The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing 9780429341434

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Defining American Life Writing
Terminology
Works Cited
1 Personal Essays
The Oldest Essay Binary: Baconian and Montaignian
The Evolution of the American Essay
Synthesizing Bacon and Montaigne
Essay as Democracy
Persona in Essays
Essays Are Defiantly Omnivorous
Works Cited
2 Memoir and Autobiography
Benjamin Franklin’s “Self-Made” Man
American Slave Narratives
Autobiography as an Act of Democracy
Transcendentalism and Selfhood in Autobiography
The Co-Creation of “I” and “We”
Early Twentieth-Century Black American Autobiography
Presidential Memoirs and Autobiographies
Self-Creation in Contemporary Autobiography
Subgenres of Contemporary Memoir
Grief Memoirs
Motherhood Memoirs
Addiction Memoirs
Family Memoirs
Divorce Memoirs
Conclusion
Works Cited
3 Literary Journalism
Honest Subjectivity
Nomenclature and Distinguishing Characteristics
Facts and Fictions
There Is a Dishonest Subjectivity
“New” Journalism
Self and Otherness
Questions of Fact; Questions of Interpretation
True Crime
Empathy and Advocacy
Works Cited
4 Lyric Essays
Segmented Essays
Braided Essays
Hermit Crab Essays
Other Lyric Essay Forms
Book-Length Lyric Essay and Memoir
Conclusion
Works Cited
5 Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches
Diaries
Public Vs. Private Diaries
Diaries as Historical Narrative
Diarist as an Embodiment of Time and Culture
Diary as Literary Construction
Diary to Supplement Celebrity
The Diary’s Daily “Ongoingness”
Epistles
Repurposed Correspondence
The Political Public Force of Private Letters
Open Letters
The Personal-Political in Literary Open Letters
Speeches
Embodied and Disembodied Symbols
Speeches of Social Reform
Indigenous American Oratory
Oral Histories and Crowdsourcing
TED Talks
Conclusion
Works Cited
6 Aural Narratives: Podcasts and Story Slams
This American Life and the Beginning of American Podcasts
The Role of the Host
S-Town and the Ethics of Telling Others’ Stories
Representation in Public Radio
Further Listening
Live Storytelling
Conclusion
Works Cited
7 Life Writing Online
Webgenres and Blogging
Blogging Communities and Controversies
The Social Network
A Brief History of Social Network Sites
The Rhetoric of SNS Interfaces
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing

The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others. Amy Monticello is an associate professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. She is the author of the nonfiction chapbooks Close Quarters and How to Euthanize a Horse. Her essays and craft articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, Hotel Amerika, Creative Nonfiction, CALYX, under the gum tree, The Rumpus, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. Jason Tucker is an instructor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. His essays have appeared in The Southeast Review, River Teeth, Cream City Review, Sweet, Waccamaw, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere.

Routledge Introductions to American Literature Series Editors: D. Quentin Miller and Wendy Martin

Routledge Introductions to American Literature provide critical introductions to the most important topics in American Literature, outlining the key literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Providing students with an analysis of the most up-​to-​d ate trends and debates in the area, they also highlight exciting new directions within the field and open the way for further study. Volumes examine the ways in which both canonical and lesser known writers from diverse class and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, and giving attention to a range of voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. These comprehensive volumes offer readable, cohesive narratives of the development of American Literature and provide ideal introductions for students. Available in this series: The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism Linda Wagner-Martin The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature Drew Lopenzina The Routledge Introduction to American Renaissance Literature Larry J. Reynolds The Routledge Introduction to American Drama Paul Thifault The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker For more information on this series, please visit: www.routle​d ge.com/​Routle​d ge-​Introd​ucti​ons-​ to-​A meri​can-​Lit​erat​u re/​book-​ser ​ies/​ITAL

The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker

Designed cover image: Getty First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker The right of Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​0 -​367-​35759-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0 -​367-​34162-​6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0 -​429-​34143-​4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9780429341434 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

Introduction 1 Personal Essays

1 8

2 Memoir and Autobiography

22

3 Literary Journalism

77

4 Lyric Essays

114

5 Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches

138

6 Aural Narratives: Podcasts and Story Slams

175

7 Life Writing Online

198

Index

230

Introduction

A significant portion of this book was written during a global pandemic. We wrote it through an incredibly contentious presidential election. We wrote it as Americans protested police brutality against unarmed Black Americans in the summer of 2020, and after Americans stormed the Capitol in the name of a twice-​impeached president on Jan. 6, 2021. The book cannot help but reflect the context in which it was written. No book can. We should not assume that is desirable or even possible. We also wrote this as a married couple sharing a university department and raising a young child together. We shouted ideas from the shower. We read aloud to one another at the end of each writing day. We talked about the America our daughter was growing up in, and the parts of it we’d encourage her to read about. In feeling for the borders of life writing as an indispensable canon of American literature, we had to confront our own relationships to America, and to the stories of America we were taught as two white children—​ one growing up in Black Belt Alabama, the other in upstate New York. Writing this book often required reckonings between America and ourselves. It also meant confronting, over and over, our inevitable failure to represent all the American lives that appear in the memoirs, essays, diaries, podcasts, journalism, and social media (to name but a few genres and forms) that comprise American life writing. Like America itself, this book will sometimes fail to live up to its ideals. We present it humbly. Defining American Life Writing Broadly speaking, personal nonfiction records and examines the true experiences and/​or perspectives of its authors, whether they be former US presidents, literary authors, or obscure diarists, bloggers, and podcasters. What makes American life writing particularly worthy of study is its practice by the powerful and the anonymous and/​or oppressed alike. We see American

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-1

2  Introduction identity as multicultural, created by and continually suffering from systems of power and inequality that leave so many in every community and identity group somehow struggling with the fraught nature of living in this nation. Likewise, we see American life writing as an act of democracy, with each author claiming their own experience and using it to reflect back on and against the larger systems we all share, for better and worse. Wendy Martin and Sharone Williams, whose volume on American women writers is part of the same series as ours, point out that, It seems grotesque to identify as American the literary productions of Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and others long denied even the basic protections of American citizenship—​yet it seems only slightly less bizarre to exclude them as if they did not exist in the same physical and cultural space as the literary productions of Euroamerican writers. (Martin and Williams xiv) We share their discomfort about the implications of calling the literary achievements of those whose lives were defined by colonial genocide “American.” But similarly, we see it as vital to include voices whose rights and humanity have been historically denied or suppressed. The narratives of racial minorities (including Black slaves), Indigenous peoples, women, LGBTQ authors, immigrants, addicts, veterans, and the poor arguably shed the brightest light on what defines American life writing as a canon, as the right to tell one’s own story becomes an expression of personal and political power. Regardless of an author’s identity or background, life writing has always been created for multiple purposes and audiences—​for public consumption in published essays, memoirs, and speeches, or for private or limited consumption. In this volume, we have included life writing across that spectrum but focused on prose forms of personal nonfiction, since they, unlike poetry, more explicitly claim nonfictional status. We also concluded that biography—​while undeniably life writing because it is written about real people and events based on facts, artifacts, and memory—​should be afforded its own analysis as a canon and art form, as it generally provides insight about lives other than its authors’ and tends to assume an objectivity that the “literary” forms of life writing we’ve identified here do not. Here, we study texts that primarily recount and reflect on their authors’ lives, curiosities, and perspectives, even if those lives necessarily—​and not without controversy—​intersect with others. Literary journalism offers exceptions but relies on an author’s acknowledged subjectivity that biography typically does not. While some chapters examine texts that include images, such as graphic narratives and social media, we have not included documentary films, photography, or photo essays, owing to their reliance on visual, rather than literary, aesthetics. However, we acknowledge that many documentary works would fit the bill as life writing in similar ways

Introduction  3 to literary journalism and podcasts, which are covered in this volume for their emphasis on literary techniques. No single volume could contain all that qualifies as life writing. The majority of the writers in this volume know their own experiences may be limited and therefore limiting. But they also believe their lives contain broader, more inclusive insights if only writing can reveal them. Life writing not only narrates and reflects on individual lives but also offers representations of a country first conceived by European imperialism, which imbued early white settlers with a sense of exceptionalism still present today. Yet life writing has also been vital in challenging white supremacy’s claims that whiteness invented America and continues to embody its core identity. This volume looks at how life writing depicts American identity as anything but unified; instead, our identity has been, since European arrival, both fragmented and intersectional, as embodied by any and all of the writers and texts studied in these pages. While we have sought wide representation, it would be impossible to name every iteration of American identity through life writing. We recognize that our own perspectives—​a nd thus our success in this book—​a re limited. It is limited by our race, our genders, our educations, our social class, what we do for a living, and where we live. The volume is an attempt. We hope it will join many others. Chapters are delineated and then internally organized by genres, subgenres, forms, and modes, each with its own histories, strategies, and texts. For inspiring this organizational approach and providing definitions to come in the following section, we credit Karen Babine, whose taxonomy of nonfiction we found irreplaceably useful, though we, like Babine, “do not put forward these categories as absolutes.” (Babine, “A Taxonomy”). Similarly to Babine’s scholarly journal Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, whose very existence has advanced the scholarly examination of life writing, we are interested in the nexus between literary history, craft, and rhetoric; our analyses are typically most animated when it comes to a text’s participation in both the discourse of its original context and ongoing public discourse. Representations of experience, which include an author’s aesthetic choices, might reinforce or challenge dominant American narratives about such experiences. For example, memoirs about motherhood make clear through their narrators that the experiences of Black mothers, who suffer higher infant and maternal mortality rates, often differ greatly from those of white mothers. But white memoirists, too, whose experiences are more widely represented, also consistently challenge American narratives about the sanctity and satisfaction of motherhood. Lastly, American life writing parallels not only the nation’s history, its cultural and social movements, and its ever-​proliferating identities as shaped by the forces of colonialism, slavery, immigration, war, and law, but also key technological advances that have spurred the creation of new and “remixed” subgenres and

4  Introduction forms. The diaries of Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath underpin today’s bloggers and social media influencers. The voice-​and ethos-​driven essays of James Baldwin inspire the narrative performances at a Moth story slam. The narrative journalism of Truman Capote and Joan Didion find a modern revival in true crime podcasts such as Serial and S-​Town. And today—​right this moment—​m illions of people across the country chronicle and curate their lives using social media. Terminology To study American life writing through its histories, techniques, and impacts means using terms that come from several different but related disciplines. An English major concentrating in literature is likeliest to encounter “life writing” as the largest category for the texts studied in this volume, while a student in a creative writing program would probably use “creative nonfiction” or simply “nonfiction” to label many of these same texts. Creative writers also typically understand a nonfiction text through its subgenre, or, as Babine puts it, “the field of knowledge in which a writer stands” (Babine, “A Taxonomy”). A rhetoric and composition student, however, might have less interest in these larger umbrellas of genre, or even subgenre, and focus instead analysis on the forms (e.g. memoir, graphic essay, podcast) and modes (e.g. narrative, inquisitive, associative) of the text in front of them, asking questions about how certain conventions are deployed, for whom, and to what ends. They would consider the text’s rhetorical situation in both the context of its original composition and the contexts in which audiences encounter it. We find rhetorical analysis crucial in our study of American life writing since personal nonfiction reflects specific cultural and historical moments in American history and has also been a tool for social and political change. Life writing allows us to trace public discourse about American issues and events over time, marking evolution in our competing and ever-​evolving concepts of American identity. In The Situation and the Story (2001), Vivian Gornick writes, Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. (Gornick 13) Though Gornick uses the broad term “literature,” her book instructs writers of personal nonfiction specifically. Such writers recount not only what has happened to them, but also the meanings contained by and discovered through what has happened. The discovery of insight often forms a secondary narrative—​ that of the mind itself as it remembers and then modulates the remembrance for the page. Michael Steinberg, founding editor of the creative nonfiction journal

Introduction  5 Fourth Genre, posits that life writers sometimes encounter dismissal for being too “confessional,” but that “a lot of nonfiction writers are narrating only the literal story of their experience, and leaving out the ‘inner story’; that is, the story of their thinking” (Steinberg 185). To unlock this inner story, Steinberg builds on Judith Kitchen’s list of expository techniques writers may draw on, including reflection, introspection, self-​interrogation, and digression, to name a few. These techniques push life writing beyond mere anecdote. The reflective voice—​that of the author looking back at experiences and interpreting them—​d istinguishes the assay mode—​the act of interrogating, of searching for complicating evidence, of only being certain that there’s more to see and more sense to be made. This technique dominates the essay subgenre but is effectively deployed throughout other kinds of life writing in infinite ways. Especially in recent decades, nonfiction life writing of all stripes has fluidly evolved and persistently resisted rigid categorization. At the end of this work, we see American life writing as exactly as complex and overlapping and noisy as the totality of America’s people. With the spread of literacy, the increased access to digital storytelling technologies, and a deep awareness of the power of life writing, those who had been written out of America’s story in one way or another have told their own stories to write themselves back into it. American life writing has always been an act of description and documentary, but also an act of individual, collective, and national self-​c reation. If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was correct in his 1968 speech at the National Cathedral “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution” that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” it is because, as he also says in the same speech we “hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope.” As Mychal Denzel Smith says, that first line, taken out of context, can lead us to assume that justice is inevitable, which is neither true nor King’s message (Smith, Michael Denzel). We have no illusions that America has arrived at its promise of egalitarian pluralism. At age 100, famed television producer Norman Lear—​whose work undeniably contributed to social progress in American culture—​w rites that he has seen progress, but also that we are still fighting many of the same fights he’d joined as a young man. I don’t love that at the start of my second century, we must fight to defend so many of the gains that were achieved during my first century … We owe one another solidarity as we assess the economic and political power of the forces arrayed against us. And we owe one another a generous measure of appreciation for all the ways we have made progress toward “a more perfect union” even as we recognize that we are far from delivering on the American promise. (Lear)

6  Introduction In How the South Won the Civil War, historian Heather Cox Richardson understands the organizing conflict of America to be democracy vs. oligarchy—​ the idea that all Americans should participate in society and governance vs. the belief that society should be organized by an elite and powerful few for their own benefit—​and that this conflict has shifted and reformed repeatedly since the nation’s founding. Life writing, even if true, can be lies and propaganda. But done well and done from a plurality of perspective, it is a force and a manifestation of America’s egalitarian progress, encouraging the nation lurchingly into better versions of itself, or at least better future selves to aspire to. There are still great questions of access and opportunity, of who tells stories, about whom, how, how often, how publicly, and to what purpose. Throughout this work, we attend not only to many life stories presented by bigger gatekeepers of publishing and broadcasting—​which have definitely grown more diverse in their offerings in more recent decades—​but also to the richly diverse and nuanced life writing published by university and independent presses and journals. Margaret Renkl reminds us that “Many important manuscripts would not see the light of day if they were measured against expectations for nationwide sales” (Renkl). She offers a roundup of examples—​a tiny sample, really—​of why university presses are essential, including works that directly refute problematic-​ yet-​profitable stories pushed so loudly by the big corporate publishers: In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance used his own troubled kin as illustrations of a self-​serving point and became a best-​selling author—​and the Trump-​endorsed senator-​elect from Ohio—​in the process. Robert Gipe is writing for a much smaller audience, to be sure, but that reality only makes his voice—​and others, like those in West Virginia University Press’s rebuttal to Vance, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy”—​a ll the more vital. (Renkl) We don’t make many distinctions about the size of the platform or the profits a given title generated. We’ve gathered a glimpse of a cross section of both influential and contemporary life writing across many subgenres, and this too is really just a tiny sample, only an introduction. But in it, we do see ongoing American progress. It is not progress simply due to the passage of time, and it is not easy. It is progress because of the labor all Americans do during that time. Despite conflicts and divisions and repeated attempts to subjugate or exterminate one or another category of people, in the labor of all these lives and in the labor of narrating them, we see hard-​earned progress and progress yet to come. In reading each other’s lives, we see ourselves in the Other. We move from the naive individualism of the I into an awareness of our interdependence. We

Introduction  7 move through any given I to find a complicated we. We see that neither the genres nor the people are as easily untangled from one another as we’re sometimes encouraged to believe. Works Cited Babine, Karen. “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasure of Precision.” Literary Hub, 3    Aug.    2020.     https:// ​l it ​hub.com/​a - ​t axon​omy- ​of-​non ​fict ​ion- ​or- ​t he- ​pleasu ​r es-​ of-​precis​ion/​ Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Lear, Norman. “I’m 100. Americans Are Still Fighting for What We Thought We Achieved over the Last Century.” USA Today, 13 Nov. 2022. www.nyti​mes.com/​ 2022/​11/​14/​opin ​ion/​u ni​vers​ity-​pres​ses-​a meri​can-​l it​erat ​u re.html?f bc​l id=​IwAR28C DfCRu6oRwexmpVH4TFiIiW4QgoF​sk7p​Ypa6​JqHP​i NrN​0bM9​A kF9 ​yZc Martin, Wendy and Sharone Williams. The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers. New York, Routledge, 2016. Renkl, Margaret. “University Presses Are Keeping American Literature Alive.” New York Times, 14 Nov. 2022. www.nyti​mes.com/​2022/​11/​14/​opin ​ion/​u ni​vers​ity-​ pres​ses-​a meri​can-​l it​erat ​u re.html?f bc​l id=​IwAR28CDfCRu6oRwexmpVH4TFiIiW 4QgoF​sk7p​Ypa6​JqHP​i NrN​0bM9​A kF9 ​yZc Smith, Michael Denzel. “The Truth about ‘The Arc of the Moral Universe.’ ” HuffPost, 18 Jan. 2018. www.huffp​ost.com/​entry/​opin ​ion-​smith-​obama-​k ing ​_ ​n _ ​5​a 590​3e0e​ 4b04​f 3c5​5a25​2a4 Steinberg, Michael. “Finding the Inner Story in Memoirs and Personal Essays.” Fourth Genre, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 185–​8. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​fge2​ 003.027

1 Personal Essays

“Essay” is a doing word. First used to describe a literary form by sixteenth-​ century French Renaissance writer, statesman, and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the Old/​M iddle French verb “essaier”/​essayer (and its noun form “essai,” later giving rise to the Anglo-​Norman “assai” and the Middle English word “assay”) means to try, to test, to weigh, to analyze, to determine, to estimate. Whatever the form or techniques of any given essay, it’s a way of asking questions, exploring evidence, and testing and reformulating interpretations. At their most fundamental, essays all have the distinguishing feature of the author thinking something through on the page. Essayistic reflective and analytical techniques are common in other nonfiction subgenres such as memoir and literary journalism, but in essays of all types, the voice and mind of the writer in the present moment enables the reader to participate in that processing of thoughts and emotions. They do the opposite of dogmatically argue. Essays do not believe things from the beginning; they doubt things from the beginning. They are typically concerned with understanding how things work and do not rest on prior assumptions. They readily embrace complexity, nuance, and complicating details. Their purpose is not to write what the author knows. Essayists write in order to know, to discover, to wonder, to often only arrive at better questions. The personal essay is the catch-​a ll term for first-​person creative nonfiction in which the author is present as a narrative character, looking at their own experiences and trying to make sense of them. Those experiences could be the types of memories you’d find dramatized in memoir, or they could be the experience of reading or having a conversation or any other category of research. The personal essay could be considered to encompass or at least overlap with all the subgenres in this volume, but we will use the term to examine work that includes the author’s lived experience but goes beyond it, contextualizing it, treating it as both case study and a lens through which to view other cases. Exactly as adaptable as the human species itself, the essay makes use of

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-2

Personal Essays  9 any technique it can find. Whether narrative or non, lyrical or plainspoken, researched or remembered, rendered in conventional, repurposed, or wildly inventive forms, we call it an essay when the dominant mode is inquiry—​a ssay. It is always an experiment. The Oldest Essay Binary: Baconian and Montaignian The personal essay is often divided into two categories. The Baconian essay—​ after the English statesman and proto-​scientist Sir Francis Bacon, who was himself influenced by Montaigne and imported his term for the genre—​focuses on performing inductive reasoning on the page, thinking from observation and interpretation of concrete details rather than through abstract logical processes. Baconian essays may have an identified first-​person writer, but the focus tends to be on the observable manifestations of public issues, social systems, and current events, pushing from those individual observations to their deeper implications. They are sometimes characterized as impersonal, without acknowledged subjectivity, and—​ in less charitable descriptions—​ prone to being stodgy and pedantic. Essays (many of them book-​length) by writers like Rebecca Solnit and Susan Sontag do sometimes incorporate personal narrative but often work more directly in the impersonal, Baconian mode. And yet, they do have very clearly defined voices and personalities, animating their extra-​personal subjects with their own incisive and endearingly human subjectivities. Some consider any public argument written with great certainty to be Baconian, but that’s not in keeping with the permanent tentativeness of the scientific method Bacon had a late hand in shaping. The Montaignian essay—​after Montaigne—​focuses on the self as its own body of evidence and its subjectivity as a source for exploration. Written from one’s own experience—​as in memoir—​essays that lean Montaignian present the self and its experiences as evidence to examine, understanding that self as a manifestation of all the things that brought it into being and that continually shape, structure, and limit its ongoing development. There is a similar observational, questioning quality to this approach as in the Baconian essay, but here the self is always at least one significant case study within the body of evidence presented. Further, self-​examining essays often raise epistemological questions about the self ’s own perceptions and interpretations. The self is both the tool of analysis and the thing being analyzed. Recently, this binary has begun to collapse. As more scholarly essays embrace the option of an honest, first-​person voice, and as more literary essays incorporate outside research of all kinds, these approaches have steadily become common tools in every essayist’s kit, to be used whenever the occasion suits them.

