A New Yorker article recently declared the death of the personal essay, but I won’t be attending the funeral. The article’s author, Jia Tolentino, identifies personal writing with women and specifically with the kind of women’s writing that makes people uncomfortable because it’s too “personal,” or what Tolentino refers to as “lost-tampon essays.”
Let’s just say that I will continue to consume—voraciously, religiously, like I’m saving my own goddamn life—“lost-tampon essays” for as long as I’m still able to read. As my heroine, Chris Kraus, writes in her book that brilliantly excavates female experience, I Love Dick, “I think the sheer fact of women talking, being paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”
This doesn’t mean I have the guts to write personally without second-guessing myself. For that I would need to kill off my inner critic. It’s overactive enough to startle me awake in a cold sweat at that hour when I want to hack into the world’s information centers, where I’ve exposed parts of myself to prying eyes, made of myself a perfect target, essentially telling everyone, here I am, impossibly sensitive, and here are all my weak points for you to aim at, cheers. But I can’t help it. This is the only way I know how to be: loud, raw, and often spiritually naked in public. So many days, I wake up telling myself, today I will be stoic. But then I’m like, oh crap, I’m a poet, and then I go and cry for half an hour about an insurance commercial.
The problem began when I started wanting to use I in my academic essays where it didn’t belong. On every page, Caroline kept popping up—making lewd gestures behind a footnote, mooning me from behind a piece of particularly dry text, urging me to get a snack between each paragraph. Kraus nails my conundrum when she writes, “so what was Chris performing? At that moment she was a picture of the Serious Young Woman thrown off the rails, exposed, alone, androgynous and hovering onstage between the poet-men, presenters of ideas, and actress-women, presenters of themselves.”
To further complicate my will to memoir, inside me the urge to hide battles epically with the urge to be seen. My powerful stage fright is a strange but determined bedfellow of my will to be entirely visible, a beacon of whatever it is that I am. I have mostly protected myself by writing essays about ideas (like Kraus’s “poet-men”) or poetry that might have emotional truth but is still not precisely autobiographical (the character in my last book was a homeless woman who lived in the New York City subway system). Thus, it was still horrifying to even consider letting whatever kind of cat I was out of the bag, writing-wise.
If there’s an erotics to placing your experience down on the page, as a writer I was often the stripper who wanted to leave all her clothes on. I needed some secrecy, some encoded nature to my biography. Even when I was trying to lay bare my bones, “Lady Lazarus” style, I remained someone who showed all and nothing. Is this how we survive? I give you the codes you can put together to spell out something unspeakable? You can’t say how, but you get it?
I needed to care for, caress, and put to bed at night the parts of me that needed to hide. Who’s looking over my shoulder anyway? Not that my Word document password is really Sherlock material. Is that purposeful? Yet another form of inkhorn strip tease? Sexual frisson? I wanted to write about my secret self, a tell-all about the riveting actual life of this particular woman, but this still remains on my to do list because I’m scared stiff. So how to remedy this?
Write something I never published? Use a pseudonym and get no credit? And why do I always need credit so badly? Why am I so hungry all the time for cheese, carbs, and recognition? And do men feel guilty for wanting credit?
Clearly I haven’t worked out all my issues with writing in a fully “personal” manner yet, but I am very clear that the beauty, complexity, and challenge of other women’s writing about themselves should not be boiled down to a chronicle of a lost tampon (which I don’t think should be mocked, either, by the way).
Of what females don’t get to see when they read about themselves in poetry by men, Adrienne Rich writes, “precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together.” I want to read more dispatches from this “puzzled, sometimes inspired creature.”
To all the women who sit writing about their mesmerizing inner lands (where that lost tampon may be wandering still) until their lady parts fall asleep, shot through with pins and needles until they feel like they might fall off, but still they sit, I salute you. I probably love you. And I want to read everything you write.