you is still one of my favorites. It's weird and specific to you, but it's incredibly relatable. Who hasn't had a strange or outright bad neighbor? Seriously, a banger.
I know what you mean you mean about half-honest, half-coy pieces. I'd rather read any "Am I the Asshole" Reddit post than that. Yes, they are all fake, but they at least elicit a reaction from me!
If you aren't going to be honest, then at least be entertaining.
There's this great book called StoryGenius that has defined what makes a good story for me, and now I see that everywhere.
People are looking for stories to help them figure out how to navigate life. The ones that seem to pull on that feeling the most are the ones that everyone wants to read.
I suppose the same goes for personal essays. Even more so actually. Like, everyone has an anxious feeling that everyone hates them, even if it's tucked away in a distant corner of their mind. When you write about that actually happening, people want to see what they can learn from it.
Lots of the train wreck essays from The Cut are from people we don't get and would prefer to stay away from, but holy shit, how do they perceive things? And what can I add to my toolbox to ensure i can keep well clear of people like this? That's what keeps me reading.
Wow! Two great nuggets in one comment:
“People are looking for stories to help them figure out how to navigate life.”
“Like, everyone has an anxious feeling that everyone hates them, even if it's tucked away in a distant corner of their mind.”
They are both now written on post-it notes by my work desk so I can keep them in mind.
I bet that sex scene gets *really* hot once Kim Jong Un shows up.
“Yes, I was a fifteen-year-old girl dreaming of growing up to be a crotchety, neurotic gay Greek man.” I’ve never had an original experience.
Speaking of Lena Dunham’s personal writing, if you’ve never read her 2020 essay on losing her fertility, I highly recommend it, as it’s a stunning piece of writing: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/false-labor-lena-dunham-fertility/
Yeah it would be like if David Chase was, in his spare time, a mob hitman. The Sopranos would still be a good show about bad people even if the author is one of those bad people so depicted!
I agree with all of this. I’m also reading her book right now and she is just an amazing writer. It’s making me want to do a Girls rewatch!
This was excellent, your point about how readers hate "half-self-awareness" especially. I usually reflexively say that writing is not therapy, but you make a strong case for the main way it *can* be therapeutic: in pushing the writer toward greater self-knowledge if, like you, they genuinely want to improve their craft.
Imo you should teach a creative nonfiction class (you could do it asynchronously online if you want to maintain your anonymity). You'd crush it.
I have a question.
“I thought that my story about dating a guy in my teens who was obsessed with my mom would be huge because it was just such a weird thing, but it wasn’t significantly more successful than any of my other personal essays!”
How do you measure the success of your articles? I’m a subscriber, and I click in nearly every new article you post, even if I don’t finish reading it because it lost my interest.
So how do you know if one article is more successful than the other? Number of likes and comments?
Paid growth and positive comments (proportion to my overall audience size at the time.)
Losing 54 paid subscribers is huge though, not random statistical noise. That's thousands of dollars lol
I think your anonymity is helpful, although I imagine the people you care the most about know your identity so maybe not so much as one would think.
I’m anonymous mostly to hide from online weirdos- everyone irl knows I’m CHH
I’ve got an enduring guess as to your first name! Purely vibes based, no sleuthy stalking. Honestly still chasing the high of thinking PinkPantheress was “probably called Vicky or something”
One of the things that is worth considering why a particular "big personal essay" is written is how much the publication or editor is actively green lighting or encouraging said essays to be written because previous personal essays got tons of buzz and more important clicks. We may be "hate" reading said essay and making fun of how non-self aware or quite frankly deranged the writer comes across...but to the magazine or publication in question the only they compare about is did you read it or are you talking about it on your substack in a way that might get your readers to read it.
There are a lot of "downstream" consequences to the fact that newspapers/publications have a lot more data as to what stories actually get read (it's tragic in many ways, but there's a reason so many news orgs have slashed the budget for international news generally) and one "downstream" consequence is getting the same variations of the same story getting written over and over again because it's clear we're reading them. This was something I sort of came to realize when there became a zillion "trips to Trump country" stories. The thing is, a lot of these stories were reasonably well written, often had interesting quotes or anecdotes and sometimes even real political insight. But man they became...repetitive. To the point there became almost a template to these things; a description of traveling to some small town that sounds like the writer is on a safari when in fact they drove west on Interstate 80 for two hours, a conversation with an older man right around retirement age at a diner talking about how he doesn't like this or that Trump did but is still with him, a picture accompanying the article of the older man staring plaintively out the diner window, details about how the local factory closed 25 years earlier, various observations of a town in decline etc. Point being, these articles got churned out with such regularity they became fodder for derision given how derivative and cliche they became. But here's the thing, you know why they kept being written? We kept reading them. Same reason there is endless articles about campus controversies my entire life**.
An exchange from the movie "Private Parts" worth keeping in mind at all times
Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for - are you ready for this? - an hour and twenty minutes.
Pig Vomit: How can that be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given? "I want to see what he'll say next."
Pig Vomit: Okay, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Pig Vomit: But... if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer? "I want to see what he'll say next."
The hate watchers, the hate listeners, the hate readers can bizarrely be the target audience. And likely is part of why these "personal essays" are crafted the way they are crafted.
** There is no aspect of American life covered wildly out of proportion to its actual importance to American society then "controversies" at elite colleges; protests, a professor saying something beyond the pale, student group statements etc. Forget you're actual feelings at what ever "controversy" you're thinking of, the actual "controversary' does not deserve nearly as much coverage as about 50 other things happening in the country that day.
I’ve written a best-selling tell-all memoir — in my mind.
Various things hit me all day long that I could turn into essays. I have had the same thoughts about Sedaris, whom I absolutely adore (he once told me a family secret at a book-signing!) I could tell some compelling stories that would be made good by my framing of them, but I don’t wish to expose myself and people close to me in that way. So I keep these stories — and my framing of them — to myself.
I’ve considered publishing such pieces under a pseudonym, but I’d want to claim them.
“ and a lot of people being “tricked” into enjoying your mediocre writing is basically the same thing as being a good writer.”
That is one of the most ridiculous things you have written (that I have read). Do you really measure quality by popularity?
I think she's defining "good" as people want to read it and enjoy it. She's not saying popularity equals GREAT writing.
Yes, thank you
Good writing is a matter of taste, good writers are a matter of satisfying the people who pay them to write
There's are types of fictional comedy that has mostly disappeared that fit the mold of what CHH describes here as a good personal essay, without the downside of airing your dirty laundry in public, especially screwball comedies. Bridget Jones's Diary is written as basically a memoir, without the author necessarily having to personally own Bridget's personal screwups in the text itself. Once audiences lost their taste for screwball, the gap got filled with a lot of bad celebrity autobiographies that weren't funny enough to get over how annoying they were.
I've read a bit a David Sedaris and one essay by Lena Dunham. I didn't find Sedaris the least bit annoying and I found Dunham insufferable, I think the difference is that Sedaris writes with the intent of telling an entertaining story while Dunham expects you to be entertained because she's telling you a story.
The unlinked I’m-very-hot essay makes me think of some of the writing done when EmRata decided to show everyone she was an intellectual - granted, EmRata is indeed hot but that’s something that’s probably less profound to everyone else, as it’s not actually surprising that hot people exist and are liked and/or resented for being hot
Could you tell me more about that? Just genuinely curious and probably am not going to read her memoir (or at least not soon).