10  Personal Essays The Evolution of the American Essay As for origin stories, Ralph Waldo Emerson and many others used Baconian essay approaches to do the work of the “public intellectual,” addressing the events of the day, but not typically using life writing to do so. Describing this general ethos, including Emerson in particular, as representing “the genteel essay and the gentleman at the fireside,” Ned Stuckey-​French tracks this early-​ to mid-​n inetieth-​century Baconian form as near-​sermons from the country estate of an elite landed gentry, such that the lineage of the late ninetieth century through the contemporary American personal essay doesn’t really include Emerson (Phillip Lopate left both Emerson and Bacon out of his influential anthology The Art of the Personal Essay). While Stuckey-​French finds a pleasure in Emerson’s musings, it is “pleasure of a different sort” from the more embodied writings of Montaignian essays (Stuckey-​French 22–​23). Instead, he looks to the fictional-​persona essays of Benjamin Franklin (as Silence Dogood, and later, Poor Richard) during the colonial period, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), though not exactly nonfictional, as foundational influences on the first-​person columnists and essayists to come (Stuckey-​French 24). In The American Essay in the American Century, Stuckey-​ French tracks a detailed history of essays in America along with the radical social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Essays had evolved from Franklin and Irving’s times into the tweedy fireside intellectualism of Emerson’s era, but the explosion of literacy, magazines, and the middle class beginning in the early twentieth century took the essay out of the hands of the gentry class and made it, as Stuckey-​French argues, a middle-​class genre. He notes that the persistent public discourse about “the death of the essay” during these pivotal decades was really not about the death of a literary form, but the death of one kind of essayist—​a nearly aristocratic ethos only possible as an embodiment of a deeply unequal society. As conditions enabled a middle class to thrive, in some ways shattering old hierarchies (and of course, preserving others, like racial and gender and sexuality hierarchies), the middle class remade the American essay along with it. A stark shift in culture meant a stark shift in cultural products. Beginning earlier, but particularly with the ascension of the professional-​m anagerial class between 1890 and 1920, there was much public lamenting of the dying of the essay, though it was only the old version of class superiority that was dying, and the kinds of essays its members wrote for one another. Technological and economic advances in publishing and distribution, along with rising wages, rising literacy, and easier and more affordable access to printed writing of all kinds would correspond with a sea change in who wrote what, for whom, why, and how. After the 1870s, Stuckey-​French writes, the “genteel essayist” lost its prominence to what we’d now understand as professional writers of columns, articles,

Personal Essays  11 and essays about modern life as they lived it, writing for nationwide audiences, rather than an elite few (Stuckey-​French 41). For all its changeability and refusal to conform to discreet categories, Stuckey-​French sees the twentieth-​century American essay as a manifestation of middle-​class democracy, taking the form back from the Brahmin “custodians of culture” (2). He points to E.B. White, not for his children’s books or the ubiquitous Elements of Style, but for his essays. Stuckey-​French sees White as “arguably the greatest essayist of the first half of the twentieth century” who “like so many middle-​class liberals, struggled to find his way both through the high times of the twenties and the fierce arguments of the thirties” (3). White’s “Once More to the Lake,” published in Harper’s in 1941, has been anthologized and used in writing classrooms nearly as often as George Orwell’s most famous essays. Stuckey-​French reads the ominous and lamenting ending of what he says is too often characterized as an essay of simple childhood vacation nostalgia as a metaphor for White’s sense of America at the time: “… we can hear him rejecting that false and romantic notion that World War I was ‘the war to end all wars’ … we can hear him mourning the sickening return of war” (200). That reading takes White’s adult return to a beloved childhood vacation spot, not as working in assay mode, but as metaphorical, ending as it does with a thunderstorm, his claim that “America has not changed in any important respect” over those years in between, and how watching his son putting on his cold and wet trunks to go swimming after the storm made him feel the “chill of death.” As Stuckey-​French seems to suggest, the only way that metaphor works is to read it in historical context—​how it’s talking from the anxious place between wars. He suggests we read all essays this way—​“against history” (200). The personal essays that get canonized in anthologies attempt a more “timeless” quality, though are necessarily of and responding to the times of their writing. Yet personal essays, as they’ve done in magazine columns for more than a century, have been a dominant form of daily commentary in today’s magazines and current events websites for a certain kind of cultural critic and for writers commenting on the news via blogs and social media. Not to be confused with the “hot take” or the blowhard fictional personas presenting party-​line opinions as if they were acts of journalism or philosophy, these shorter-​lived personal essays are no less essential than daily journalism, even though they are exactly as ephemeral. Much American essay writing beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century does consider Montaigne as its primary ancestor. A number of now-​ canonical American personal essays in this mode dominate so many anthologies and English and writing classrooms. They are seen as pillars of the contemporary versions of the subgenre. James Baldwin is renowned for his personal essays. “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), from the collection by the same name, addresses the psychological toll

12  Personal Essays of being Black in apartheid America, even in comparatively progressive northeastern cities. He first sketches a portrait of his father as a way to establish what he’d inherited, both from him and from America. He is finally brought to a point of explosive violence when, in a restaurant, he was told “We don’t serve Negroes here” one too many times, throwing a water mug at a waitress, missing her, and shattering the mirror behind her. We are brought to that point as well. We are led to feel exactly as violent along with him, thus landing the critique that such conditions could bring anyone to this point of violence. (Baldwin, Native Son 96–​97). That move of inviting a reader—​especially a reader of a different identity group, in this case, white readers—​to identify with the author’s younger self under pressure proved a powerful tool for getting otherwise disinterested audiences to vicariously participate in a life so different from their own and ultimately question their own place in the system so oppressive to their fellow human beings. Also canonically (though Britishly), George Orwell had done the same in “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and “A Hanging” (1931), which were both powerful condemnations of colonialism, and yet he did so primarily through personal experience, without a lot of Baconian lecture-​style holding-​forth about it. In Orwell’s case, even his younger self understood the horrors of colonialism, and yet he worked in its service, demonstrating how his own behaviors were driven by systemic factors, despite being in conflict with his personal ethics. Though he was not an American, Orwell’s work as an anti-​totalitarian essayist still echoes a powerful influence throughout American essay writing. While these mark neither the first nor the most recent trends in the personal essay, they do represent the Montaigne-​ forward approach that dominated the subgenre for the rest of the century. Synthesizing Bacon and Montaigne Over the centuries, these distinctions between personal essay forms have become more a matter of technique, with authors—​as all good artists do—​ blending them with infinite other techniques as they see fit. Authors may be observers observing themselves in Montaignian style and advance the more Baconian moves of tending to other research as well. Likely, Montaigne would be happy with that, since he talked of the importance of his mind’s “roaming,” in and out of the self, but always through the self. As Lopate says, The essayist attempts to surround a something—​a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—​by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. (Lopate xxxvii)

Personal Essays  13 Rebecca Solnit may spend tremendous time thinking, reading, interviewing, and synthesizing research in her many book-​length essays, but she maintains a distinct and recognizable voice and persona throughout her work, narrating first-​person site visits and interviews and brief experiences that are freely in conversation with her less personal evidence. In Orwell’s Roses (2021), she is clear that she is not writing a biography of Orwell but uses much of his biography as she explores questions of war and political violence, of labor and exploitation, of totalitarianism and propaganda, of coping with a violently tumultuous world, of conceptualizing time and history from longer perspectives, longer lifetimes, like that of a tree or a rosebush. Even when some of their work is marketed as memoir or criticism, contemporary essayists like Melissa Febos, Leslie Jamison, Meghan Daum, bell hooks, Eula Biss, David Foster Wallace, and so many others have found power in the interplay between the self as evidence and evidence observed beyond the self. Jamison writes in “How to Write a Personal Essay,” “I’m interested in essays that follow the infinitude of a private life toward the infinitude of public experience … I’m drawn to essays that allow the messy threads of grief or incomprehension to remain ragged, to direct our gazes outward” ( Jamison, “How to”). Biss, in On Immunity: An Inoculation (2014), keeps a comparatively light touch when it comes to the personal—​ recounting brief incidents and conversations with her husband, son, father, mother, sister, and friends—​but uses those amid a symphonic composition of fragments of research. A book-​ length essay that meditates upon the nature both of immunity and the rhetoric we use to talk about it, it is a collage of artfully wrought and juxtaposed pieces, unified by a clear, purposeful, and incisive line of inquiry that belies the assumption about fragmented works being haphazard and unskillfully crafted. In Immunity, Biss’s is a mind at work through both fierce logic and poetic lyricism—​a scientist’s mind, a historian’s mind, a rhetorician’s mind, a mind of a mother just trying to keep her son healthy. In The Made-​Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, Carl Klaus also locates Montaigne as the origin of the contemporary personal essay, saying that he set himself “persistently against Aristotle, Cicero, and the medieval scholastics” and “established the now conventional posture of the personal essayist as an independent, often skeptical mind, exploring ideas and experiences outside the confines of received or prevailing intellectual structures” (Klaus 10). Observing the digressive nature of Montaigne’s essays—​ which freely roamed from one subject to the next within the same piece—​K laus sees him as cultivating an on-​page persona that is rigorously crafted to appear like a casual wanderer, and in so doing, makes the mind itself (and the uncertain nature of memory, observing, knowing) central to the subject, whatever the stated subject. The writer’s lines of thinking and inquiry provide an essay’s unity and structural arcs, regardless of whether a linear, scenic narrative is present.

14  Personal Essays Klaus sees this in “Of Repentance” when Montaigne writes, I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just at it is the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being; I portray passing … My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. (Klaus 17) Klaus reads Montaigne as claiming his work is “consubstantial” with himself. The writer’s persona, if not the actual author, is created in the act of essaying. As has been said about essaying, journaling, therapy, prayer, and meditation, it is less an act of some discovery of an “authentic” self than in the cultivation of a self through some reflective practice. However, as we see in the essay’s most recent practitioners, the Baconian approach has been subsumed into this larger roaming of the mind the essay genre has been doing all along. Twenty-​fi rst-​century American essayists roam absolutely freely across whatever information and techniques suit them in the process of their inquiry. Baconian and Montaignian models have been incorporated together, along with many others, sometimes blended, sometimes more separate, as arrays of paints on the same palette. Essay as Democracy In answer to so much toxic American individualism, the best regarded American personal essayists situate their own experiences within larger contexts. They take what is often politically defined as a matter of individual choice and responsibility and illustrate how choices are structured, incentivized, limited, or prevented by systemic factors. In Sarah Smarsh’s essay “Poor Teeth,” she contrasts her own family’s dental health with those of popular culture representations and easy-​answer arguments. In film and television, people with bad teeth are bad people, with whom the audience is discouraged from identifying. While Smarsh doesn’t claim that personal dental hygiene isn’t important (she became devout to her own dental care routine), she details the many cracks in American medicine that systemically align poor teeth with poor people. In America, health insurance is mostly tied to employment—​which can lead to gaps in coverage—​and eyes and teeth are luxury add-​on items that aren’t always covered, especially by the insurance offered in low-​wage jobs. Those with government-​funded health care often find that more expensive procedures like crowns are not covered, and even basic preventative care like cleanings might be unavailable since not all dentists participate in government programs.

Personal Essays  15 She writes, “It wasn’t sugar that guided our dental fates. And it wasn’t meth. It was lack of insurance, lack of knowledge, lack of good nutrition—​poverties into which much of the country was born” (Smarsh). She extends this into rhetoric and storytelling, with villain characters often marked as bad people with their bad teeth. She anticipates the assumptions that teeth are merely cosmetic with a story of how her father almost died from sepsis due to an abscessed tooth. And she demonstrates how the cosmetic aspects of teeth are still matters of life and death, since people with “poor teeth” are less likely to be hired into non-​ poverty jobs. The stories we tell, she implies with her analysis of film and popular culture, are directly related to the policies and laws and social structures of a society. And thus, to change those systemic things first requires changing the stories we tell. And that move implicates every more privileged American—​likely her target reading audience—​who might otherwise not realize that, though they might not have poor teeth themselves, this essay is about them too. As Philip Lopate noted in The Art of the Personal Essay (1995) that when Montaigne wrote “Every Man has within himself the human condition,” he meant that “when he was telling about himself, he was talking, to some degree, about all of us. The personal essay has an implicitly democratic bent, in the value it places on experience rather than status distinctions” (Lopate xxiii). Persona in Essays Conventions of essay writing have drawn a line that would not allow for wholly fictional personas to do the assaying—​like Poor Richard or Geoffrey Crayon—​ and yet contemporary conventions have embraced the inescapable truth that even the most scrupulously honest essayist is always crafting a persona—​a stylized version of themselves—​through which to do the telling. This tracks with evolving understandings of selfhood more generally, which consider the living self as also not a static thing, but highly reactive, highly adaptable to circumstance, wholly and continually co-​constituted in social interactions with other selves, always shifting and growing and emerging from infinitely complex confluences of factors. Carrying that idea to its most contemporary development, Sonya Huber writes in Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto that the concept of some singular “authentic” voice is a limiting fiction and not at all descriptive of how voices (or personae or selves) function. She writes, We each have a range of functional voices that help us get through the day … Every voice we develop is an interface or cognitive tool to help us interact with a specific slice of the world in a specific time and place. All of these voices are definitely connected … [throughout life] we discard some of our old voices, or they are used to make new ones. (Huber, Voice 3)

16  Personal Essays Huber sees voices and selves not as “anything goes” or as “coming out of nowhere,” but neither as singular nor static things. They arise from our multiplicities of realities and move fluidly across our changes. As she draws from wide-​ ranging theories about the self and the writer’s voice, she tells about the ways in which she acknowledged and gave space and even names to her various voices as they emerged. Confronted with a chronic autoimmune disease, she found she could no longer access many of the voices or methods that had served her earlier writing so well, and yet by naming and making room for new ones, she found power in it. At times, she could only summon smaller amounts of time or attention for essay writing. Piece by piece, though, Pain Woman began to speak, and she became the voice of her collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System (2017). So what results is not any abled woman writing as if she were disabled (that wouldn’t be nonfiction), but a disabled woman writing toward a voice and self that are emerging in context of her particular disability. Having been raised, as so many were in an era dominated by the narrative strategies of novels and fictional films, by the mantra “show don’t tell,” Huber didn’t realize for a long time how actually debilitating that vapid advice was, especially when it comes to nonfiction. In “The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell,’ ” Huber recounts developing as a writer just as creative nonfiction began to be offered in graduate MFA programs, a time still dominated by life reduced “to nouns and verbs,” she wrote chunks of scenic memoir, only beginning to realize that not all stories can be best told that way. She writes, Evaluating our lives cinematically makes us prefer certain stories over other stories. It means that certain stories don’t get told. We know that if we reduce ourselves to actions and surface details—​what can be seen—​m any of us will disappear … My authority comes not from details and forward motion, but from a deep place in my gut where my 48 years of experience have tangled like fishing line. (Huber, “Three Words”) This minimized the typically less “cinematic” aspects of stories of women, people with disabilities, and minorities disenfranchised in subtler ways than action-​sequence violence and gore. She continues, It’s the binary and the dualism that’s the problem, as if “showing” and “telling” were our only options. We have so many selves we could be, so many modes … Tell me the truth. Tell me lies. Tell me what you want to say. Tell so that we may all be less alone. (Huber, “Three Words”)

Personal Essays  17 It makes sense that the essay would be a good place to find room for telling as well as showing. Whatever the form or subject matter, so much of what has defined the essay has centered around that reflective voice—​the mind at work, figuring something out, making connections, and involving the reader in those thought processes. So much great personal essay writing has relied on the gap between the interiority—​the mind of the younger, scenic, experiencing, character self—​and the reflection—​the mind of the older, questioning, writer self that’s thinking by writing. Whether primarily intellectual, emotional, or ethical, focused inward or outward, that distance and tension between the past and present selves represents character evolution and the motivations and conditions for those changes. Literary writing of all genres tends to rely heavily on character evolution (or the lack thereof ) in its meaning making. Leonard Kriegel, in analyzing William Manchester’s essay, “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All,” observes that Manchester, despite the four decades and professional expertise he earned as a historian and writer after the war, does not see in an aging Japanese soldier a sense of shared trauma, but the same fear and hatred he had as a young Marine, still feeling in his body after 40 years the desire to kill the enemy before he kills you. The personal essay allows writers to discover their own complexity—​and that includes their hatreds as well as the raw sustainability of their wounds. Among the legacies of the personal essay is that it has been used to describe so many different kinds of pain and self-​d iscovery. (Kriegel 95) Thus, it’s more an essay about Manchester’s current pang of murderous feelings after all these years than it is a remembering of the battle itself. Essays Are Defiantly Omnivorous If there’s one notorious thing about nailing down absolute definitions of the essay, it’s that none of them hold up absolutely. Some essays don’t have a reflective voice at all. Essays written in the historical present tense—​where the events took place in the past, but the younger self is narrating in the present tense—​the narrative voice is all or nearly all the interiority voice. Most of the essays in Ryan Van Meter’s memoir-​in-​essays (as such collections are sometimes called) If You Knew Then What I Know Now are written in the historical present. Those individual essays don’t, strictly speaking, have that reflective voice. All of the essays narrate Van Meter’s coming-​of-​age experiences as a young gay man, so that accomplishes memoir things, and yet they are up to other things beyond memoir (if memoir is defined as scenic narrative recollected in the past tense).

18  Personal Essays Some, like “Discovery,” adhere to the historical present, and yet we can implicitly hear the reflective voice speaking through the younger self in the present tense. While Ryan and his brother Garrett stay at their grandparents’ farm one particular summer, Garret goes with their grandfather to work in the field while Ryan stays behind with their grandmother, helping with house chores. He finds a dress that had probably belonged to his aunt when she was a girl. Grandma catches him trying it on, and after a brief moment of surprise, she asks him to help set the table, not mentioning the dress other than acknowledging that it fits. That younger self spends a solitary table-​setting scene loving how the dress feels—​the feel of the bodice as he smooths it down, the way it opens up when he spins, the sound of the hem against the carpet. Then the older voice speaks vicariously through the younger one: We look at each other, a woman in her dress, a boy in his, one of us on each end of a perfectly set table for four. Here is a secret we both helped make, and in this moment we feel it dropping fully formed down into each of our bodies, whole and heavy, where it will sit forever. I’m too young to know exactly why we’re keeping the secret, but I know we’re not going to tell anybody what she’s just let me do. (Van Meter 47) To use Karen Babine’s taxonomy, we can call this a personal essay form working in a narrative mode (as opposed to an assay mode) (Babine). In the title essay of Van Meter’s collection, he addresses his younger self in the second person, explicitly telling him “If you knew then what I know now,” and so it is written mostly in the future tense, telling himself what will happen and how to make sense of it. That makes it unlike many other personal essays in appearance, but very much like other personal essays in purpose and function in assaying the author’s own changes between interiority and reflection. The essay as a category is constellation of forms, each of which might be built in different modes to assay or to narrate or to otherwise function lyrically. While the “lyric essay” is sometimes held apart from the personal essay (as this volume reluctantly does) due to its emphasis on borrowed or invented forms and, well, lyricism, any borders one might draw really indicate sites of overlap, where categories that might be distinctly separate if measured by both of their most extreme examples mingle, merge, and reveal how permeable our arbitrary borders really are. As each chapter in this volume makes clear, varieties of nonfiction life writing are gloriously fluid and stubbornly defy rigid categorization in all the best ways. Even when an essay overtly assays, there’s still an ocean of possibilities of how it might do so. Some involve imagination to the point of evolving the subgenre of “speculative nonfiction,” and a journal by the same name. Speculative Nonfiction editors Robin Hemley and Leila Philip write on the journal’s website, “A speculative essay concerns itself with the

Personal Essays  19 figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage” (Hemley). Though here, it’s expected the reader is made aware of exactly what is being imagined. It depends on imagination as a tool of inquiry, rather than as a way to present fiction and call it fact. In Tessa Fontaine’s craft essay “The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction,” she details a number of ways how and reasons why nonfiction writers deploy imagination in their fact-​based work, even though those things might seem incompatible until you start thinking about it. She writes, Even beyond our sensory constraints, writers always encounter unknowns, from small-​scale memory failures to questions of cosmic enormity. A creative nonfiction writer frequently smacks up against the limits of her perception, of known truths, faced with what she does not know … Many of these gaps can be explored and made richer through speculation and invention. (Fontaine) Fontaine explains how writers might explore alternative possibilities to the stories they’d been told, to imagine moments from other people’s point of view, to deduce what must or probably fill the actually unknowable gaps in our knowledge and in our inherited stories, to embrace not-​k nowing as a source of strength and structure. It’s generally expected that, when an author engages in speculation in nonfiction, they somehow label what it is they’re doing. Signal phrases like “I imagine,” “I wonder if,” “I like to think,” “the story I heard,” or words like perhaps, suppose, maybe, and so on are easy and reliable ways of doing this. Other times, it’s a larger conceit that implies the speculation. In her collection How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, Tyrese Coleman considers the overall collection to work as a memoir, but each individual piece is either a short story or an essay. It’s usually clear, though, when she’s speculating. In “Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results,” she works with the not-​ knowing that’s endemic to America for so many people of African descent: she can’t know for certain who her ancestors were or even vaguely know the distant ones, so she uses the conditional tenses would/​could to imagine what she can’t know based on what she does know. To apply Vivian Gornick’s well known formulation of the situation and the story: the situation is Coleman sketching out her own family tree. The story is about many things, but like any good personal essay, her experience is a manifestation of far bigger forces—​being Black in America after centuries of systematic destruction of Black history, culture, and records. In an interview with the journal Guernica, Coleman calls some pieces in the collection “stories,” and others “essays.” She says that she started drafting some of the pieces in one genre, but as she worked, they turned into the other. Stories became essays and essays became stories. None of the pieces are labeled

20  Personal Essays as such in the collection, but since the title and author’s preface note explain this, the reader is not misled, and questions of knowing and remembering then become part of the assay work that’s done both implicitly and explicitly across the collection. Noting that the very act of remembering anything alters the memory—​that a memory is changed by the present moment, the emotions we feel at the time of remembering, and purpose we use each memory to serve—​she says, You have a responsibility to make clear that this is how you see it in your head, based on these emotions. You can do that through poetic language; you can do that through speculative language … You’re not writing a journalistic fact … You’re writing using lyrical language to convey certain emotions that are also a part of that memory, and that memory is not going to be true to the exact reality. But the memory is true to yourself, to your feelings. (Kasbeer) There does seem to be an ethical line even here, though. Essayists tend to reject the dark side of subjectivity—​in which we actively delude ourselves into rejecting what we actually do know in favor of a more palatable false reality—​ and instead use it to move boldly into the uncomfortable truths and uncertainties. In that way, the essay is the opposite of dogma and can help protect us from it. In “The Essayification of Everything,” Christy Wampole writes, “… the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of the social and political life in contemporary America.” And so she calls for us to apply the essay ethos to, well, literally everything: What is perhaps most interesting about the essay is what happens when it cannot be contained by its generic borders, leaking outside the short prose form into other formats such as the essayistic novel, the essay-​fi lm, the photo-​essay, and life itself. (Wampole) And so it is the gaze from which an essayist looks, rather than the isolated facts of experience or research, that constitute whatever personal essays are and how they function culturally, aesthetically, and intellectually. Whether dominant or marginalized, central or liminal, the life someone essays from—​the particular confluence of privileges and marginalizations, permissions and constraints, histories and hopes, knowledges and ignorances, wisdoms and gaps of perception, sense of self and society—​means that essays, like all art, are products of the world that made the people who wrote them, and through those lives, reflect back onto the world.

Personal Essays  21 Works Cited Babine, Karen. “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision.” Literary Hub, 3 Aug. 2020. https://​l it​hub.com/​a-​t axon​omy-​of-​non ​fict ​ion-​or-​the-​pleasu​res-​ of-​precis​ion/​ Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston, Beacon Press, 1983. Fontaine, Tessa. “The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, no. 6.1, Fall 2019. www.assay ​jour ​nal.com/​tessa-​fonta ​i ne-​ the-​l im ​its-​of-​per​cept ​ion-​t rust-​tec​h niq​ues-​i n-​non ​fict ​ion- ​61.html Hemley, Robin and Leila Philip. www.specul​ativ​enon ​fict ​ion.org/​ Huber, Sonya. “The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell.’ ” Literary Hub, 29 Sept. 2019. https://​l it​hub.com/​the-​three-​words-​that-​a lm​ost-​ rui​ned-​me-​a s-​a-​w ri​ter-​show- ​dont-​tell/​ Huber, Sonya. Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Jamison, Leslie. “How to Write a Personal Essay.” Publishers Weekly. 28 Mar. 2014. Accessed 1 Oct. 2022. www.publi​sher ​swee​k ly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​i ndus​t ry-​news/​t ip-​ sheet/​a rti​cle/​61591-​how-​to-​w rite-​a-​perso​nal-​essay.html Kasbeer, Sarah. “Tyrese Coleman: Writing the Truth, Unbound by Genre.” Interview with Tyrese Coleman. Guernica, 5 Dec. 2018. www.guer ​n ica​m ag.com/​t yr​ese-​cole​ man-​w rit​i ng-​the-​t ruth-​u nbo​u nd-​by-​genre/​ Klaus, Carl. The Made-​Up Self. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2010. Kriegel, Leonard. “The Observer Observing: Some Notes on the Personal Essay.” Truth in Nonfiction, edited by David Lazar. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2008. Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York, Anchor Books, Random House, 1995. Smarsh, Sarah. “Poor Teeth.” Aeon. 23 Oct. 2014. https://​aeon.co/​ess​ays/​there-​is-​no-​ shame-​worse-​than-​poor-​teeth-​i n-​a-​r ich-​world Stuckey-​French, Ned. The American Essay in the American Century. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2011. Van Meter, Ryan. If You Knew Then What I Know Now. Louisville, Sarabande Books, 2011. Wampole, Christy. “The Essayification of Everything.” The New York Times, 26 May 2013. https://​opin ​iona​tor.blogs.nyti​mes.com/​2013/​05/​26/​the-​ess​ayif​i cat ​ion-​of-​eve​ ryth​i ng/​

2 Memoir and Autobiography

While personal essays aim to recreate how our minds work in the discovery of insight, using personal experience as a springboard for reflection, interrogation, and analysis, memoir attempts to render personal experience as narratives. In her taxonomy of nonfiction, Karen Babine calls memoir a form of nonfiction, rather than a genre of its own. Across scholars, the classification of memoir as a genre, subgenre, and form pose challenges in analysis, but while Babine’s differentiation is sound, she also recognizes that the proliferation of memoir has created categories of literature that now act as subgenres of nonfiction. Several prominent subgenres will be discussed in this chapter. Memoirs may be short works or book-​length. They tend to use less exposition than personal essays in order to illustrate (rather than meditate or expound on) how life experiences take place and subsequently represent larger concerns of our shared humanity. Some memoiristic essays focus on extraordinary experiences, such as Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” which describes in dry, humorous detail her complicated life leading up to the 1991 mass shooting at the University of Iowa. Others focus on the quotidian, such as E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” and Maureen Stanton’s “Laundry.” But in each of these cases, individual experiences are dramatized to illuminate more common truths. Memoir and autobiography are often treated as acts of confession. It was, after all, St. Augustine’s fourth-​century Confessions that linked the public declaration of one’s sins to one’s possible redemption; for Augustine, the latter could not exist without the former. For centuries, philosophers and critics expressed varying degrees of wariness about the value and ethics of “confessional” writing, even as the popularity of autobiographical texts, which served largely political purposes in early American history and hit a commercial fever pitch in the 1990s and early 2000s, has long compelled audiences with the promise of conversion demonstrated by true experiences over those imagined in fiction. Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in 2010 in The New Yorker just past the

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-3

Memoir and Autobiography  23 height of the memoir bonanza, provides a historical lineage since Augustine based on the confessional: The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to—​and readers have been insatiable for—​ever since. Augustine of Hippo bequeathed to Augusten Burroughs more than just a name. (Mendelsohn) In Mendelsohn’s view, the appeal of autobiography is that it offers readers both optimism and a roadmap; readers, too, can travel from shame to absolution. But he wonders whether redemption gained by revealing the skeletons in one’s closet (which necessarily means opening others’ closets) is achievable, true, or worth it, especially now that memoir’s preoccupation is no longer typically the author’s relationship to a higher power, but their relationship to themselves. He writes: Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once “confession” came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest, it was but a short step to what the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent “memoir craze”: “the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art.” (Mendelsohn) Mendelsohn concedes that excellent memoirs exist and even, yes, confesses he has had occasion to write autobiographically when only the use of his own experience could explain his intellectual perspective on a subject. But Mendelsohn’s skeptical view of the confessional as aesthetically hollow and primarily self-​serving is a pale echo of William Gass’s 1994 rebuke in Harper’s. Gass, who saw the late twentieth century as defined by narcissism years before social media made the public performance of self hood a 24-​hour-​a-​d ay job, sees the autobiographer as corrupted from the outset. Their moral bankruptcy stems from what Gass believes is one of the only truths an individual can reliably represent: that the limitations of our own consciousness, which applies itself to everything it encounters and thus transforms it, render inherently false our versions of events, our perceptions of others, and most of all, our perceptions of ourselves (Gass). Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety? Who is smug enough to find amusement or an important human lesson in former follies? Or aspire to be an emblem

24  Memoir and Autobiography for some benighted youngster to follow like the foolish follow the standard borne forward in a fight. To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster. (Gass) Gass’s portrait of the repellant autobiographer would assume that confession is always tainted by the desire for redemption, leading us, even unconsciously, to alter our confessions to suit our selfish purposes. It assumes that confession is synonymous with memoir, and that to say anything about oneself at all is to be ashamed of it, to confess it, and to thereby absolve ourselves of it. But that only works if we also assume that our personal experiences, for no other reason than their personal nature, should be defined as shameful. Gass assumes several other unflattering motivations to write a memoir, all of which impugn the character of the writer in a way that curiously leaves out the novelists and short story writers who create characters and situations from their own lives. (Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-​volume “autofiction” series My Struggle comes to mind.) But there are other reasons to write memoir. Melissa Febos is an affirmative defense. As an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence, she once refused to write a memoir, having internalized Gass’s sweeping and shallow criticisms of the genre. Instead, she tried to fictionalize her experiences into a novel. “I was determined to stick to my more humble presumption that strangers might be interested in a story made up by a twenty-​six-​year-​old former junkie sex worker,” she says in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022). But Febos says her own story “wouldn’t leave [her] alone.” Eventually she did write a memoir that made her reconsider those views that equate therapeutic writing with self-​obsessed, artless drivel (Febos, Body 7). Citing studies that outline the psychological benefits of writing about traumatic experiences, and acknowledging that people who engage in autobiographical writing are not necessarily creating art, she sees no inherent conflict between art and healing: It is a logical fallacy to conclude that any writing with therapeutic effect is terrible. Being healed does not have to be your goal. But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such a bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-​jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and bad science has always been the disguise of our national prejudices. (9) To Febos, such criticisms of memoir do not prove the genre’s lack of artistry but rather illuminate how American systems like capitalism and patriarchy and racism and classism work to silence their victims through shame. She unpacks the phrase “navel-​g azing” as one that implicitly maligns feminine experience (the navel itself being associated with birth) and concludes that narcissism is, in

Memoir and Autobiography  25 fact, antithetical to the goals of memoir, whether it is published or tucked into a desk drawer (18). “The risk of honest self-​appraisal requires bravery,” she writes. “To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-​image that pleases you” (20). Readers, she suggests, always pick up on self-​serving intentions; it is the primary charge of autobiographical writing to subordinate the ego in service of art and truth. Febos claims that to write about traumatic experiences in particular is a subversive act. She calls out a uniquely American proclivity to dismiss and demean stories of victimization—​to shame marginalized populations out of describing their subjugation—​in order to maintain established power structures. She directly counters Gass’s assertion that to have written an autobiography of any kind is to have made oneself a monster: “I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation” (27). For Febos and other proponents of personal narrative (e.g. Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir and William Bradley in “Acquiring Empathy Through Essays”), who speak respectively about the democratizing nature of memoir and its empathic effects on readers), maintaining secrecy about one’s private shame (indeed, defining one’s own experiences by shame at all) is riskier for both self and society than disclosure. And disclosure itself neither constitutes nor precludes artistic merit. The reasons to write memoir and autobiography, while inclusive of personal healing, are also about representing experiences and identities that American culture has sidelined—​it is the country’s narcissism, expressed through majority perspectives, that memoirs often indict. In American literature, we can trace the history of autobiographical writing from the early colonists and revolutionaries who sought to define a quintessential American identity through themselves; to the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who believed in universal experiences of personhood; to former slaves and Black writers throughout America’s history who wrote their lives to challenge the institutions of their oppression and as acts of individual and communal self-​creation; to writers of every class and culture, every identity and minority group writing to assert their own humanity and belonging and lived realities; to the late modern and postmodern authors who rejected the notion of a unified self or universal experience of life and instead examine complex, shifting identities that more closely resemble the complexity of the world they live in. We define autobiography and memoir as related but distinct. Autobiographies typically cover more narrative ground, taking the reader across the vast terrain of the author’s life from early childhood to present day. In contrast, memoirs tend to cover only part of the author’s life, focusing on specific events or themes, and include many subgenres (grief memoirs, motherhood memoirs,

26  Memoir and Autobiography addiction memoirs, etc.). While the terms are often used interchangeably, even on book covers, it is useful to differentiate them for analysis, especially as autobiography is increasingly synonymous with well-​k nown public figures such as presidents and celebrities, while the majority of memoirs are now written by “ordinary” Americans or literary writers who’ve chosen to work in memoir. Regardless of classification, the story of America and the life stories of individual Americans are always in conversation. How an author identifies themselves as part of or excluded from various groups has become foundational to understanding their lives in American society and therefore implicates the rest of American society. Where we start the story of America matters to how we read and understand the nonfictional stories of its authors, including whose life stories are most emblematic of American identity. For example, The New York Times’s 1619 Project—​a journalistic initiative by professor Nikole Hannah-​Jones launched in 2019—​“aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’s national narrative” (“The 1619 Project”). If we apply the project’s goals to literature—​i f America’s story begins not with the arrival of the Puritans or the Declaration of Independence, but with the first African slaves forced across the ocean to build a new nation—​then the autobiographies and memoirs of Black authors, including those written by the enslaved, could be understood as the most fundamentally American stories in the canon. Autobiographies and memoirs write and rewrite the story of America through the perspectives of individual citizens and the shifting contexts of their lives. We cannot read Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995)—​recounting Karr’s life in both an east Texas oil town and a dysfunctional, hard-​d rinking family—​w ithout noting how the book pushes against the uniquely American reverence of the nuclear family. We cannot read Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), centered on Laymon’s experiences growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, struggling with his weight, dark skin, and the dangers of living in such a body, without reflecting on the routine violence inflicted on Black bodies by American police. But neither memoir offers redemption to anybody—​most especially not their authors. Instead, each illustrates that the way someone processes their own experiences informs their actions and the consequences of those actions. Such an understanding often elicits empathy from the reader, but rarely absolution. While Karr dubs her book simply “a memoir,” Laymon includes the word “American” in his subtitle. As Black Americans continue to fight for civil rights, the decision to add “American” as a descriptor for Laymon’s own story is significant and has been a way for many memoirists from marginalized identities to claim the country that has so often refused to claim them. Consider a few: Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn

Memoir and Autobiography  27 America, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s This is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, Marie Arana’s American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, and Dawn Turner’s Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood. Such books proclaim that there are many American experiences and that American identity, by virtue of its founding as a new nation stolen from Indigenous peoples, built by slaves, and populated by immigrants and their descendants, will always be hyphenated, fractured, and layered. Memoirs and autobiographies illuminate how people respond to their own historical and cultural contexts, their own complex identities, the larger systems of power and inequality that structure and limit their personal choices, and their own inclusion or erasure from the body politic. A single life may offer limited representation, but to recognize our own fears and desires in another’s story is a bridge between writer and reader. That may explain why these forms continue to be popular. They insist on an expansion and complication of our national identity and, through discovering the familiar in one another, more investment in our shared humanity. Benjamin Franklin’s “Self-​Made” Man Before we look at autobiographical writing that challenges the concept of a static, exemplary Americanism, it’s important to locate where enduring ideas about our national identity were first codified. Memoirs by early colonists such as William Bradford and John Smith detail the lives of the Puritans and Virginia settlers of the seventeenth century, but as Susan Balée notes, these accounts largely focus on taming the New World’s wild terrain, wresting it from the Indigenous peoples painted in these surviving texts as dangerous belligerents, as well as the colonists’ spiritual development in response to their adversities—​what Balée calls “God’s account book, the one the Bible says will be brought forth on Judgment Day” (Balée 53). These journalists of the New World would lay the groundwork for the country’s founding on principles of godly labor and individual responsibility and did so largely because of their willingness to “cast off their Old World selves like salt-​stained garments.” Unlike the Europeans settlers who colonized Canada, Balée argues, early American settlers “rebelled against the mother country [England] and its patriarchal demands, even as they modified its old customs and laws to suit the new community,” and, through Christianity, also rejected the sovereignty and influence of Indian “heathens” (40–​41). These early colonial autobiographical writings suggest that, by the time of the country’s founding, American identity had already coalesced around notions of Christian exceptionalism, which would, over time, evolve into American exceptionalism—​the belief that America is a special nation with special people protected by a god that loves them in a special way.

28  Memoir and Autobiography In the late eighteenth century, as a fledgling nation sought international credibility, a four-​volume autobiography presented a blueprint that, in using the author’s life as example, implicitly illustrated who may achieve the kind of success we eventually came to call the American Dream. While we have many excellent biographies of America’s founders, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who each contributed enduring ideas of American identity, only Benjamin Franklin penned his own autobiography. His four-​part narrative has arguably most influenced America’s sense of self using terms we still employ and debate today. Written between 1771 and 1790, the year of Franklin’s death, it was never finished, but was published in a variety of forms, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing to evolve through the late twentieth century. Throughout the two decades of its writing, even amidst the American Revolution, he was encouraged by a number of close, powerful friends to complete it—​less because of Franklin’s talents as a writer or statesman, and more because they saw Franklin’s life as promotional material for America. New York University professor Jennifer Jordan Baker analyzes Franklin’s Autobiography as “not as a generic tale of an ordinary American experience but rather as a story of exemplary success that uses Franklin’s experience to advocate, like a celebrity endorsement, the possibilities of American life” (Baker 275). Supporting the notion that Franklin’s life was not representative of typical American life, Baker focuses on Franklin’s ability early in his career to secure both the personal and eventual financial status he needed to build his printing business and ultimately his reputation—​which was then itself monetized by others seeking endorsements from Franklin. Baker posits that Franklin’s autobiography was understood by his contemporaries as “a public project that could benefit the new nation” (276). Baker’s theory is bolstered by Part Two of the Autobiography, which includes letters written to Franklin by friends and admirers encouraging the autobiography’s writing. Franklin’s friend William Vaughan, writing in 1783, goes so far as to “solicit” Franklin’s life story out of several “motives.” Vaughan claims that Franklin must write his own story to prevent others from doing so with their own, presumably nefarious purposes, and to moreover present a table of the internal circumstances of your country, which will very much tend to invite to it settlers of virtuous and manly minds … I do not know of a more efficacious advertisement than your Biography would give. Vaughan sees Franklin’s life story as a recruitment tool for America, drawing to it those who wish to emulate Franklin’s financial and personal success. He uses some familiar language to describe the template Franklin’s life provides, referring to his story as that of a “rising people,” and to Franklin as a man of

Memoir and Autobiography  29 “self-​education” more valuable than that provided by schools and that upward mobility lies in “a man’s private power” (Vaughan 59–​ 61). Vaughan sees Franklin as a new archetype of a self-​m ade man, educated by his pursuit of experience and not formal study, who bootstrapped his way to a tier of success and notoriety that would go on to inspire and cement a country’s ethos. Franklin’s Autobiography is unique in its simultaneous implications that other Americans may use his life as a manual for success and that his life was in fact extraordinary, couched in privileges, and thus opportunities, unavailable to others. It is not a representative American story, but an aspirational story—​one that underpins what would become, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the story of American upward mobility that drew immigrants to our shores even as Black Americans, Native Americans, and women were still not permitted to vote. Today, Franklin’s accomplishments still enthrall, but they no longer deceive as many readers into believing that Franklin’s life demonstrates what is possible for all Americans. American Slave Narratives William L. Andrews counted that 102 authors wrote books about their own enslavement between the first published American slave narrative, Briton Hammon’s in 1760, and the end of the Civil War in 1865, and that another 102 did so from emancipation into the twentieth century (Gates xii). Noting the narrative and distribution affordances made possible by the printing press, the fact that some formerly enslaved authors gained experience in oral storytelling and rhetoric on the antislavery lecture circuit, and the ways in which both narrative and political conventions emerged dialogically across hundreds of slave narratives, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the communal and collaborative nature these narratives accrued over time, and the common purposes to which they were all put, though their writing and publishing spanned nearly two centuries of American history: Each slave author, in writing about his or her personal life experiences, simultaneously wrote on behalf of the millions of silent slaves still held captive … Each author, then, knew that all black slaves would be judged—​on their character, integrity, intelligence, manners, and morals, and their claims to warrant emancipation, citizenship, and equality—​on this published evidence provided by one of their number. (Gates xiii) Slave narratives were testimonials of events in each slave’s life that would stand as evidence in the court of public opinion against the horrors of the institution of slavery, typically used and prized not for their artistry but for their content and demonstration of the author’s humanity. Formerly enslaved

30  Memoir and Autobiography authors typically served as witnesses, while white abolitionists—​as editors, collaborators, ghost writers, interpreters, promoters, and certifiers of the former slave’s believability—​situated themselves as the reflective voice, making meaning, giving political purpose and their own philosophical vision to these works, but generally denying that agency to the authors themselves. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) is likely the most celebrated American slave narrative and functions in this classic fashion. It grows from the preceding cannon of slave narratives. Gates notes its resemblances to The Interesting Narrative of The Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa The African Written by Himself, published in London in 1794, and sees it as a major influence. Douglass’s Narrative was prefaced by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who partnered with Douglass beginning in 1841 and wrote reassuringly of the veracity of Douglass’s story. He explicitly defined the rhetorical ends to which he wanted Douglass’s narrative used: “So proudly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties which are daily inflicted on its victims” (Gates 306–​307). Nolan Bennett describes how these testimonies functioned mostly to provide evidence, while it was white abolitionists who claimed the authority of building arguments and philosophy on them. The most common challenge to these narratives was to discredit them as untrue. Sometimes they were fabricated as propaganda. Bennett notes that Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) and Narrative of James Williams (1838) were found to be works of fiction shortly after their publication (Bennett 245). Bennett also observes that, despite abolition as a goal, the rhetorical strategies of abolitionist allies typically reinforced the racial hierarchy, since they considered the question of abolition to be a conversation white people were having amongst themselves. So, due to a broadly racist reading public, slave narrative authors needed white Americans to verify and interpret what white audiences generally regarded as raw testimony, and questionable ones at that. Narrative focuses on events of Douglass’s life in slavery, largely rendered as exposition between vivid and dramatic scenes. One iconic moment, after his long suffering under and ultimate fight with the slave breaker Covey, gives a flash of inspiring interiority of how the younger Douglass felt in this moment: It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood … the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact … the white man who expected to succeed in whipping me, must also succeed in killing me. (Gates 366) While Douglass’s Narrative followed much of the standard strategy of slave narratives at the time—​chronicling horrors experienced and seen, confronting

Memoir and Autobiography  31 the faces of the abusive slavers, arguing by synecdoche (corroborated by many other slave narratives and cosigned by white abolitionists) that the institution and those who upheld it where indefensibly immoral and must be stopped—​it was Douglass’s claiming and even creating of himself that may mark this work as a turn away from slave narratives as simple testimony to be used by white political agents, and toward formerly enslaved writers more directly claiming that political and philosophical agency for themselves. Bennett goes so far as to separate slave narratives (and any other first-​ person evidentiary testimonials) from the genre of autobiography altogether, suggesting that Narrative would more rightly be called a slave narrative, while Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) would more properly be called autobiography because it devotes significant time to a reflective voice that didn’t only narrate slavery, but actively denounced it, expanding the critique beyond the obvious slave drivers to implicate far larger systems, including sympathetic white readers and abolitionists who still subscribed to a racial hierarchy, holding Black Americans as inferior even while advocating for their freedom. Narrative critiqued slavery but not the racism that underwrote both the peculiar institution and abolitionists’ lingering prejudice … to denounce wrongs in My Bondage and My Freedom is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. Thus Douglass’s self-​m aking in Bondage fits his developing politics, one that rejected moral suasion or disunion and that looked to expansive conceptions of “the people.” (Bennett 242) This is the use of autobiography not just to narrate experiences, but to advocate for a sense of communal identity, both the one that exists and another the author encourages us to aspire toward. Harriet Jacobs, writing under the pen name Linda Brent, published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself in 1861. In it, she emphasized the family trauma, sexual assault, and degrading harassment suffered by women slaves, detailing not only the obvious sexual power male masters held, but also the constant threat of a mother’s children being sold and their families being separated forever. Jacobs highlights the ironies of the “good treatment” she received in her early life against the betrayals of her white mistresses who promised her freedom yet kept her in bondage, then contrasted with the slaveholding white woman who also helps her into hiding. Numerous scholars see Jacobs subversively challenging the Cult of True Womanhood that dominated middle-​class white society in the American antebellum period and that emphasized “virtues” like purity, submissiveness, and a woman’s duty to the maintenance and unity of one’s family and domestic

32  Memoir and Autobiography spaces. Using such rigid criteria to shut out nonconformists from the title of “woman” altogether denied women slaves full status as women, since slavery systematically prevented slaves from developing and maintaining their own families and domestic spheres. Their families were subject to being sold away from them at any moment. Noting that white women were Jacob’s primary reading audience, Jennifer Larson examines how Jacobs uses her narrative to show this same audience how the Cult of True Womanhood divided and subjugated all women—​ forbidding any true sense of “sisterhood”—​and frequently forced situations that compromised its own principles. Jacobs’s master’s wife’s passive acceptance of his rape of Jacobs not only serves as its own account of degradation but also stands in for the broader cultural critique of gender divisions. Mrs. Flint … is aware of Dr. Flint’s deviance … Nonetheless, she does not break the silence and approach her husband about his abuse nor do anything to stop it. Her submissiveness consequently proves to be detrimental to her happiness (as it undermines the sanctity of her marriage), as well as harmful to Brent (whose purity goes unprotected). The narrative paints the slave mistress’s submissiveness, the refusal to intervene on behalf of the slave girl, as sisterhood lost. (Larson, Jennifer 743) Implicitly, Jacobs’s pointed critiques of the failings of society aspire toward correction. The lament for the failings of what is also stands as a hope for what can be. Douglass’s work advocates for the self-​ determination and agency of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. Jacobs calls for a solidarity among women across difference and a reorienting of society, a claiming of a unified power, the limiting of which, as Larson suggests, was the reason the patriarchal Cult of True Womanhood was created in the first place (Larson, Jennifer 744). Autobiography as an Act of Democracy Many life stories are written at times of social upheaval and so participate in and advance those changes. Bennett writes: Significant autobiographies appear at times when the relation between the individual and the state is in question, be that relation one of inheritance, imperialism, industrialization, education, immigration, or so on. These autobiographies portray not simply the author but the people not represented by political institutions or literary genres of the day. (Bennett 244)

Memoir and Autobiography  33 When Douglass broke from Garrison, he rejected both his politics of disunity and the lingering racism among abolitionists that still denied autonomy to Black Americans. This, Bennett says, is a site to read autobiography as a democratic political act: “… an inquiry common to democratic theory: not to ask whether slavery contradicts law, but to ask from what people these laws arise” (Bennett 250). William W. Nichols analyzes Douglass’s retelling of his fight with Covey in Bondage. Knowing Covey planned to whip him, Douglass ran into the woods that night, where another slave name Sandy offered him a magical root that would protect him from his overseer’s violence. At this moment, the older writer Douglass finds some humor in his younger self, who thinks he’s above such superstitions due to his book learning and rationality, but concedes that those things never protected him in the past, so he’d put his trust in the root. When Douglass returns, Covey treats him pleasantly, and for a short time, he thinks the root had worked its magic. But Covey only wanted to lure him into a false sense of security. They fight. Douglass wins. Nichols notices that, when Douglass finds humor, irony, the ridiculous, it’s always in the individual’s failings. He contrasts that with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), in which Thoreau readily laughs at institutions, yet takes the self—​especially his own self—​w ith solemn earnestness: It is that vision which produces a kind of humor in My Bondage which is ultimately self-​effacing. Unlike Thoreau, who often seems detached from the world he mocks, Douglass portrays himself as inevitably part of the human failure he describes. (Nichols 158) Being about the same age and knowing many of the same influential figures around New England, “both were centrally concerned with those forces which deprived them of their freedom to realize fully their self hood” (Nichols 155), and yet they differed significantly in how their ideas of self-​reliance and self-​ creation related to some larger collective. Transcendentalism and Self hood in Autobiography Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are the best known figures of American Transcendentalism, a movement that placed heavy emphasis on a concept of a pure, authentic, natural self, which was only corrupted by society’s institutions. Emerson, through his essays, and Thoreau, through essays and the meditative memoir Walden; or, Life In the Woods (1854), contributed much of what we still see as quintessential American individualism, at least among moderately affluent white people.

34  Memoir and Autobiography In Walden, Thoreau writes about two years he spent living on Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, compressing those experiences into a single year. He set out to validate the Transcendentalist assumptions of locating some authentic self by retreating into the sacred natural world and laboring to sustain oneself within it. In contrast to New England Puritanism, this belief held that each individual was wholly unique, and that all knowledge was best acquired in communion with the self, rejecting established authorities, orthodoxies, social constraints, and the coercive power structures built on them. In a famous line from Walden’s conclusion, he writes “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away” (Thoreau, Walden 198). The self, in this view, stood outside society, even suffered by exposure to it, and was best understood in solitude. However, that presents a contradiction for the Transcendentalist writer: why write about yourself to anyone else at all? As Nichols wonders: if each self has ideally a unique and absolute independence of every other, a potential that can be determined by that self alone, then it is difficult to explain why the experience of one individual should have any essential significance for another. (Nichols 156) In Douglass’s “Self-​ Made Men,” speech, one of his greatest hits as an orator, first presented in 1859, he talks at length on the value of labor and self-​ sufficiency, yet rejects the idea of some “authentic” self. He recognized that different situations constitute different selves, and that unequal advantages of wealth and privilege reveal the flaws of the pure and static sense of self held by Romanticism and Transcendentalism. He says, “It is not fair play to start the negro out in life, from nothing and with nothing, while others start with the advantage of a thousand years behind them” (Douglass “Self-​Made” 39). While he goes on to praise self-​d irected labor in ways that might please Thoreau, he cautions that industrious self-​creation alone can’t account for how any one life proceeds: there are in the world no such men as self-​m ade men … no generation of men can be independent of the preceding generation … I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as is the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power and greatness from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as the waves, but are one as the sea. (Douglass “Self-​Made” 32)

Memoir and Autobiography  35 Thoreau and Emerson’s conception of self has been challenged as “bourgeois individualist” because it ignores the material realities that structure, limit, and create self hood and identities both individual and communal—​constraints only someone as privileged as these men could overlook, and which are made violently concrete to every subjugated identity group (Mostern 39–​40). Famously, Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes, arguing that they might be used to fund the Mexican-​A merican war, which he found unjust. His solution to the problem of entangling oneself with society’s ills was often to avoid participating in society at all. While this tactic of non-​participation deeply inspired later social justice activists, Thoreau failed to articulate all the circumstances and resources that enabled him to withhold his participation. Walden itself was Emerson’s private property, on which he allowed Thoreau to conduct his experiment designed to validate their shared philosophy. It was a flawed experiment for many reasons, not least of which was that Thoreau, not being held at Walden by force or circumstance, could choose a different situation at any moment. He writes that he ended the experiment in order to serve himself, just as he had begun it: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one” (Thoreau, Walden 197). He was not forced to subsist at Walden. He could be certain, due to his friends and family and financial resources, that, should his bean field fail to yield a crop, he would not starve. He and Emerson spoke against the Fugitive Slave Act but never had to worry about being kidnapped and sold into slavery themselves. Thoreau dispensed life advice through Walden as if everyone had the same permissions and resources. His solitude would not have been possible if everyone else had taken his advice at the same time. Had every resident in Concord, Massachusetts decided to go live at the pond with him, Thoreau may not have been so pleased with all that competing self-​reliance. The sewage issue alone might have caused him to rethink the interconnected relationships between individuals, and the need to solve problems collectively. Though fragments of his ideas like nonviolent resistance and direct action against what individuals decide are unjust laws (“Civil Disobedience” 1849) would go on to inspire activists like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Thoreau’s own concept of injustice was ill-​defined, and only addressed those parts of social systems he found personally problematic, ignoring those privileged parts in which his own entire self hood was cultivated (Powell 28–​29). Transcendentalism’s insistence that society was an interference to self hood rather than a producer of it validated this flawed assumption and prevented Thoreau from the deeper realizations found in his descendant social justice activists. While it seems antithetical to more individualistic interpretations of his work, and to Transcendentalism itself, Thoreau’s farthest reaching influences are actually concepts of interdependence, like recognizing the distant

36  Memoir and Autobiography implications of the systems each individual participates in—​the things social justice movements took from him. Douglass’s use of autobiography sketches the co-​constituative relationship of individual self and democratic society with much greater nuance and consistency. As Nichols put it, “Thoreau’s vision of self-​reliance is surely closer to what we have wanted to believe about ourselves as Americans, but I suspect we badly need to learn to understand the view of the self which Douglass presents in My Bondage” (Nichols 158). Douglass understood the self was constituted in relation to others. Romanticism and Transcendentalism gave way to Realism and Naturalism, and from there, steadily, mainstream American memoir and autobiography have caught up to this very realization that slaves like Douglass and Jacobs learned by being forced to live on the receiving end of the American institutions that refused to acknowledge the exploitative interconnectedness America’s individualistic myths were built on. The Co-​Creation of “I” and “We” There is tension in writing an individualized narrative that also represents a larger community or identity. At its most problematic, attempts to use the “I” to represent the “we” risk signaling (or even assuming) some kind of essentialism about any particular identity. The common critique is that not all members of any given community are the same. While valid to a point, when it is overextended to argue that no one life can represent any part of a shared experience or identity or system of power and inequality, it becomes a dismissive misreading of “identity politics.” Scholars have broadly come to understand identity categories like race and gender as social constructions, rather than anything biologically or theologically determinate. But it is precisely the fact that an identity is invented and has material consequences in both individual and group formation that makes it real. This doesn’t, however, make it static. It is the durability of certain oppressive conditions that produces the commonalities in identitarian memoirs over time. Within slave narratives alone, there is much individual variety, and yet, because slavery and its horrors persisted, those authors all shared a common threat, a common injustice, and a common purpose in writing against it. It was the culturally created oppression and the needs it created for repeated, strategic storytelling that produced a sense of unity bigger than any individual differences. As slavery ended, Black autobiography and actual Black lives increasingly diversified, even as Black America faced continual rebirths of that same “metaphysical system” through subsequent generations of racial terror, Jim Crow, de jure segregation, mass incarceration, and further systemic inequalities in every direction. More freedom and more varieties of lives that could be legally and

Memoir and Autobiography  37 practically lived drove a greater diversity of American Black thought and art, yet ongoing racism has still worked to define a common cause of suffering and resistance. But dominant identity groups are not free of identity. bell hooks was talking about being a Black woman professor in the historically very white and male college classroom when she said, “The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body” (hooks Teaching, 137). Because the dominant power identity set—​straight, white, cisgender, abled male with a certain education and socioeconomic class membership—​ had defined itself as the norm, it had actively erased the idea that those identities were identities at all, and that their privileges—​m any of which were purposely built on the subjugation of other identity groups—​d id not result from systems of institutional inequality over many generations, but from individual abilities and natural superiority. And so, such a person at the intersection of all that privilege could write about their own life while denying all these embodied realities and could deny that their choices and those of others were structured and incentivized by larger systems and narratives and material histories. That is a degree and kind of narcissism actually worthy of aggressive public critiques, and one that has shown up not just in memoir, but in speeches, in journalism, in photography, in film, in history textbooks, in federal economic policy, in voter suppression, in gerrymandering campaigns, in every category of thing America has ever made. This has nothing to do with genre. Americans have proven that we can build narcissism into anything we want. Kenneth Mostern considers how, in any rhetorical situation, elements of the speaker’s identity inevitably function as context that contribute to the meaning, and therefore identical statements made by people of different identity markers—​gender, race, class, etc.—​can yield different meanings. As he says, “Our identities literally cannot be disconnected from our politics” (Mostern 5). It makes sense that those in privilege would (problematically) assume an almost blank slate position from which they could create whatever self they desired. Their social positions enable that in them while actively suppressing it in others, prescribing to other groups the limits of identity. It may be the fact of having to negotiate membership in a maligned group that yields American autobiography’s most complex functions. It is the self dialogically emerging with larger cultures and subcultures, not neatly, but within the noise of so many other people and events. In this context, Mostern sees Black American memoir and autobiography from its beginnings as an essential political tool to talk back against these limitations, and one that has been used by Black political and thought leaders as a way not only to report their experiences, but also to define their philosophies: “autobiography is that process which articulates the determined subject so as to actively produce a newly positive identity” (11).

38  Memoir and Autobiography Early Twentieth-​Century Black American Autobiography Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) built upon the speech in Atlanta that made him famous in 1895 (about seven months after Frederick Douglass died, leaving a prominent vacancy in Black political and thought leadership). Washington took the position of accepting racial segregation as a temporary arrangement and advocated that in return white America support Black education and social and economic progress. Thomas Aiello writes, Washington’s Atlanta Compromise … was not trumpeting permanent second-​class citizenship for African Americans. Instead he wanted Black self-​ improvement that would ultimately earn White respect, and thus a seat at the negotiating table as equals somewhere down the road … In such a situation, the only way to fight was to grow stronger within the paradigm, rather than trying to change the paradigm itself. (Aiello 76) Initially praising the speech as a position from which Black and white Americans could begin, W.E.B. Du Bois steadily parted ideologically and practically from Washington. Du Bois, a Black, Harvard-​educated sociologist and New England native, advocated Black scholarship and education forming a “Talented Tenth” to lead social change through direct protests. Washington, a Virginia-​born former slave whose story represents what’s now a trope of American autobiography—​the “overcoming narrative” directly descended from Benjamin Franklin’s myth of individualistic self-​creation—​rose to found many vocational schools, the best known being Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. From his position living within a south that was openly hostile to Black advancement, Washington held little hope in direct appeals to white solidarity, and so advocated for Black Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are,” using the resources at hand to improve themselves separately from white America through industrial and vocational (as opposed to academic or professional) education (Washington 91–​92). Du Bois published a harsh review of Up from Slavery, and then The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which included the essay “Of Booker T. Washington and Others,” firmly underscoring the philosophical divisions between them. Though the true spectrum of thought, argument, philosophy, voices, and lives were far more complex than this simple binary, this polarized vision would in large part frame civil rights debates for much of the twentieth century: “If Du Bois is the lynchpin of a lineage that runs from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr., it is just as easy to pinpoint Washington as the connective tissue that binds Martin Delaney and Malcolm X” (Aiello 77).

Memoir and Autobiography  39 Du Bois wrote three major works of autobiography that span his career and mark his shifts in racial thinking over time: Darkwater (1920), Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), and The Autobiography of W.E. Burghardt Du Bois (1968). Each of them somehow presents Du Bois himself as evidence against assumptions of Black inferiority. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, Continuing in the tradition of the slave narrative, Dusk of Dawn aims to speak with the authority of the first person against the assumptions and the practices of racism … like the authors of the slave narratives, he refutes through his own extraordinary cultural achievements the belief in the intellectual and cultural inferiority of the Negro. (Du Bois xixx) In his earlier work, notably in Souls, Du Bois suggests that the “problem of the color line” was an arbitrary distinction on which to subjugate people, and that telling the truth of the baselessness of racial prejudice would win the argument and therefore the day. In Dusk, he works from autobiography but also creates extensive Socratic dialogues with fictional composite characters that stand in for white people he knows—​and white America by extension—​w ith whom he debates concepts of race and the prejudices built on racist assumptions. Having spent so much of his life in white spaces, and having labored so long to prove his abilities and position in those spaces, he writes of historical class inequalities and sees his present moment from his own liminal perspective: I was not an American; I was not a man; I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world … All our present frustration in trying to realize individual equality through communism, fascism, and democracy arises from our continual unwillingness to break the intellectual bonds of group and racial exclusiveness. (Du Bois 105–​106) Even at this later stage of his career, he answered the system set on “expulsion of black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery,” by trying to reason with it (Du Bois 85). Even as Du Bois’s sociological and autobiographical work demonstrates how racialization is formed, Mostern writes that this explanation does not form a unified politics: “The objective structure of blackness that has had so much subjective impact on his life and theorizing has placed him, at age seventy, in a profoundly different position than many other blacks … Du Bois is left with he concrete fact that he speaks for absolutely no one.” (Mostern 72, 74)

40  Memoir and Autobiography While Du Bois’s highly unusual and individualized experience left him with much theoretical and historical knowledge about race in America, his lived experience and the insights he could derive from it were very unlike nearly all of Black or white America. As works of autoethnography, Du Bois’s autobiographies could not generalize very far from his own case study, though they tried. His experience was exceptional and therefore not at all representative. Still, atypical lives can teach us much about the typical, once placed into that context. Presidential Memoirs and Autobiographies In the eighteenth century, US presidents began a new canon of personal narrative. In standard autobiographies and memoirs that focus on the years of their presidencies or other significant eras of their lives, US presidents have connected to readers and historians across time, and in some cases, their writings have helped shaped their legacies. In the twentieth century, with the rise of presidential libraries as a feature of post-​presidential life, the expectation that a former president would write about their terms became nearly ubiquitous, and in the twenty-​fi rst century, even presidential hopefuls publish their life experiences in an effort to gauge their potential with voters (Gershon). Craig Fehrman, citing a speech John F. Kennedy gave at the National Book Awards in 1956 after Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage was released, describes this phenomenon: “ ‘How many books will I sell?’ has become one of the better answers to ‘How many votes will I get?’ ” (Fehrman). It wasn’t always fashionable for presidential hopefuls or even recent presidents to pen their life stories. Four out of the first five US presidents wrote books of personal narrative, personal correspondence, and other “musings” under the prevailing notion at the time that such books should only be published after their deaths (Gershon). James Buchanan was the first ex-​president to publish a memoir in his lifetime. Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of Rebellion (1866) is believed even by Buchanan’s contemporaries to be motivated by his desire to launder his image after disastrous policies led the nation into civil war. While Buchanan’s memoir may have been self-​serving, and thus dismissed, it anticipated the nation’s need to process the horrors of the Civil War—​a need better addressed by Ulysses S. Grant’s 1885 The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Written at Mark Twain’s urging to help Grant and his family recover financially from failed business ventures, Grant’s book focuses on his military career, though it also more generally covers his life, leading to its distinction as the first autobiography written by a former US president. It is considered a highly literary work (possibly because Twain lent his own literary style to the prose) by Fehrman and other critics, including Edmund Wilson. Grant completed it while dying of throat cancer, which perhaps infused his prose with an urgency that captivated readers.

Memoir and Autobiography  41 Theodore Roosevelt published an account of his time with the Rough Riders in 1899 and released an autobiography in 1913 that largely sought to justify his presidential policies. Calvin Coolidge’s 1929 autobiography, serialized in Cosmopolitan, marked a change in style, moving from dryly retold historical events and self-​defenses to a more personal meditation. Such self-​reflection in the portrait of a presidential term drove nearly every US president from Harry Truman on to write an autobiography or memoir, providing personal context for key political events. Truman wrote two memoirs preceding a longer autobiography, including his 1955 Memoirs: Year of Decisions, which covers Truman’s use of nuclear weapons to force Japan’s surrender in 1945, ending World War II. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all published memoirs covering their presidencies from a personal standpoint, soliciting understanding and empathy from the American public, but sometimes inspiring admiration or scorn from historians and biographers. Former president Donald Trump has not released a presidential memoir but published three books in the late 1980s and 1990s on his life in business. Barack Obama has published several books on his life and career. Dreams of My Father (1995), a memoir of Obama’s early childhood leading up to his entry into Harvard Law, is considered his most literary book, one not solely motivated by political ambition. His second, The Audacity of Hope (2006), previews many issues central to his 2008 presidential campaign. Michiko Kakutani called the book “a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech” (Kakutani). In 2020, Obama released his third autobiographical book, A Promised Land, first of a planned two-​volume series, which chronicles Obama’s first presidential term through the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. President Joe Biden wrote two books prior to his presidency. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (2007) preceded his unsuccessful run in 2008, but for its candid recounting of the 1972 car accident that killed his wife and 1-​year-​ old daughter, the book received praise from major outlets such as The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. His second book, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017), examines once again the role of loss and grief in Biden’s life, this time the loss of his son Beau to brain cancer. These personal subjects, though experienced by an author in a highly atypical position, make these memoirs very different from the chronicles of great deeds and noble principles common to presidential or influential-​figure memoirs of earlier eras and instead join the subgenre of grief memoir—​something accessible to everyone. Self-​Creation in Contemporary Autobiography While presidential memoirs are manifestations of trends of power in America—​ and whatever ideals a particular historical moment associates with power—​that

42  Memoir and Autobiography is a very small representation of American culture. Contrary to casting oneself as some sort of American ideal, writers of less privilege and power offer a far more nuanced portrait of America through their life stories, since they were unable to ignore the systems of power and inequality that came to bear on their lived experiences. Within every American identity group (especially considering the blurry and contentious boundaries of those identities, the individuals who occupy liminal spaces among multiple groups simultaneously, and the pluralities of individual experiences within them), there is a negotiation of the individual and the collective, shaped by cultural and historical factors large and small, public and private, global and local. Within nationality and ethnicity alone, one could spend hundreds of pages and still barely give the most superficial attention to the unique and varied life writing traditions (and scholarship analyzing it) among Jewish-​A mericans, Irish-​A mericans, Italian-​A mericans, Chinese-​A mericans, Native  Americans, Latinx Americans, LGBTQ Americans, “third-​ culture” people in America, and so many more. However a group might be defined, similar issues of power and inequality, self and society are often central to the experience and the ways individual lives write themselves out of the margins and into public discourse. Many have asked if autobiography works to describe a life or to write one into existence. Of course, it’s both. Autobiography works to describe the world a self lives in and to create a future one. Mostern writes, “An autobiography becomes that text in which the determinate recall of self and the determinate recall of history are consequences of one another; this should be true even … where the author is unconscious of the fact” (Mostern 82). Within Black autobiography, authors have always displayed a conscious awareness of the historical moment in which the storyteller operates, and steadily throughout the twentieth century, Black writers worked toward self-​ creation inseparably from a collective work toward an ever-​evolving definition of being Black in America, and for many, globally. Angela Davis published her eponymous 1974 autobiography at age 28. In a later work, she writes: my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom … I would write a political autobiography exploring the ways in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle. (Davis 20) Self-​creation done in direct dialogue with group identity—​the group itself not static and perpetually emerging from the plurality of its members and shifting conditions across time—​remains an essential feature of identitarian autobiography and the political, philosophical, and social purposes to which thought leaders within marginalized communities apply stories from their lives.

Memoir and Autobiography  43 The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (1964) recounts the life of a man in steady states of change, cycling through epiphanies and disillusions, his own reinventions rendered as an embodiment of the evolution of racialized discourse in America across his short lifetime. Whether more properly considered biography than autobiography—​since Haley did the actual writing (or maybe “ghostwritten autobiography” that actually names the ghost)—​it tracks X’s life from childhood (in which his parents are devotees of Marcus Garvey, whose views his father is murdered for speaking publicly), through his time feeling like a successful mascot of respectability politics at a mostly white school and living with a white family, though adolescent street hustling, through his arrest and time in prison, through his conversion to Nation of Islam (NOI) and devotion to its leader Elijah Muhammad, through his rising in leadership and influence espousing the NOI’s racial separatist views, and ultimately beyond his devotion to Muhammad and toward the global, pan-​A frican identity he was beginning to develop at the time of his assassination in 1965 (Haley). The writing of the book itself straddles this final self-​transformation and so can sometimes seem at cross purposes with itself. Mostern writes that it is constructed to fit a notion of identity consistent with a particular narrative moment … over a period in which two conflicting narrative agendas are at work, and the text, written by a third party, is not rewritten to contain the contradictions. (Mostern 140) X’s conversion, both spiritually to Islam and intellectually through his “homemade education” (as X called it), established the self-​m aker, self-​educator trope still widely seen across the subgenre of prison autobiography, which is very aligned with the self-​m ade man stories America had been telling itself since Benjamin Franklin. Much of the book espouses the kind of patriarchy Elijah Muhammad prescribed and remains problematic in terms of gender—​ particularly racialized gender—​yet he also speaks of his mother, his sister Ella, his wife Betty (to whom the final version of the text is dedicated) in ways that do (at least sometimes) accord them a kind of agency and autonomy and respect his patriarchal words and philosophies do not. While X carries on at length about whichever philosophy possesses him in that particular moment (during long interview sessions with Haley), it was less any single idea that people seemed to identify with so much as with the man whose contradictions and changes and struggle to get better embodied much of the larger racialized social landscape. His struggles to continually change himself are often read as both product and producer of broader social change. Later Black memoirists and thought leaders are outgrowths of the traditions and conditions that came before, but many push beyond a simple redemption

44  Memoir and Autobiography or epiphany or transformation narrative, working to render their lives (and the world that surrounded those lives) in acceptance of its full and fraught complexities. Prolific author and theorist bell hooks (the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) was an influential figure, bringing Queer Black Feminism into public discourse beginning with 1981 with the widely praised Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Working from the multiple overlapping identities in her own life, much of her writing and thinking—​both in storytelling and in overt political theorizing—​g ains its power from these intersections. Her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood is an album quilt of lyric fragments, each one three pages long, accruing into a larger mosaic that both derives strength from her family/​community and feels conflicted within it. In one section, hooks recalls the way adults would talk about gay men when she was a girl, calling them “funny,” never saying, “homosexual,” but not mocking them. She recalls attitudes of tolerance—​that their sexuality wasn’t approved, but that it wasn’t their fault. These men could still receive community respect. Not so when it came to queer women. The gendered inequality of queerness in her community is stark in this chapter’s final paragraph: they let me know quickly that men have the right to do whatever they want to do and that women must always follow rules. Rules like women are made to have babies. Only by being with men can women have babies. Women who do not want to be with men must be made to feel bad, ashamed, must be excluded from all community of feeling so that they will come to do what is expected of them—​if not, they will be punished, they will be alone—​they will not be loved. (hooks Bone Black 138) Hooks said in a 2014 talk with The New School, she described her concept of queerness “as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (Peake). Evelyn Shockley writes, She shares with us the pain of her difference, the willful sense of self that drives her to rebel against the people she would like so much to please … We sense the adult hooks’s understanding of the genuine concern motivating her parents; she knows that they are attempting to prepare her and her siblings to survive a world in which “they are children … black … next to nothing.” Nonetheless, hooks does not hide her condemnation—​both as girl and as woman—​of their actions. (Shockley)

Memoir and Autobiography  45 That invention of a self, the invention of a place in the world for that self—​in context of inequalities and systems of oppression—​and the insistence on the embodied manifestations of those social, political, and material realities, are sophisticated public uses of life writing and are strong features of much African American autobiography and memoir. In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), Roxane Gay, like hooks, writes from her life experiences and how her feelings about them do not align with the judgments of the world around her. Also like hooks, she works in short chapters that amount to segments in a book-​ length essay, applying a sharp critical perspective to the cultural narratives that overprescribed how she was to be and how she was to understand herself. Like hooks, she writes to create her identity publicly, an act that reverberates as a critique against the surrounding culture. The parenthetical “my” in the title underscores her self-​ownership and reminds the rest of us that her body, like all others’ bodies, doesn’t belong to us. She describes being a survivor of a gang rape, and coping with that trauma, in part, through food. But the real focus is on the disconnect between her understandings of herself and the world’s assumptions about bodies that look like hers: I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate how the world all too often responds to this body … I have tried to love or at least tolerate this body in a world that displays nothing but contempt for it. I have tried to move on from the trauma that compelled me to create this body … been silent about my story in a world where people assume they know the why of my body, or any fat body. (Gay 22–​23) As in any memoir, Hunger recreates scenic daily experiences, but she also acknowledges that media, like television, constitute daily lived experiences as well. Gay feels the invitation to shame and the coercive power of the dominant cultural narratives about fatness and thinness: throughout her talk show career, Oprah Winfrey has sold a redemption narrative, an overcoming narrative, through dieting and thinness; reality shows like The Biggest Loser, Fat to Fit, and My 600-​lb Life combine elements of the game show and the makeover talk show; “women’s networks” are saturated with it from the advertising to the reality TV to the fictional narratives. As Gay says, all this presents a desire for weight loss as a primary component of women’s identity, and that she performed self-​hatred in public largely because society expected that of her. Leigh Gilmore writes, Gay … explores what it means to have an experience of violation without a language for it, what it means to have a self and a body that can be harmed

46  Memoir and Autobiography in ways she could not fathom … Unlike the expected arc of a weight-​loss narrative, Gay tells a weight-​g ain story. She exposes the sentimentality of narratives in which women triumph over their hunger, as she skewers their sexism, as if the only important work a woman’s body must do is shrink as her power over her hunger grows. (Gilmore 683) Gay resists the overcoming narrative (which is dishonestly simple and rooted in shame) and works to replace it with a narrative of honest acceptance, even when acceptance means accepting what it means to negotiate the fraught false binary of fat/​thin. She writes “… the fat acceptance movement is important, affirming, and profoundly necessary, but … part of fat acceptance is accepting that some of us struggle with body image and haven’t reached a place of peace and unconditional self-​acceptance” (Gay 153). Questions of how much space to take up, of how to take it, of defining and owning oneself, of being able to honestly question oneself and the cultures that self occupies, are all key questions in Hunger, and though Gay primarily considers them in context of trauma, gender, and body size, she does so as a Black woman in America and displays a similar philosophy of self-​and-​society as does contemporary African American memoir more broadly. Written in the second person, addressed to his mother, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir gains power from that epistolary quality—​a memoir in the form of a letter. At times, he’s working things out with her; at others, he’s measuring the distance between them made by generations, gender, abuse, circumstance; at others, he’s recognizing the things those bodies both share, and the things they can’t; still at others, having her as the stated audience in a public-​ facing text gives a precise focus and purpose for the work of mining memory to further construct an adult identity in terms of race, gender, family, education, geography, poverty, and, like Gay, fatness. The introduction establishes shades of tension between Laymon and his mother, but those tensions are small in the face of the larger tensions between Blackness and Mississippi, Blackness and America, and where those external tensions become internalized. There is the literal heaviness of a body shaped by poverty and food scarcity, and by relying on food to cope with traumas personal, interpersonal, and systemic, but heaviness is a running metaphor, gaining layers of meaning steadily along the way—​heavy as self-​protection, heavy as the truth, heavy as history, heavy as love. In sketching out the women in his life, Laymon continually confronts sexual violence as a normalized, lifelong abuse suffered by his grandmother, his mother, countless other Black women and girls, and how the masculinity he was raised within was built in large part on that abuse. He recounts being among the younger boys waiting elsewhere in a house while the older boys “ran the train” on teenage Layla—​the tax they told Layla she had to pay in order to float in the

Memoir and Autobiography  47 deep end of the pool. He writes, “Layla was a black girl, and I was taught by big boys who were taught by big boys who were taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them” (Laymon, Heavy 16). Laymon is unsettled by this, by the social pressure that he should not be unsettled by it, by the suggestion that he go take his own turn with Layla. When she asks, he makes Layla some instant lemonade and secretly chugs blue cheese dressing right from the bottle. Layla acts disturbingly casual, though she confesses to the young Laymon she doesn’t feel good and asks him to walk with her out to the pool. Teetering on this edge of choice of what kind of man to become, he runs home and waits for his mother. He was sent to that house to use their encyclopedias to write an essay his mother had assigned him. He hadn’t written it, preoccupied as he was by the group sex of questionable consent. That same day, his mother had bought him his own set of encyclopedias, and so perhaps her excitement over them meant he was punished less than he would have been otherwise for not doing her assignment. She demanded to know why. He didn’t tell her: “I stood there watching you, feeling a lot about what it meant to be a healthy, safe black boy in Mississippi, and wondering why folk never talked about what was needed to keep black girls healthy and safe” (27). Such traumatic moments among friends, family, and others throughout the community could be seen as individual crimes and tragedies, but Laymon is always careful to situate them as threads in the larger fabric of America. They are not excuses; they are explanations. Everyone seemed to be doing the best they could, and often that best did as much damage as it served survival, but under such conditions, how could it be otherwise? He writes: The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better … They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neoconfederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words. (114) Rather than ending on the false epiphanies of “I have changed and have the answers and now others must do likewise,” Heavy ends with a set of promises. He promises his mother to lose weight, to not be like her with a gambling addiction, to leave the past behind and move to a healthy future, even though he can’t promise he means everything he says. He promises himself, using his mother’s style of forcing him to write lines as punishment, all the things he will and won’t do, accept, be. It’s a fraught and complex list, just as life has been for him and for Black America as he’s known it. He will accept, he says, that Black children will not recover from all those things the teachers didn’t name, and

48  Memoir and Autobiography that they are “worthy of … love and liberation.” There is a ringing hope for the future, but not an abstract or idealistic or quick or easy one. In these recent examples, which stand among many others, the self and the society are inextricable, but there are no sudden epiphanies or transformations about those dynamics, infected by neither false optimism nor abject pessimism—​both of which are equal crimes against the truth because of their false sense of certainty. The selves in these writings are momentary captures in a never-​ending act of creation. To use Sarah Manguso’s term, there’s an “ongoingness” that is built on an ever-​deepening understanding and never rests like it’s arrived at the end of anything. Subgenres of Contemporary Memoir Contemporary memoirs tend to be narrow in narrative or thematic scope. They do not usually begin at birth and may bypass large swaths of the writer’s life to narrate distinct events or apply specific lenses on experience. They may not be arranged chronologically. Because our lives, however individuated, often share certain milestones—​adolescence, education, relationships and marriage, parenthood, loss—​ subgenres have emerged, forging their own approaches and conventions (leading, of course, to deviations). Memoirs examining their authors’ identities have given rise to other categories that rely on diverse representation in order to challenge stereotypes. When we talk about a specific memoir, we discuss it as part of a subgenre, such as coming-​of-​age memoirs, immigration memoirs, grief memoirs, or incarceration memoirs. These categories, which tend to be fluid and include considerable overlap, facilitate dialogue between titles, advance social discourse, and help readers, who often seek out memoirs to provide insight on their own lives and find and compare books that cover similar ground. As a nation shaped by immigration—​from people who have sought refuge and economic opportunity in America, to Indigenous populations (whether eradicated and displaced by white colonial-​ settler immigrants, assimilated, or persistently and defiantly alive despite five centuries of those efforts), to current fear mongering about the southern border—​A merican memoirs about immigration and its generational reach form an important subgenre. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) illustrates how complex heritage sparks imagination. The book blends memoir and myth in order to understand how Kingston’s identity has been forged across continents, cultures, and centuries. Ira Sukrungruang’s Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (2010) revisits Sukrungruang’s upbringing as a first-​generation Thai American living in Chicago, trying to understand the culture of his immigrant parents, and searching for some way to carry all the parts of himself. In Ordinary Girls (2019), Jaquira Díaz traces her childhood from the housing projects of Puerto Rico to apartments in Miami Beach, trying to preserve her relationship to her

Memoir and Autobiography  49 homeland while also growing up fast and hard with a schizophrenic mother and philandering father in a complicated, sometimes violent American city from which Díaz repeatedly escapes, always to return to what and whom she can never leave. Her memoir examines not only the ties that bind, but also those frayed by colonialism, exemplified between Díaz and her family, and between Puerto Rico and the United States. Other recent memoirs, such as Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), Marcello Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land (2020), and Meredith Talusan’s Fairest (2021), offer their own poignant, personal examples of how immigration memoirs grapple with the tension and fluidity between cultures, the pressure to assimilate, and the desire to honor and remember. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000) is ostensibly a food memoir focused on Bourdain’s experiences as a New York City chef, but also covers the drug addiction Bourdain fed both in and out of the kitchen. E.J. Levy’s short 2004 memoir “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” uses Julia Child’s cookbook as a sensory conduit to memories of Levy’s mother. “In the kitchen, my mother could invent for herself a coterie of scent and flavor, a retinue of exquisite associates, even though she would later have to eat them,” Levy recalls. “What she craved in those years was a companion, not children; but my father was often gone, and I was ill-​suited to the role” (Levy 190). Other food memoirs include Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special (2014) and Marissa Landrigan’s The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat (2017), among dozens and dozens more. More than 100 years after Thoreau’s Walden, nature memoirs, too, have bloomed. Annie Dillard’s 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek maps the natural world of Dillard’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk (2016) is a grief memoir but revolves around MacDonald’s adoption of a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Barry Lopez built a prolific career capturing his enlightenment through nature, including Of Wolves and Men (1978), Arctic Dreams (1986), and his most personal, yet posthumous Horizon (2020), which recalls Lopez’s travels through six regions, including the Kenyan desert, Botany Bay, and the glaciers of Antarctica. Experiences of sexual assault, abuse, harassment, and other kinds of gender-​ based violence and discrimination voice what has been silenced in so many victims by the American justice system and culture at large. Gay’s Hunger fits here as well. Zoe Zolbrod’s 2016 The Telling revisits the years of childhood sexual assault Zolbrod suffered from a relative as well as how Zolbrod came to tell her story—​not once, but throughout her life, to different people and to varying responses that shaped her narrative and caused it to deepen and evolve. Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers (2019) also focuses on the enduring effects of sexual assault. Of her self-​perception after years of abuse by her grandfather beginning when she was seven, Talusan writes, “For most of my life I believed I was a bad person because something bad had happened to me. I had to learn that I was not bad” (Talusan 145).

50  Memoir and Autobiography Memoirs about illness and disability also form a vital discourse. They capture the experience of living with chronic illness and pain, the perils and frustrations of the American healthcare system, and the physical and social landscapes that either enable or disable someone’s full participation in society. William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1989) is considered the first intimate portrait of depression as a progressive illness, tending largely to its narrator’s labyrinthine inner journey as he peers over and then pulls back from the abyss of suicide. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (1994) centers on Grealy’s childhood cancer, how it disfigured her face when a third of her jaw was surgically removed, and what she was willing to endure for social acceptance. Emily Rapp Black’s Poster Child (2006) recalls the loss of Black’s leg at 4 years old due to a congenital defect, and later her experience as the face of the March of Dimes, while privately struggling with her self-​image as a teenager. Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) narrates her experience being paralyzed in a car accident, her subsequent involvement in the disability rights movement, and the political thought she developed from these experiences and relationships. Pivoting to the perils of a capitalistic healthcare system, Sonya Huber’s Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010) follows Huber as a young mother in the throes of anxiety, working jobs for health insurance that still provided only inadequate care for herself and her son. Intimately familiar with that same system from another side, Paul Kalanithi, neurosurgeon and author of When Breath Becomes Air (2016), chronicles his own terminal diagnosis and the journey he underwent to continue working while planning for the end of his life (his memoir was published posthumously). Straddling subgenres, Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (2018) narrates Khakpour’s exhaustive search for relief from pain caused by Lyme disease alongside her complex addiction history. While we cannot cover all subcategories of memoir in depth, we can survey some of the most popular to study narrative approaches and intersections between identity and experience. We can also probe the overrepresentation of white writers, even while appreciating how diverse memoirs increasingly amplify underrepresented voices and challenge the entrenching of white, heteronormative experience as the only definition of unhyphenated “American.” Grief Memoirs Grief memoirs relate an author’s experience of loss and mourning. They represent the many ways grief reverberates throughout a life changed by both the presence and absence of a loved one, usually a spouse, child, or parent, but grief memoirs may explore any life-​a ltering loss. Many also examine the social implications of a loss—​what conditions precede or follow a death and how those conditions shape the author’s experience of grief—​including their performance of it, circumscribed by social norms that dictate Elisabeth Kubler-​Ross’s grief ’s “stages.” Rarely, however, is grief so tidy. Additionally, death is often a moral

Memoir and Autobiography  51 matter in America, as evidenced by national attitudes toward victims of suicide or addiction. America’s “self-​m ade man” myth has a converse. If, in the mythical land of equal opportunity, success stores are stories of self-​creation, then anything that’s not a success story is a story of self-​destruction, and the self is solely to blame for its poverty, its addiction, its disability, its labor exploitation, its lacks, its death. Grief memoirs are frequently an antidote to that myth. They challenge our temptation to link morality with mortality. They take a story that has been individualized and sketch a larger context for it—​one that implicates systems far beyond any one death, and that therefore implicates the rest of us. The death at the heart of a grief memoir is usually not the climax of the story. These stories are interested in the effects—​how the living are forever changed by what and who was taken, and how. Several excellent grief memoirs also chart the territory of grieving the end of one’s own life, such as Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016). Despite an illustrious career as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi cannot cure himself of the lung cancer that sends him on an end-​of-​ life journey culminating in a heartbreaking direct address to the infant daughter Kalanithi will not see grow up. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), which retraces Strayed’s months-​long hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, from California to Washington, contextualizes her journey through her non-​smoking mother’s death from lung cancer when Strayed was 22. Wild’s structure uses the hike as the dramatic present, with flashbacks filling in her mother’s illness and death and Strayed’s subsequent years of addiction and adultery that eventually led her to the brink of losing everything. As characters, Strayed’s mother is saintly—​a single mother dedicated to her three children, building a rugged-​but-​happy life in rural Minnesota—​while Strayed is a sinner whose life would be a disappointment to her mother, or so everyone implies before her trek. Strayed’s hike is not just an escape from her recent divorce and heroin use, but also a bridge from one part of her life to another. The labor of the trail becomes the embodiment of Strayed’s internal pain, transforming grief into mountainous insights and valleys of despair, frustration, self-​awareness, and occasional peace. The labor of it, we understand, frees Strayed from her mistakes and helps her confront the deep anger she feels about her mother’s death. On the other side of her hike may not be redemption, but acceptance, not only of her mother’s death but also of her own choices. “What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also got me here?” Strayed writes. “What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?” (Strayed 258). Most grief memoirs concern singular losses, but Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013) strings together grief across a lifetime in order to probe its systemic sources. Through separate chapters yoked together by Ward’s own story of growing up in DeLisle, Mississippi, a small town where racism, poverty, corruption, and addiction define life for its residents, the deaths of five young

52  Memoir and Autobiography Black men in Ward’s close orbit (including her brother Joshua) form a narrative that indicts the circumstances that so often shorten Black men’s lives. Tragic accidents, murders, and self-​inflicted deaths flow from the same sources, Ward concludes. She tries to leave her birthplace and its pain behind, but finds the same pain elsewhere, and sees that for Black Americans, there is no escape from racism. Her scope widens beyond specific losses to larger injustices behind Black grief. When her 19-​year-​old brother is killed by a white drunk driver, the driver receives the light sentence of five years in prison, plus a fine to Ward’s mother. “The man served three years and two months of his sentence before he was released, and he never paid my mother anything,” she says (Ward 235). The final chapter zooms out even further to survey Black life in Mississippi as painted by the starkness of statistics on Black poverty, educational prospects, and incarceration. Then, in an echo of the Black Lives Matter organization founded the same year of her memoir’s publication, Ward writes the names of her loved ones trapped within those numbers: What we carry of Roger and Desmond and C.J. and Ronald says that they matter. I have written only the nuggets of my friends’ lives. This story is only a hint of what my brother’s life was worth, more than the nineteen years he lived, more than the thirteen years he’s been dead. It is worth more than I can say. And there’s my dilemma, because all I can do in the end is say. (240) Grief can spark research into the past for hidden truths that death can free us, finally, to know. In T. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019), her father’s death is but one loss of many. In 2004, Steven Madden, T. Kira Madden’s uncle, was convicted of stock manipulation, fraud, and money laundering. He served 41 months in prison. Divorce, immigration, addiction, incarceration, and even adoption shuffle people into and out of Madden’s life at unpredictable times, creating devastating absences. “There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions,” she writes (Madden 299). Both her Chinese-​Hawaiian mother and her wealthy father—​brother of shoe mogul Steve Madden—​struggle with substance use disorders that land them in rehab and relapses that often leave a young Madden to her own devices. What she sees as typical, such as her father passed out on the couch or her mother dripping candle wax in a fugue state, is partly based on her upper-​class environment, where money masks trouble. At her Boca Raton prep school, she hangs out with other wealthy, under-​supervised kids who party hard, but also endures racist nicknames, Asian fetishization, and the pain of closeted queerness. Writing in the present tense, Madden inhabits her childhood, teen, and young adult perspectives, and the evolution of her voice and its immediate insights grow up with Madden as a character even as the narrator retains a bird’s

Memoir and Autobiography  53 eye view, watching her own life unfurl and incorporating all that Madden couldn’t know at the time. Though the adults who populate the book often have serious problems that leave Madden literally cleaning up their messes (and their blood), Madden’s recollections contain levity and tenderness. After a blackout rage in which Madden’s father beats her mother, she comes home and finds him passed out on the couch. “My father has never been a bedroom father, a kitchen father, a backyard father, an office father, a roof father; he is a father of the living room couch,” she writes. “His left arm dangles. I lift it and let it drop. He feels dead to me. Even like this, I love him” (80). These moments are crucial, ensuring the reader remains aware of the book’s central loss. More direct prolepsis also flashes, tinting scenes with the future we already know, reminding us of Madden’s real purpose: this recollection is constructed by grief. The last third of the book vacillates between the loss of Madden’s father to complications from emphysema and an even more distant past hidden for many years. She expands the scope of her family’s story, spiraling lyrically into genealogical research using short bursts, white space, and intertextual play with images and non-​chronological associations as both Madden and the reader learn the real secrets of her extended family—​not the ones hiding in plain sight, like the drugs and vodka strewn around her childhood home, but the grief that fueled her parents’ addictions in the first place. Eventually, through DNA testing, Madden learns that the absences haunting the lives of her childhood home include siblings she knew nothing about: a sister and brother both adopted by other families. Madden reckons with the knowledge that she is the child her parents kept. A year after her father’s death, her mother accidentally burns down that childhood home, site of so much pain and love. Madden places the event within the constellation of secrets, and joys that make up her family. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) is an intimate account of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, focusing on Didion’s stunned, paradigm-​shifting grief in the immediate months that follow. “The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted,” Didion writes (Didion The Year 34). She recognizes that her grief is not unique, but nonetheless shocking in its intensity. The book describes what grief-​induced “derangement” looks and feels like to Didion, a writer famous for her detachment as a narrator in earlier nonfiction: Marriage is memory, marriage is time … it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-​n ine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first since I was twenty-​n ine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger. (197)

54  Memoir and Autobiography Didion had cause to release a second grief memoir, Blue Nights, in 2010. Centered on the perplexing death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, Blue Nights is an even more candid account of Didion’s grief as a mother looking back on what she might have failed to see about her daughter’s life. Although critics often see the book as less polished than The Year of Magical Thinking, they also praised the raw narrator Didion fashions of herself. In a scene of Didion sorting through mementos of Quintana, she writes, “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here” (Didion Blue 46). In such candid prose, we see Didion grappling with a parent’s regret that cannot be explained or rectified. It must simply be carried. Motherhood Memoirs Blue Nights is primarily interested in grief, but in its reflections on parenthood, it dips into the conventions of another popular subgenre. Motherhood memoirs (note that “fatherhood memoirs” do not form a distinct subgenre, though some well-​ k nown titles exist—​ e.g. Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate, Neal Pollack’s Alternadad, and Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed) narrate the changes pregnancy, labor, and caretaking bring to women’s lives with all the gendered expectations that come with them. Such memoirs explore their narrators’ vacillating embrace of motherhood, regardless of the love they feel for their children. Adrienne Rich’s 1976 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution examines Rich’s life as the mother of three sons, as well as the society that imposes rigid standards for what constitutes a “good” mother. Weaving sociological research into her midlife point of view, Rich’s memoir straddles personal narrative and cultural analysis, so calling it a memoir may be a stretch. Still, Of Woman Born is foundational for using the lived experiences of a mother as the basis for questioning the institution of motherhood. Quoting from her own 1960 journal, Rich writes, “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering … It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-​edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness” (Rich 21). It is not the abstract concept of motherhood that Rich evokes, but her own mothering of her own children. Essayist Eula Biss, writing about the impact Of Woman Born had on her, says, “Rich’s predicament, as a mother who was also an artist, remains a predicament today. And what she did with that predicament, what she did with her rage and frustration, remains deeply instructive” (Biss “How Motherhood”). Biss underscores the timelessness of Rich’s anger and tenderness, a spectrum of emotion American culture doesn’t outwardly afford mothers, which may be why many motherhood memoirs have a note of rebellion—​the taboo of a mother’s ambivalence being as strong today as ever. We can see Rich’s influence

Memoir and Autobiography  55 in Louise Erdrich’s 1995 lyric memoir The Blue Jay’s Dance, which describes the irresolution of mothers: “But of all passing notions, that of a human being for a child is perhaps the purest in the abstract, and the most complicated in reality” (Erdrich 3). Similarly, Anne Lamott’s 2005 Operating Instructions offers an acerbic, tell-​a ll chronicle of single motherhood, while Sarah Menkedick’s 2017 Homing Instincts, a memoir-​in-​essays, also blends research and personal experience as Menkedick and her family move into a cabin on her family’s Ohio farm. Motherhood memoirs frequently intersect with other subgenres. Emily Rapp Black’s The Still Point of the Turning World (2013) narrates the nine-​month period following Black’s infant son’s terminal diagnosis with Tay-​Sachs disease as Black and her then-​husband process their heartbreaking future. “How do you parent without a future, knowing that you will lose your child bit by torturous bit? Could it even be called parenting, or was it something else, and if so, what?” Black writes (Rapp 11). The Still Point of the Turning World lives in the liminal space between motherhood and grief, which, as Black says in the opening chapter, is the case in any “great love story” (1). Heather Kirn Lanier’s Raising a Rare Girl (2020) chronicles Lanier’s journey after her daughter Fiona was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. When pregnant with Fiona, Lanier had attempted to follow every rule and retrospectively sees this attempt to control fate as an unconscious expression of ableism—​ something Lanier’s love for her daughter requires her to dismantle in herself. “Mothering Fiona was turning me into a different kind of woman,” she says (Lanier, Raising 80). In the 1986 edition of Of Woman Born, Rich’s introduction takes stock of how “little has changed and much has changed” in the previous decade (Rich xii). Rich, who came out as gay in 1976, sees progress on childbirth, marital rape, the custodial rights of lesbian mothers, and sexual discrimination in the workplace as vital, but still inadequate and reflective of racial and economic privilege. Enough did change so that some women—​those almost entirely white and of educated background, and most likely to be featured in the media—​the conditions of their lives were light-​years better than those of their mothers and grandmothers, even their elder sisters. (xiii) Rich writes, observing the evolving narratives of white mothers and noting the absence of progress for mothers of color, poor mothers, and single mothers. In discussing her wish to be sterilized after having three children, Rich shares that she had to convince the medical establishment—​the same system that argued for the sterilization of Native, Black, and Latina women (xx). Significantly, she identifies white feminism as taking a moralizing position, using a child

56  Memoir and Autobiography as “a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-​r ighteousness” not given to marginalized mothers and childfree women, who have long formed communities that decentralize the role of the biological mother in caretaking for young children (xxiv). She admits that her “Motherhood and Daughterhood” chapter failed to apply more diverse lenses in its analysis of the mother-​d aughter relationship and points to growing representation of motherhood in fictional literature by authors such as Alice Childress, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde (xxv–​x xvi). Deesha Philyaw, author of the short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, recalls in a 2008 issue of Bitch her enthusiastic response to Lamott’s Operating Instructions and subsequent disappointment in the dearth of such books published by Black women, despite the publishing industry’s claim that the mommy memoir terrain was replete. Her disappointment stems not only from lack of representation but also from the pervasive notion that memoirs like Operating Instructions offer universalities of motherhood when in fact their insights arise from white women’s experiences, which are then characterized as typical. “The absence of Black mommy memoirs mirrors the relative absence of Black women’s voices in mainstream US media discourse about motherhood in general,” Philyaw writes. She points out that the “mommy wars” between women who, despite educational privilege, opt to stay home with their children and those who opt to work out of the home ignores the historical requirement that Black mothers, since the time of slavery, work and mother at the same time, incurring at least white culture’s erasure of their experiences and at most its dangerous insistence that mothers who work cannot be good mothers (Philyaw). Ten years after Philyaw’s article, Nancy Reddy sees little change. At Electric Literature in 2018, Reddy surveys the landscape of contemporary motherhood memoirs and declares it far too white. While she praises a spate of recent memoirs for their depictions of motherhood’s messiness and for eschewing advice-​g iving, she recognizes that identifying with these authors comes easy because Reddy, herself, is part of the same demographic. This leads her to be troubled by the freedom of white authors to admit taboo positions that racially marginalized mothers cannot risk sharing in such a public way. Using Ayelet Waldman’s controversial New York Times Modern Love essay, in which Waldman confesses to loving her husband more than her children, Reddy argues that Waldman’s essay is an inadvertent expression of her own white privilege: Whiteness means that Waldman can call herself a bad mommy and … not actually risk having her children taken away from her. Women of color can’t expect the same response. Protective services, including the removal of children … acts as a form of surveillance for black and brown mothers … If a woman of color declares herself a bad mother, there’s a very real risk that the state might just believe her. (Reddy)

Memoir and Autobiography  57 For women of color, the risks that come with public exposure are significantly higher than a bad book review. Reddy suggests this could be why—​ unlike white narrators, who often dramatize their frustrations and failures as parents—​Black and brown authors tend to use “calm and authoritative” personas. In Camille Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History and Angela Garbes’s Like a Mother, Reddy encounters narrators who are not surprised by the challenges of being working mothers nor obsessed with their own shortcomings (while still admitting they have them—​ the introduction to Garbes’s book revolves around finding out she was pregnant while hungover after a fun night out) (Garbes 1–​4). While the memoirs of white women often explore third-​wave feminism’s interest in reclaiming pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding from a patriarchal medical establishment, women of color like Garbes refuse to characterize their C-​sections as failures and don’t take up the mantle of martyrdom; Garbes is explicit about the support of her partner and the “web of friends … whose texts, visits and emails helped her navigate the early days of motherhood” (Reddy). Stigmas against non-​ white and single mothers find a crucial nexus in Nefertiti Austin’s Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America (2019). After becoming licensed to foster children from the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, Austin—​a single, Black woman who teaches history at several area community colleges, and by her own description a “free, successful Black woman in the world”—​adopted a 6-​ month-​old Black baby boy named August. But despite Austin’s accomplishments and grounded sense of self, mothering August quickly taught her that “none of [her success] meant [her] child would be spared the fate of so many Black boys in our country” (Austin 8). Set shortly after the 2012 death of 17-​year-​old Trayvon Martin at the hands of vigilante George Zimmerman, Austin’s prologue recounts her intention to take August to a Black Lives Matter rally. As they prepare to leave the house, with Austin patiently explaining, in an age-​ appropriate way to her curious and intelligent son, why they were going to this event, Austin considers how to dress August. She feels especially conflicted about the hooded sweatshirt she ultimately chooses to keep him warm. Though she realizes August is too young to be considered a threat, her mind flashes on his future as a teenager whose race and gender in a hooded sweatshirt would be “synonymous with danger” (7). Motherhood So White offers an intimate representation of single Black motherhood in an America that sees mothering through a white lens. Austin also recalls her own childhood, growing up in the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. Her troubled, drug-​addicted parents were also Black Power revolutionaries who encouraged their two children to turn away from the seduction of white culture and its version of the American Dream—​a culture Austin only experienced when, after her parents could no longer care for their children, she and her brother went to live with her “bourgeoisie” maternal grandparents,

58  Memoir and Autobiography an unofficial adoption that tracked with other unofficial arrangements in Black families. Austin writes: My parents got a Black divorce, which meant they physically and emotionally went on with their respective lives, but neither legally filed for divorce. This arrangement was common in the Black community, because a formal divorce involved lawyers, which meant a lot of money had to be spent to make a separation legal … If kids had been produced during a marriage, divorce was a direct pipeline to family court and child support, which could result in a father going to jail for missed payments. (19) Austin also explores the patriarchal stigmas and expectations applied to single mothers raising sons on their own—​stigmas that exist in both Black and white culture. After Austin adopts August, she faces pressure from Black friends to join a religious community. “No one pestered me about it when I was on my own,” she writes, “but after I became a mom, the expectation that August needed a formal religious upbringing was something I faced constantly” (157). She describes how the men in her life schooled her on the kind of masculinity they thought August should learn, and how tiresome their “mansplaining” became even as Austin deeply valued them as integral parts of August’s life (182). Austin’s community recognized her strengths and successes as a mother and career woman who not only worked full time but also became a popular blogger and speaker after adopting August. To the world, she presented a strong, confident front, and while Austin does not apologize for or downplay her achievements, she also confesses some things she hid at the time. “Most days, I was in survival mode,” she says of her demanding schedule. “It came at a cost. I barely recognized myself and had what Dr. Maya Angelou described as ‘a kind of strength that was almost frightening’ ” (172). The memoirs of Austin, Dungy, Garbes, and even former First Lady Michelle Obama, whose internationally bestselling memoir Becoming (2018) discusses parenting before and within the White House, invite readers into domestic spaces Black women have largely protected from public view as part of protecting their children and families and evoke the resilience and ambition of Black women and girls as a product of personal resistance and the strength of Black communities. Addiction Memoirs Addiction memoirs narrate debilitating experiences with drug, alcohol, sex, gambling, and other compulsions. From first tastes to rock bottoms (or lack thereof ), and then traditionally the means and communities through which their authors get and stay clean, these memoirs offer a kind of antihero’s journey

Memoir and Autobiography  59 that necessitates sharing ugly and sometimes terrifying behavior, depicting some of the most socially deviant and silenced of private struggles. While most addiction memoirs assume an arc of redemption through eventual sobriety, many also attempt to normalize discussions of substance abuse in unsentimental and even unapologetic terms. The best examples reject simple confession in favor of complex character and cultural study. They constitute a major subgenre of the contemporary memoir for their evocation of empathy for who, in fiction, might be called “unsavory” or “unsympathetic” characters; this is significant because the success of other memoir types often hinges on the likability of their narrators. By humanizing of one of society’s most notorious pariahs—​the abject addict—​addiction memoirs ask readers to take a clear-​eyed and compassionate view of one of America’s most ubiquitous taboos. In 1944, Charles Jackson published The Lost Weekend, a novel about an alcoholic’s five-​d ay bender thought to be a thinly veiled depiction of Jackson’s own alcoholism. In 1953, William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation and Naked Lunch author whose contemporaries include Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, published a semi-​autobiographical novel based on his experiences as a heroin user and dealer. Like The Lost Weekend, Burroughs’s Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict is labeled a novel, but a more fitting genre would probably be autofiction, as its narrator, William “Bill” Lee, is widely considered to be an incarnation of Burroughs. “I don’t mean it as justification or deterrent or anything but an accurate account of what I experienced while I was on the junk,” Burroughs says in a published letter to Ginsberg. “You might say it was a travel book more than anything else. It starts where I first make contact with junk, and it ends where no more contact is possible” ( Jordison). Burroughs defines his purpose: storytelling, not self-​help. He is not interested in saving anyone, including Bill Lee; he aims only to capture what it looks and feels like to develop, and then try to overcome, a psychological and physical need. The “travel” from first contact to no more contact is echoed in Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life (1994). Known previously for his columns in The New York Post and New York Daily News, Hamill’s memoir recounts its author’s lifetime relationship to alcohol, beginning as a boy observing the drinking behaviors of Greatest Generation men—​colorful but toughened, suffering quietly until alcohol makes their pain burst forth—​who populate his Brooklyn upbringing. Hamill’s book might be considered an autobiography for the way it records the whole of Hamill’s life, yet its focus on the role of alcohol gives it the kind of specific focus that defines contemporary memoir. Hamill offers a story of how insidiously addiction can form through alcohol’s integration into daily life—​its modeling by elders and the rite of passage it provides into an American adulthood. His experience also reinforces the image of the hardened and hard-​d rinking male reporter. “Drinking was part of being a man,” he says (Hamill 146).

60  Memoir and Autobiography Despite referencing and sometimes reinforcing this masculine stereotype (though not intentionally sexist), Hamill’s narrative offers a more subtle, literary portrayal of addiction than the confessional stories told in church basements. In fact, Hamill never enters Alcoholics Anonymous. He white-​k nuckles his way to sobriety, even while frequenting the same bars to see his old friends. In the book’s final pages, he briefly contemplates relapse: “I have stopped, I said to myself. If I begin again, I don’t even deserve pity” (264). Hamill’s lack of self-​pity is admirable to some readers and reflects the bootstrapping ethos of American men in charge of their own destinies. But it takes a broadly moralistic tone reflective of the addiction-​a s-​personal-​weakness notion prevalent in Hamill’s upbringing, before substance use disorder was classified as a disease in the late 1980s. Women, who often encounter greater stigmas associated with addiction than men, have contributed heavily to the subgenre. In Wild, Cheryl Strayed admits to her heroin use as an impetus for completing the Pacific Crest Trail hike at the center of her memoir. Arguably the first addiction memoir written by a woman to achieve popular acclaim is Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story (1996). Knapp, a longtime columnist and lifestyle editor at the now-​defunct Boston Phoenix (though Knapp wasn’t an investigative journalist, she spent time with reporters like Hamill), describes a love affair with alcohol that began at age 14. The sensory appeal of booze insidiously turns toward dependence early, and yet Knapp maintained such a polished façade of sophisticated professionalism that it obscured her drinking as problematic. She writes that she’d thought that she drank a little too much, but that it wasn’t serious. Alcohol didn’t cause her to lose her job or do it poorly or not show up for it. She was reassured that her drinking didn’t look like that. Though we see the Ivy league-​educated Knapp in plenty of privately messy moments, she does not lose face at work nor the love of her family. In “Hitting the Bottom,” the chapter describing Knapp’s final descent before heading to rehab, she describes a furious but ultimately loving moment with her partner Michael, who admitted he was afraid and he wanted her to get help. Later, a 1-​a.m. phone call to her exhausted but loyal sister brings Knapp the moment of clarity she needs to get serious about quitting (Knapp 237–​238). She had also read an excerpt of Hamill’s memoir in Esquire, which helped solidify her decision to seek treatment. Drinking is also interested in gender, mapping how women’s lives, structured by suffocating and contradictory expectations, can uniquely lead to dependencies, plural. “I am consistently amazed to hear women talk about their multiple relationships with addictions,” Knapp writes, “the way they combine two or three, the way they shift from one to another, so naturally and gracefully you might think they were changing partners in a dance” (137). Her other memoir Appetites: Why Women Want centers on Knapp’s eating disorder—​the addictive feeling of control over her own body it gave her. It was published posthumously

Memoir and Autobiography  61 in 2003, after Knapp had died from lung cancer brought on by the one addiction she never managed to quit: smoking. Knapp’s curiosity extends to the neurological effects of drinking, and how they ultimately support disease theories of addiction. She describes the “vicious cycle” put into motion through this “artificial revving” of the brain. “By drinking too much, you basically diminish your brain’s ability to manufacture feelings of well-​being and calm on its own, and you come to depend increasingly on the artificial stimulus—​a lcohol—​to produce those feelings” (126). The cycles and systems she studies, blended with her own story, demonstrate how women’s addiction differs from men’s both in root causes and expressions. Strung Out (2020), a memoir by Ravishly advice columnist Erin Khar, reflects on Khar’s 15-​year opioid addiction in the 1990s and early aughts within the context of America’s later opioid epidemic. Khar, who began taking her grandmother’s expired prescription at age 8 and graduated to heroin by 13, offers another portrait of the high-​functioning addict. But Khar also unpacks national narratives surrounding opiates. She writes, “Those who cross that boundary, who ‘choose’ heroin, are marked with shame” (Khar 15). For Khar, motherhood eventually paves the way to recovery—​she quits shortly after she becomes pregnant. But years later, when her 12-​ year-​ old son, who is learning about the opioid epidemic raging in America during his childhood, asks if she has ever done drugs, Khar is torn between wanting to protect him from the truth of her past and recognizing that the silence of shame jeopardizes both her recovery and her son’s education about drugs, especially in a culture that places such a high premium on personal responsibility. She writes, The American ethos of putting your nose to the grindstone and persevering does a great disservice to mental and emotional health. When you can’t get out of bed in the morning, when you have no self-​worth left, when you’ve had childhood trauma, when you suffer any form of PTSD, the option of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and overcoming addiction or other mental health issues is not possible. And that is not a moral failing. (15) Khar does have past traumas. Though she grew up well-​off, she was sexually abused as a child by a family friend, coping with dysfunctionally divorced parents, and escaping into similarly dysfunctional relationships as a teen and young adult. In unsentimental, largely scenic prose, she revisits the conditions that caused and sustained her addiction even as she earned good grades in school, had many friends, and rode horses—​an external life that appeared to be heading in the right, well-​rounded direction. Khar not only depicts high-​functioning addiction hiding in plain sight but shifts perceptions of opioid addiction specifically. Heroin had been thought to be the drug of social “degenerates” like Burroughs, which allows for easier dismissal and diminished humanity, but

62  Memoir and Autobiography Khar uses her academic accomplishments and social “passing” to change the face of opioid abuse. We could add Jerry Stahl’s 1995 Permanent Midnight, Augusten Burroughs’s 2003 Dry, and David Carr’s 2009 Night of the Gun to the list of well-​k nown addiction memoirs. Though this genre had been the province of men, memoirs by white women, especially about alcoholism, have proliferated in the twenty-​ first century. Following Knapp’s Drinking were actress Carrie Fischer’s Wishful Drinking (2008), Mary Karr’s Lit (2009), Sarah Hepola’s Blackout (2015), Kristi Coulter’s Nothing Good Can Come From This (2018), and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering (2018)—​a ll excellent memoirs about the lure and trap of booze for women. Jamison’s memoir is notable in its examination of the literary history and consideration of race and class in studying when addiction is viewed as a criminal act rather than an illness. Class certainly figures into former beauty editor and Page Six socialite Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life (2017), which also stands apart from other addiction memoirs by situating her substance use as an extension of Marnell’s glamorous Manhattan life, and ending with its narrator still abusing drugs (specifically the ADHD medication Adderall), thus rejecting conventional redemption through sobriety. But “drinking like the boys”—​a s several of these authors variously describe these acts of false empowerment—​a lso studies white women’s drinking through its proximity to, and acceptance by, white masculinity. When asked about being light-​skinned in an interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Khar says she only survived to give that interview because, I had financial privileges. I had the privileges of the support of friends and family. And it was still painfully hard for me to get help … when you take all of that away, how exponentially harder it is for someone to access help, even in terms of harm reduction services. (Khar) Unlike many memoirists writing about recovery through 12-​step programs and total abstinence, Khar holds a more progressive view that embraces harm reduction programs, which in public discourse are characterized with increasingly mocking scorn the closer to poverty an addict is. Khar’s claim that recovery is often tied to demographics might help explain why so many addiction memoirs are written by white authors and underscore who has permission to be messy in public. As motherhood memoirs highlight, people of color have more to fear when revealing deviance, even in literature. The corrosiveness of secrecy drives Wampanoag author Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart (2010). The book focuses on Febos’s time working as a professional dominatrix in New York City during her last year of college, explicating the price of hiding so much of herself from others, including her job and drug addiction. Most of her friends and family saw her only as a typical student carrying a

Memoir and Autobiography  63 4.0 GPA. Like other authors, Febos is a high-​functioning addict, but one who recognizes the danger she’s in: she quietly hopes someone who loves her will discover her secrets and keep her from dying. Visible effects of Febos’s heroin use first surface at her job—​dopesick, she vomits during a session in the dungeon, killing the carefully orchestrated performance. Her client calls her out for being high. “His knowing look made me want to punch him in the face,” Febos says (Febos, Whip, 118). In an addiction-​ meets-​addiction moment, the narrator feels as exposed as the men who beg her to torment and humiliate them into pleasure. (For a complex memoir on sex addiction, see Sue William Silverman’s 2008 LoveSick.) Febos’s follow-​up, Abandon Me (2017), looks again at her addictions, but from the vantage of over ten years’ sobriety and through her search to better understand her Indigenous heritage. In the title piece, Febos begins visiting her long-​ lost birth father, a Wampanoag man who exited Febos’s life when she was still an infant. Jon is an alcoholic living on the edge of poverty with the remains of his small family, all variously addicted and suffering, and through him, Febos begins to look at her own substance use through studies of generational trauma: among native population, the rates of sexual and physical abuse, addiction, chronic illness, mental illness, poverty, and suicide are sometimes more than three times that of the national average, and there is doubt about the causal relationship between this and the five hundred years of purposeful and systematic destruction of Native American people by Europeans. (Febos, Abandon 184–​185) Febos’s family, which once suppressed its native roots to avoid discrimination, exemplifies the causal relationship. Links between racism and addiction are also explicated in Brian Broome’s Punch Me Up to the Gods (2021). Sectioning his memoir using the iconic lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” which Broome says offered him a “mini treatise on Black masculinity,” Broome confronts his harsh upbringing in Warren, Ohio as a dark-​skinned, gay Black boy who finds himself a perpetual outsider (Broome). Punch Me Up to the Gods represents the colorism and homophobia prevalent in both Black and white communities, both of which reject Broome for his skin color and his sexuality. “My parents didn’t even make a ‘good’ Black,” he writes. “Not honey colored or caramel. They made me the color of a turned-​off TV screen and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Pitch Black” (Broome 53). At 10 years old, Broome’s best friend explains the nuances of being Black that Broome has clearly missed: The differences between Black boys and white boys, he explained, are vast and it is entirely up to the Black boy to make those differences clearer. White boys could just do whatever. But Black boys had to show through

64  Memoir and Autobiography our behavior that we were undeniably, incontrovertibly the most male. The toughest. (21) Despite heartbreaking teenage scenes, such as losing his virginity to a “project girl” who is disgusted by Broome’s clear disinterest, Broome knows early on he would never measure up to the hypermasculinity that other Black men in Warren used to shield themselves from structural racism. After a failed attempt at college, Broome seeks comfort and acceptance in the gay bath houses and bars of Pittsburgh, where he begins using hard drugs and learning the culture of gay sex in the 1990s, against the fading backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. Broome presents himself to his new friends as much more experienced and confident in his sexuality than he really was. “According to me,” he writes, “I had been involved in three-​ways and orgies covered from tip to toe in genitals and there was no sexual situation that I was intimidated by. My lips were numb with cocaine and lies” (92). In Broome, using substances to escape the pressures of Black masculinity and carve out his own identity, we find a foil to Hamill’s drinking as an expression of the white masculinity that embraced and enabled him. Broome’s eventual sobriety is a smaller part of the narrative, mentioned only occasionally in a retrospective voice that looks back on Broome’s most bankrupt moments as an addict. “You have to believe me that after I sobered up, I was mortified,” he writes to a former love interest about getting thrown out of a bar (193). Broome deploys a second framing device that provides opportunities to allude to Broome’s recovery in a 12-​step program: interludes between chapters and sections tell the present-​d ay story of riding the bus with a Black father and son, Tuan, who reminds Broome of himself as a child, grappling with the expectations of Black masculinity and what love looks like in Black families trying to survive. These sections serve as springboards for Broome to recall not only his childhood, but also parts of his story that fall outside the book’s main narrative, such as going to rehab (183). Punch Me Up to the Gods isn’t as concerned with redeeming Broome as narrator as it is in understanding the confluence of shame that led first to self-​a lienation, and then to self-​destruction. Family Memoirs In America’s national identity, emphasis falls largely on the nuclear family as the stabilizing foundation of a successful life, particularly when that family is white and middle class. As historian Stephanie Coontz (particularly in her 1992 The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap), and many others have shown, this was a pretty recent invention, and one not particularly rooted in reality. Contemporary family memoirs tend to stand in stark contrast to that image of the American family, offering more complicated and realistic

Memoir and Autobiography  65 depictions. They represent the families not featured in postwar advertisements for cleaning products and status symbols—​cars, houses, lawn mowers—​and who have been written out of the mid-​twentieth-​century American Dream narrative. Susan Balée sees the postwar period of the mid-​t wentieth century as a significant turning point for American memoirs and autobiographies. Cold War era authors, she says, “discovered that their identities derived not from the pressure of external, historical forces, but quite literally forces within the family” (Balée 42). No longer were war, economic depression, or other large-​scale historical events the subjects examined in relation to the self, but one’s own identity as shaped by one’s upbringing. We would argue that today’s memoirs have reached a middle ground, collapsing the binary concept of self vs. society into a co-​ constitutive ecosystem. The majority of successful memoirists now narrate life experiences that converse directly with the external forces shaping that life. Balée identifies Mary McCarthy’s 1957 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (originally serialized in The New Yorker) as an early example of a memoir that “presents a self shaped by family dynamics” (42). In the opening chapter, McCarthy’s parents die in the 1918 influenza epidemic, after which she and her brothers are cared for by a series of oft-​abusive and sometimes-​angelic guardians, including great aunts and grandparents, all of whom exact influence on McCarthy’s development either through kindness or cruelty. Constantly adapting to new situations with members of her extended family, McCarthy cultivates an evolving Catholic faith and acerbic intellectualism to help her cope and eventually find her own direction as an adult. Notably, McCarthy, whose voice Balée describes as “a new version of the underdog: Cinderella-​w ith-​an-​Attitude,” admits at the outset that she must have imagined or speculated about certain aspects of her experiences, as memory is simply too fallible to recall everything accurately and in detail (42). According to Balée, confessional writing about the family took off in the 1960s with books such as Loren Eiseley’s The Unexpected Universe (1969), which focuses on Eiseley’s victimization at the hands of his mother. She also sees Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987) as a pioneer of the “my-​mother-​m ade-​me-​ who-​I-​am” family memoir (46). Gornick’s mercurial relationship with her mother forms the core of a narrative about learning to accept and communicate with the woman at the center of her life, and not written out of grievance or the desire for score-​settling. “Their bond occurs at the point where separate worlds intersect—​the immigrant world of the Russian-​born mother, the urbane world of the Manhattan-​born daughter—​and the City itself serves as the place where, for generations, different worlds have co-​existed,” Balée writes (48). Maya Angelou’s 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings dramatizes effects of patriarchy, racism, sexual assault, and the power of literacy on young Black women. Angelou’s memoir charts the author’s life from age 3 until she becomes a mother at 16. It is often labeled a coming-​of-​age story for its focus on the

66  Memoir and Autobiography narrator’s transformation from child to adult through her exposure to, and survival of, racial and gender discrimination. Similar to McCarthy, Angelou’s early life is shaped by the absence of the parents who abandoned her in Stamps, Arkansas, where Angelou and her brothers are raised by their grandmother and uncle. Though Angelou’s grandmother has found economic stability through owning a general store, the family encounters pervasive racism from white townspeople—​everyone from the “powhitetrash” children of Stamps to the Ku Klux Klan that terrorizes Blacks throughout the Deep South threatens the family’s safety. Perhaps this is why, after Angelou’s rapist (her mother’s boyfriend) avoids jail time, it is insinuated that Angelou’s uncles murder him in their own act of vigilante justice. They have seen all too often how the American justice system treats Black victims—​especially female victims. In a 1990 interview with George Plimpton for The Paris Review, Angelou describes Caged Bird as adopting certain traditions and political functions of slave narratives. “Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful,” Angelou tells Plimpton. “I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—​the slave narrative—​speaking in the first-​person singular talking about the first-​person plural, always saying I meaning we” (Plimpton). While Balée’s interest in family memoirs emphasizes family life as the foundation for individual experience and insight, Angelou’s autobiographical writing emphasizes the polyvocal nature of Black lives speaking not only for themselves but also for their communities. Though the term “representation” can be inaccurately taken to mean all-​encompassing, reinforcing monolithic views of underrepresented identities, in memoir it more often refers to how one author’s experiences—​such as those of Black girlhood in the mid-​t wentieth century—​invite other representations that combat hegemony. Plimpton presses Angelou on this point. He asks her how those who haven’t lived a similar life can relate to her experiences, to which Angelou protests that her specific traumas “obscure the truth,” which is that each of us lives with challenges that encompass humanity more broadly—​“what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail” (Plimpton). While Angelou’s claim that specific experiences, regardless of the demographically driven circumstances from which they arise, act as conduits to consider our shared struggles for love, safety, and prosperity, Balée—​w riting during the commercial memoir boom of the late 1990s—​characterizes some millennium-​era memoirs as hardly more substantive than an episode of Jerry Springer. Toward some memoirs, she adopts a Gass-​like position, seeing them as reflective of, and an invitation to, the sort of shallow voyeurism daytime talk shows peddled to viewers for shock value. “Revelations that were once reserved only for the ears of the therapist, are now trumpeted to the world for all to hear and judge,” she writes (Balée 48). Rather than evoking the reader’s own feelings and desires, sensationalist memoirs keep readers at arm’s length. As an example, Balée cites Kathryn

Memoir and Autobiography  67 Harrison’s 1997 The Kiss, which confesses to one of the most disturbing of family taboos: incest. At 20 years old, Harrison not only reunites with her estranged and mysterious father but begins a consensual sexual relationship with him in an effort to cement their bond on his disturbing but unwavering terms. Although the salacious material drew thousands of curious readers, critics lambasted the book for its reliance on novelistic scenes (without a guiding reflective voice) that obscure their characters’ motivations—​especially the narrator’s. In a scene of their first meeting in ten years—​a visit that eventually produces the kiss of the book’s title—​Harrison ably describes her father’s reaction to her grown appearance: My father looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before. His hot eyes consume me—​eyes that I will discover are always just this bloodshot. I almost feel their touch. He takes my hands, one in each of his, and turns them over, stares at my palms. He does not actually kiss them, but his look is one that ravishes. (Harrison 51) Harrison chooses her words carefully—​ consume, ravishes—​ to suggest the sexual nature of her father’s gaze. But Harrison does not tell the reader how she responded to this gaze, either at the time or in hindsight. She says, “His eyes rob me of words,” using the present tense ostensibly to place the reader in her position at the time, not only meeting her father as a stranger, but also bypassing any introspection or retrospection about this significance of this moment, then or now. Did Harrison recognize her father’s true desires in this scene, or only in hindsight? How does the distance between the narrator and this watershed moment of her life widen or contract in its retelling? Harrison deserves consideration that her serious trauma, which has wiped many details of her sexual encounters with her father from her memory (an occurrence not uncommon for rape and incest victims), is partly to blame for Harrison’s narrative suppression. But The Kiss illustrates, perhaps, why other memoirs might appear on their surface to be self-​obsessed, studying one’s life from seemingly endless angles; without a reflective narrator mediating the experiences of her younger self, we cannot understand Harrison’s response in the moment, nor her future actions. While we’re entertained by a scene that could be straight from the Sally Jessy Raphael Show, we crave what a genuine psychological excavation—​the real work of lying on a therapist’s couch, which is not only to recount but also to understand and apply—​would discover. An enigmatic, violent father lives at the center of Lee Martin’s From Our House (2000). Often compared with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), which documents Wolff’s migratory early childhood and the cruelty he faced at the hands of his volatile stepfather, Martin’s memoir traces its author’s life growing up in rural Illinois with a gentle schoolteacher mother and farming father whose hands become mangled in a corn picker when Martin is a baby. The accident

68  Memoir and Autobiography has profound effects on Martin’s father, a stoic but once-​convivial man who continues to farm using prosthetics that cause him no small amount of pain. The shame of his helplessness morphs into a rage taken out on his only child—​ the sensitive, quiet Martin, who has no stomach for the rough wilds of farm life—​w ith a belt. Unlike Harrison, whose abusive father remains mysterious to the reader, Martin is determined to know his father better through reflection, meditation, and speculation that search for the complexity, and indeed the love, hidden behind or within his father’s anger and bitterness. If he can understand his father’s rage, Martin implies, he may be able to overcome his own: Because he had no hands, he must have thought he had less room for error than other men … no matter the cause of his slip-​up, it would always appear that he had erred because his hooks had somehow hampered him. It made him less forgiving; it made him impatient. Each time I misbehaved, did he imagine I was trying to take advantage of his handicap? (Martin 62) Even when family memoirs emphasize one parent’s influence, such as Gornick’s mother or Martin’s father, most show interest in other adults who shape an author’s life—​especially those whose presence counters, in some way, the central parent’s dominance. Martin’s relationship with his mother offers tenderness in the wake of his father’s rages. Harrison’s father may spur the taboo acts of The Kiss, but the person with whom Harrison most wants connection is her emotionally distant mother. Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody’s Daughter (2021), grew up missing her incarcerated father, whose absence shapes her life like a shadow. But it is the women who raise her—​her mother and grandmother—​to whom Ford feels the fiercest attachments. Like Martin, Ford hails from the Midwest. Somebody’s Daughter takes place mostly in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Ford grew up in poverty, sharing beds and eating canned food dinners, and then in Muncie, where Ford attended college at Ball State University. Ford’s narrative largely focuses on her upbringing by a protective but volatile single mother struggling to support her family, as well as her God-​fearing grandmother whose warmth and bravado make Ford feel safe. Ford’s masterful reconstruction of her childhood perspective creates intimacy with the reader as we experience her internal responses to her loud, loving, and fearful environment and also humor as she learns to survive both by following rules and breaking them. When she learns from a TV commercial that smoking is dangerous, she dumps her mother’s cigarettes in the garbage and then waits to be found out. She says, I knew Mama would find her cigarettes in the black trash bag eventually, a few of them ripped in half to ensure their loss. When she did, I was going to get hit, and I was already afraid of the pain. (Ford 16)

Memoir and Autobiography  69 While Ford’s mother can be a suffocating presence, and the family is close (often living in different apartments of the same building), they are all secretive about the absence of Ford’s father, who was sent to prison at the beginning of her life for reasons she doesn’t learn for many years. Ford frequently recalls how she integrated the memory of her father into her childhood understanding of herself, or rather, how his integration chafed against the solidity of Ford’s daily experiences. She writes, I can’t remember a time before I knew my father was incarcerated, or just “in jail” as I said for the first decade of my life … [he] would fade away into the background of my four-​year-​old everyday life until I’d forgotten he’d been part of it all. But before he went to jail, he was here, in a home, with me and my mother. Before he was gone, he loved me. (30) Such gaps in memory, which reflect the gaps in Black families fractured by incarceration—​a state that disproportionately claims the freedom of Black men in America—​allow a version of Ford’s father to emerge mostly in her imagination—​one also fueled by her grandmother’s stories of Ford’s earliest years, when her father adored her openly. Ford occasionally visits her father in prison, usually in the company of her uncle, and their visits are awkward but loving. “In all my life, no one else has ever looked that happy to see my face,” she writes (93). But it is her grandmother, caretaker of the family’s collective memory, who eventually reveals the reason for his conviction: he raped two women. Ford learns this as a teen in the wake of her own sexual assault at the hands of an ex-​boyfriend. Her trauma makes reconciling her love for her father with his violence against other women impossible outside of trauma logic. “My naïveté shamed me, and I accepted that shame as my own. In the dark, at night, the saddest part of me assumed my father’s crimes were the source of the crime committed upon me,” she writes (125). Ford’s education in high school and college, however, provides respite and opportunity. Even as Ford experiences tokenizing and microaggressions from classmates, her education ultimately fulfills the American promise of social mobility through a college degree (143). She becomes part of the creative writing community in Muncie and, after graduation, moves to New York with her boyfriend to launch her career with connections she has made through her writing. It is there, at the start of her new life on the East Coast, that she receives a call from her mother with the news that her father is getting out of prison. This news, revealed in the first chapter of the book, becomes the exigence for Ford to rewind her life and write into “the spaces where [her] family was absent,” searching for the story that will make the irreconcilable parts of her life fit together (189). It is not until the final, abbreviated chapter that Ford finally meets her father outside prison walls. The reunion is witnessed by the

70  Memoir and Autobiography rest of Ford’s family (minus her grandmother, whose death in Ford’s college years is a crucible Ford endures with her mother, bringing them closer). The memoir’s ending, Ford explains, is also the beginning of a new story—​one the reader cannot hear because Ford has not yet lived it. She knows her father’s crimes will always trouble her, demanding acknowledgment, if not forgiveness, which she contends isn’t hers to give him. But the fact of her family beside her as she greets him closes some of the gaps caused by incarceration, trauma, poverty, and racism. Divorce Memoirs “Divorce lends itself to storytelling,” writes Vivian Wagner in a 2016 issue of Creative Nonfiction. “Almost always, there’s a built-​in arc of conflict; tension and drama; protagonists and antagonists; challenges and difficulties” (Wagner 10). Divorce memoirs relate the dissolution of a nuclear family, as well as new family structures and personal identities that arise in the place of its destruction. Although the US Census Bureau reports both marriage and divorce rates fell between 2009 and 2019, divorce is still a common experience, and memoirs about it constitute a significant subset of modern family memoirs. The narrative of marriage as a happy ending, as a culmination of desire, as everything to be dreamed and hoped for, is so prevalent in our culture that telling the story of a marriage falling apart still feels risqué and daring. (Wagner) Divorce memoirs—​ especially those that trade lamentation for possibility and even joy—​reject marriage as necessarily foundational to one’s happiness. Instead, divorce may be the pivot point toward a more genuine happiness. Rather than focusing solely on the dissolving marriages of their authors, contemporary divorce memoirs tend to look beyond the final parting (which is hardly ever final, especially when children are involved) to the life that awaits their narrators after all the papers are signed. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) follows Gilbert’s world travels and self-​d iscoveries in the wake of her divorce in her early 30s. Though Gilbert, who is both wealthy and professionally successful at the outset of the book, globe-​trots to put herself in the way of new experiences, her memoir chronicles an inner journey based on what Gilbert paints as deliberate choices. “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort,” she writes—​a claim some critics have found dubious (and echoing that same self-​creating individualist myth that has persisted across America’s lifetime), as Gilbert organizes the three words of her book title into a self-​designed and well-​funded quest rather than an authentic, travel-​induced stumble into meaning.

Memoir and Autobiography  71 Examining the memoir’s popularity with women, Rachel Cusk looks at Gilbert’s use of breezy humor as both intoxicating and a smokescreen of class privilege and consequently shallow insight. Cusk writes The problem lies in the egotism of these female goddesses and gurus, who require their (female) audience to stand still while they twirl about, who require us to watch and listen, to laugh at their jokes, to admire their beauty and their reality and their freedom, to witness their successes … Elizabeth Gilbert is a relentless cataloguer of such successes, social, gastronomic, spiritual and sexual: the pizza she eats in Naples, the lover she takes in Bali, the friends she makes, even the quality of her transcendence at the ashram, all are perfect, the very best. Such indulgence in female pleasure, written in the voice of a “witty warrior-​ woman,” Cusk claims, can sound empowering but unsuccessfully masks the commercialization of self-​d iscovery and glides past any part of it that might be exploitative, hollow, or unavailable to most women (Cusk). While Gilbert’s divorce and subsequent travels highlight the class implications of radical life change, Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (2021) maps the stakes of dissolving a marriage that contains both gender and financial imbalances. Though Frangello’s successes as a writer and editor do bring income to her family of five—​including twin adopted daughters from China and a son born after Frangello had been told she could not conceive naturally—​her husband of two decades is the primary breadwinner. Throughout their union, which includes plenty of joy and solidarity, Frangello manages her husband’s explosiveness by playing the calm, steadying, and often capitulating presence that soothes his ego and protects their children from its storms. But when Frangello, who grew up in poverty in Chicago and feels indebted to her husband for providing, begins a passionate affair with a writer and musician from her artistic circle, she must confront both her unhappy marriage and her own ability to betray those she loves. Eventually, Frangello confesses her affair to her husband and the fallout is even worse than she imagined. In the midst of her domestic chaos, Frangello’s best friend dies, her parents’ health begins to fail, and Frangello herself is diagnosed with breast cancer. But these experiences prove clarifying—​Frangello realizes that she wants to build a life with her unnamed “lover” and summons the strength (and perhaps cunning) of a wolf to blow down what had become her fragile dwelling. Like Gilbert, Frangello sections her memoir into three main parts: Affair, Aftermath, and Affliction. She employs the letter A because of its damning, Scarlet Letter connotation, and the first chapter of the book, “The Story of A” operates like a prologue that previews both the story to come and, in its organization as an index, explores what happens when adultery is committed by a woman. In the entry for “A is for Anger,” Frangello describes a nationwide

72  Memoir and Autobiography feminist rage in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency—​a rage she no longer feels she is permitted to claim. Frangello has no interest in restoring her reputation or explaining herself in order to justify her betrayals—​“This is not that kind of book,” she writes—​but in representing feminism in non-​puritanical terms (Frangello 7). She is keenly aware of gender disparities when it comes to adultery. Even though she is a devoted, adoring mother, a caretaker to her parents who live in the downstairs apartment of her home and require increasing medical attention, and a dutiful wife for two decades to a man whose temper has him shouting in restaurants and pushing his wife into walls, she knows she has committed the greatest taboo for women, and while she recognizes the inherent unfairness in our culture’s response to female adultery, she does not downplay the emotional pain she has caused her loved ones. Blow Your House Down cops to the hurtfulness of its narrator’s choices, showing empathy and concern for Frangello’s soon-​to-​ be-​ex, her lover, and most of all, her children. Even as Frangello comes to recognize that her mistakes shouldn’t deprive her of future happiness or her feminism—​that, in fact, feminism’s mission of gender equality necessitates that women’s adultery be as normalized as men’s—​the risk of being unlikable has the effect of claiming unlikability for women and expanding memoir’s possibilities for female narrators, who often hew closely to self-​deprecation and apology in order to atone for sins of gender. Frangello is sorry for her wrongs and analyzes their roots, both personal and social, with the intellectual precision of a major feminist thinker, but does not beg for forgiveness. Conclusion What William Gass believed about the memoirist is that their artistic goal is to create a flattering record of the self—​a self so narcissistic that it cannot possibly tell the truth about its experiences. “An honest autobiography is as amazing a miracle as a doubled sex, and every bit as big a freak of nature,” he wrote in 1994, his antiquated language evidence that American viewpoints constantly evolve. Today’s readers embrace a non-​static self. Today, American memoirs and autobiographies do not settle questions of identity so much as ask them. In Body Work, Melissa Febos suggests that the best autobiographical writing “confesses” in search of a different definition of redemption. “Instead of a deliverance from sin, a buying back, a return of another kind,” she says. “If I brought my burdens, my unspoken and perhaps unspeakable thoughts and deeds, maybe I could exchange them for the mercy of acceptance” (Febos, Body 109). Writing personal narrative expresses a change in Febos’s self-​conception. In describing how she came to write Abandon Me, she cannot separate the making of art from the transformation of self it depends upon. Before writing the title piece, still embroiled in the toxic relationship whose narrative Febos would dismantle and rebuild more truthfully throughout the book, she wrote the words

Memoir and Autobiography  73 “abandon me” on a notecard and pinned it to her kitchen wall. “What I have described here is a moment of creative experience, a moment of inspiration, and isn’t it also a spiritual one?” she writes (Febos, Abandon 122). She would leave her relationship and she would do it in part by telling the truth of it, not the lie that had once sustained it. To tell the truth, Febos had to look inward at her past—​ her parents’ complicated divorce, her secret addictions, her desire to worship others—​but also outward. She had to analyze movies from the 1980s that had influenced her views on devotion. She had to learn about the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts to which one side of her family belongs, along with another side’s Puerto Rican roots. She had to consider the ocean as a calling not only to her sea captain father, but also to the white colonists who conquered and killed their ancestors, and to whom parts of her also belong. Febos’s memoir is not a work of narcissism. It is a work of humility. And it is quintessentially American. In her 2009 TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (quoting Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe) says a “balance of stories” is a crucial part of countering injustice and inequity, and that imbalances of storytelling (“how they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how may stories are told”) arise from imbalances of power: Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person … The danger of the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. (Adichie) In a country as vast and varied as America, contemporary memoirs explode narrow notions of American identity. They show how personal experience can offer representation while recognizing the limits of any single experience to speak for others. There’s always another Gass to refresh the skepticism in some think piece about our self-​absorption, but the genre proliferates because American identities proliferate. We need many stories from many perspectives in order to glimpse what it is we all share. It is exactly as inaccurate to say all memoirs must be narcissistic and hegemonic as it is to say all journalism must be propaganda. These tools can be used in those ways, but narcissists and fascists are not the sole owners of them. Narcissism is a purpose, not a genre distinction. If, at a certain cultural moment in America, bestselling memoirs from large publishers sound shallow and self-​absorbed, too white, too privileged, too exclusionary of who all actually make up America, it is not because more complex memoirs and more diverse authors do not exist at that moment; it is because imbalances in power produced a culture unwilling to give attention to them. Forces of capitalism and the cultural primacy of one group over others can yield such incomplete, anti-​democratic life writing. One can commit vanity with the novel, the newspaper, the television sitcom, the history textbook,

74  Memoir and Autobiography the presidential speech, or the sweepingly dismissive critical essay as easily as with the memoir. Throughout this chapter and throughout American history, authors have used autobiography and memoir in democratic ways, in counter-​ hegemonic ways, in ways exactly opposite the accusations of solipsism and frivolity so thoughtlessly levied at it. Times are changing. Increasingly complex and diverse life writing has made it to both physical and digital publication, progressively building on exactly the kind of work slave narratives set out to do in this nation’s beginnings. Far more often than not, life writing is written to claim self and citizenship, to force acknowledgment of complex realities, to obliterate the oppressively normative prescriptions of what an American is and ought to be. Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED, www.ted.com/​ talks/​chimamanda_​ngozi_ ​adichie_​t​he_​d​a nge​r_​of ​_ ​a _ ​s​i ngl​e _ ​st​ory/​t ra​n scr ​ipt?langu​ age=​en Aiello, Thomas. “The First Fissure: The Du Bois-​Washington Relationship from 1898–​ 1899.” Phylon (1960-​), vol. 51, no. 1, 2014, pp. 76–​87. Clark Atlanta University. www. jstor.org/​sta​ble/​43199​122 Austin, Nefertiti. Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America. Naperville, Sourcebooks, 2019. Baker, Jennifer Jordan. “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Credibility of Personality Author(s).” Early American Literature, vol. 35, no 3, 2000, pp. 274–​93. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​25057​205 Balée, Susan. “From the Outside In: A History of American Autobiography.” The Hudson Review, vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 40–​64. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​3853​119 Bennett, Nolan. “To Narrate and Denounce: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Personal Narrative. Political Theory, vol. 44, no. 2, 2016, pp. 240–​64. Biss, Eula. “How Motherhood Radicalized Adrienne Rich.” Literary Hub, 30 Apr. 2021. https://​l it​hub.com/​eula-​biss- ​on-​how-​mot​herh​ood-​radi​cali​zed-​adrie​n ne-​r ich/​ Broome, Brian. Punch Me Up to the Gods. Boston, Mariner Books, 2022. Cusk, Rachel. “Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert” (Review), The Guardian, 24 Sept. 2010. www.theg ​uard​ian.com/​books/​2010/​sep/​25/​elizab​eth-​g ilb​ert-​rac​hel-​cusk-​ reread​i ng Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2005. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York, Knopf, 2005. Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. New York, Knopf, 2011. Douglass, Frederick. “Self Made Men.” The Objective Standard, Spring 2018. https://​ theob​ject ​ives​t and​a rd.com/​2018/​02/​self-​m ade-​men/​ Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Dusk of Dawn (the Oxford W. E. B. du Bois), edited by Henry Louis, Jr. Gates, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007. Erdrich, Louise. The Blue Jay’s Dance. New York, Harper Perennial, 2010. Febos, Melissa. Whip Smart. New York, St. Martin’s, 2010.

Memoir and Autobiography  75 Febos, Melissa. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. New York, Catapult, 2022. Fehrman, Craig. “If You Want To Run For President, Write A Bestselling Book First.” Medium, 4 Feb. 2020. https://​gen.med ​ium.com/​how-​book-​w rit ​i ng-​bec​a me-​a n-​ essent​ial-​part-​of-​w inn​i ng-​the-​white-​house-​1e977​701c​a f b Ford, Ashley C. Somebody’s Daughter. New York, Flatiron Books, 2021. Frangello, Gina. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason. Berkely, Counterpoint Books, 2021. Garbes, Angela. Like a Mother. New York, Harper Wave, 2018. Gass, William. “The Art of Self.” Harper’s Magazine, 7 Dec. 2017 (originally in print May 1994). https://​harp​ers.org/​2017/​12/​the-​a rt-​of-​self/​ Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York, Signet, 2012. Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. New York, Harper Collins, 2017. Gershon, Livia. “A Brief History of Presidential Memoirs.” Smithsonian Magazine, 12 Nov. 2020. www.smi​thso​n ian ​m ag.com/​h ist​ory/​brief-​h ist​ory-​presi​dent ​ial-​memo​i rs-​ 180976​267/​ Gilmore, Leigh. “Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American Memoir: The Year in the Us.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 680–​87. EBSCOhost. https://​doi-​org.ezp​roxy​suf.flo.org/​10.1353/​ bio.2017.0063 Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley. New York, Ballantine Books, 2015. Hamill, Pete. A Drinking Life. Boston, Back Bay Books, 1994. Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York, Avon Books, 1998. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 1994. hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1996. Khar, Erin. Strung Out. New York, Park Row, 2021. Knapp, Caroline. Drinking: A Love Story. New York, Dial Press, 2005. Lanier, Heather Kirn. Raising a Rare Girl. New York, Penguin Random House, 2021. Larson, Jennifer. “Converting Passive Womanhood to Active Sisterhood: Agency, Power, and Subversion in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Women’s Studies, vol. 35, no. 8, Aug. 2006, pp. 739–​56. Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. New York, Scribner 2018. Madden, T. Kira. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. New York, Bloomsbury, 2019. Martin, Lee. From Our House. New York, Plume, 2000. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “But Enough About Me.” The New Yorker, 25 Jan. 2010. www. newyor​ker.com/​m agaz​i ne/​2010/​01/​25/​but-​eno​ugh-​about-​me-​2 Mostern, Kenneth. Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-​ Century America. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nichols, William W. “Individualism and Autobiographical Art: Frederick Douglass and Henry Thoreau.” CLA Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1972, pp. 145–​58. College Language Association. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​4 4328​494 Peake, Amber. “ ‘Queer-​Pas-​Gay’ Identity Meaning Explored as bell hooks Dies Aged 69.” The Focus. Jan. 2022. www.thefo​cus.news/​cult ​u re/​bell-​hooks-​queer-​pas-​g ay/​ Philyaw, Deesha. “Why Are So Few Motherhood Memoirs Penned By Women of Color?” Bitch, 23 Feb. 2016. www.bit​chme​d ia.org/​a rti​cle/​a int-​i-​a-​mommy- ​0

76  Memoir and Autobiography Plimpton, George. “Interview with Maya Angelou.” The Paris Review, no. 116, Fall 1990. www.the​pari​srev​iew.org/​i nt​ervi​ews/​2279/​the-​a rt-​of-​fict​ion-​no-​119-​m aya-​ ange​lou Rapp, Emily. The Still Point of the Turning World. New York, Penguin Random House, 2014. Reddy, Nancy. “We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs.” Electric Literature, 4 Dec. 2018. https://​ele​ctri​clit​erat ​u re.com/​we-​need-​to-​t alk-​about-​whiten​ ess-​i n-​mot​herh​ood-​memo​i rs/​. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York, W.W. Norton, 1995. Shockley, Evelyn E. “Review: Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.” African American Review, vol. 31, no. 3, Fall 97. JSTOR, https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​3042​600 Retrieved from JSTOR Jun. 14 2022. Strayed, Cheryl. Wild. New York, Vintage-​R andom House, 2013. Talusan, Grace. The Body Papers. New York, Restless Books, 2020. “The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019. www.nyti​mes.com/​i nte​ract ​ive/​ 2019/​08/​14/​m agaz​i ne/​1619-​a mer​ica-​slav​ery.html Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Layton, Gibbs Smith, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://​ebook​cent​ral-​proqu​est-​com.ezp​roxy​suf.flo.org/​l ib/​ suff​olk/​det​a il.act​ion?docID=​4764​783 Vaughan, Benjamin. “To Benjamin Franklin from Benjamin Vaughan, 31 January 1783.” Founders Online, reprinted from William Temple Franklin, ed. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin. https://​found​ersa ​rchi​ves.gov/​docume​nts/​Frank​ lin/​01-​39-​02-​0 053 Wagner, Vivian. “Splitsville: On the Rise of Divorce Memoirs.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 59, Spring 2016. https://​cre​ativ​enon ​fict ​ion.org/​w rit ​i ng/​spli​t svi ​l le-​on-​the-​r ise-​ of-​d ivo​rce-​memo​i rs/​ Ward, Jesmyn. Men We Reaped. New York, Bloomsbury, 2013. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2007.

3 Literary Journalism

Not all journalism is literary journalism. Not all literary journalism qualifies as life writing. There are many forms, endless and continually emerging techniques, and the ongoing development of the genre through many technological platforms: podcasts, documentary film, graphic journalism, and the infinite multimodal enhancements possible in digital environments. As writers have continued to incorporate new technologies and tactics into composing literary representations of real people outside their own personal spheres, they’ve carried on a tradition of making facts into stories and further confounded many attempts to define it with formal categories. A rough consensus on what constitutes literary journalism is a matter of technique and includes attention to lives other than the author’s own—​even if it includes the author’s own—​some sense of narrative (whether linear or non), scenic description, an emphasis on an honestly subjective point of view, a purpose of investigation into events and people beyond the author’s self and immediate relationships, and of course, the expectation that it all be built out of factual material. Today, literary journalists frequently span the full range of nonfiction writing throughout their bodies of work and, within the same piece, often employ genre-​fluid multiplicities of technique. Blending memoir, journalism, and criticism, Leslie Jamison’s collections The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make it Burn are labeled “essays,” since they consistently feature the reflective voice of the writer actively thinking things through, but many of her essays are also works of literary journalism in that they either begin or end or intermittently visit the world beyond the self, rely on interviews and journalistic fieldwork, and work to see broad social phenomena manifested in each case she studies. And as she writes about the lives of her subjects, she either directly or indirectly writes about her own. As in all writing about the lives of others, so much depends upon the life of the person doing the looking. “… we are always seeing other people, other art, even nature itself through the cracked lenses of our aches and longings,” Jamison said in an interview (Vasudevan). In her work, she openly negotiates the tension between what she expects and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-4

78  Literary Journalism what she finds. In “52 Blue,” her essay about “the loneliest whale in the world,” onto whom many people across the general public had overwritten their own stories of loneliness, Jamison fantasizes for a paragraph about interviewing the researcher Mary Ann Daher, imagining the meanings Daher would make, the feelings she’d carry, the conflict she surely felt at professional, cold science cracking against what was clearly a story of high emotion. But Jamison has to climb down from the story she’d dreamed, acknowledging her own tendency to tell a preferable story: It could have gone like that … This world, however, holds only her refusal to return my emails. The Woods Hole media-​relations representative made it very clear: Daher was done talking about the whale; done refusing to make assumptions about the whale; done correcting other people’s assumptions about the whale. ( Jamison, Make It 15) The story is more about the parade of people Jamison presents, each of whom identifies with the whale, or what they think the whale is—​how they think it thinks, how they think it feels, how they can only imagine it lives. The utterly unknowable whale had become the icon, a container into which so many people had poured their own loneliness in hopes that the whale-​shaped vessel would help them contain and make meaning of it. It became a mass cultural phenomenon that included both journalists and civilians. The thesis of the reportage-​essay, then, concerns not just how vulnerable we all are to telling our own story—​projecting our own fears and hopes onto it—​when we try to tell someone else’s, but also how easily we confuse the two. In the late ninetieth century, Realism and its tributary Naturalism were reactions against Romanticism—​ and its subset of Transcendentalists—​ and these trends were evident in works of American fiction and literary journalism of the period, like those by Stephen Crane and Jack London, who each worked in both genres. In the same piece as her reporting on the whale and its many fans, Jamison marks an advanced stage of this Realist backlash with Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 magazine article “Nature Fakers” in which Roosevelt saw the Romantic/​Transcendental approach to nature as narcissistic, with humans only looking at their own reflection in nature, rather than at the actual wondrousness of it. He accused them of dishonestly using imagination “not to interpret facts but to invent them.” Jamison writes: Roosevelt was especially concerned about “fact blindness”: the possibility of telling fake stories about nature might blind us to the true ones … feeling too much awe about the nature we’ve invented will make us unable to appreciate the nature in which we live. ( Jamison, Make It 20)

Literary Journalism  79 Recalling that even Emerson, the leader of American Transcendentalism, was critical about the logical ends of his own approaches, Jamison builds a work of journalism about the unknowable whale’s life as a celebrity and the people who made it their icon at the same time she uses these stories to raise the literary and theoretical questions she grapples with directly in her own work, and that have always been fundamental to literary journalism. There is the inevitable subjectivity of the storyteller: whether writer, photographer, filmmaker, museum curator, or practitioner of nonfiction in any medium—​how much it hides, how much it illuminates, how much the story is the person watching it and retelling it (or at least their interactions with what and whom they witness), how much its pretense of objectivity will always be a lie, how we might have both empirical reality and the metaphors we make of it—​and the wisdom to know the difference. Nonfiction of all types has come to make room for overt grappling with these questions. Many works of literary journalism are even primarily about these questions. No longer is this a private conversation among story makers, but frequently an essential part of the story itself. The metanarrative and the openly reflective voice of the essay are far less common in “straight journalism,” but in works attempting literary goals and methods, those moves are never a surprise. And it may be that, in acknowledging the complexities of writing a representation of reality, in narrating the ethical struggles inherent in never being able to make the writing exactly reflect the reality, in scrupulously defining the unanswerable questions, this genre may be more honest than straight news could ever be. Honest Subjectivity Literary journalism might best be distinguished from straight journalism by a movement away from the pretense of an “objective” point of view, and an embrace of a more honestly subjective one. In A History of American Literary Journalism, John C. Hartstock identifies times of great social change as also seeing the most pronounced practice of literary journalism techniques. The reactions against Gilded Age America—​built for rule by industrial robber-​ barons—​led to sensationalist and muckraking journalism, and documentary efforts like Jacob Riis’s How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) and the journalistic work of writers like Crane and London. The Great Depression triggered another such journalistic movement away from objectivity and toward subjectivity. Hartstock argues that, during times of great social crises and upheaval, the decontextualized daily facts of straight news journalism reveal themselves as inadequate to capture the subjective experiences of living through such turbulence, and that subjective approaches to journalism frequently aligned with the ethos of the Progressive Era in journalism and social reform movements

80  Literary Journalism (Hartstock 167). In this vision, the limitations of the purportedly all-​k nowing narrator are apparent. By embracing a multiplicity of subjectivities, literary journalism typically holds that knowing things and telling stories about them are both best understood as communal activities. We don’t know things alone. We don’t tell stories alone. Hartstock sees the same pattern repeat with New Journalism rising from the social transformations of 1960s America. This most iconic cohort of literary journalists like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion, among others, all greatly stylized the subjectivity already present in the genre, largely as a way of defining a perspective from which to look at the social reckonings of the era. Even more than the others of this cohort, Didion’s work and contributions to literary journalism have been unfathomably influential to all who came after. Even in her detached journalistic style, her perspective, her persona, and of course her judgment are evident, coloring every description through her particular beholder’s lens. In her now-​classic collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), she displays the confluence of techniques and the writer-​thinker persona that would define her career and be a foundational influence for the entire genre from that moment forward. Her work is so thoroughly analyzed that it feels redundant and inadequate to do more close analysis here. The synthesis of her own life as an American and Californian with popular culture and a hawk-​eyed stare at the small manifestations of broader social patterns arose from the turbulent times in which she first came into her own as a literary journalist and sustained her career and influence throughout the remainder of the century and two decades into the next. Of course, New Journalism wasn’t new, and literary journalism didn’t stop there. These approaches have been around throughout the last century and a half in America but predictably cycled into prominence whenever societal needs for them spiked. A sustained increase in literary journalism in recent decades gave rise to the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies in 2006, which publishes an academic journal and gives additional scholarly attention to the genre, along with the individual scholars, conferences, university programs, and research institutes increasingly devoted to it. The sharply developing critical work, and the sheer volume and diversity of literary journalism over the past two decades, is an indication that America—​and, indeed, global civilization—​is experiencing a sustained need for it. Stephanie Elizondo Griest, in All the Agents and Saints (2020), takes an approach of empathetic subjectivity, as so many have in the social justice lineage of literary journalism. She documents the factual landscape of the south Texas colonias so near yet also so removed from the nearby places where she spent her childhood and seeks to understand the people and the culture that emerged there, including herself. Griest writes of her own Tejana heritage, occupying the liminal space of being mistrusted and otherized by both white people and

Literary Journalism  81 Mexican nationals. She writes, “we have a visceral desire to know what inside us is Mexican, what is gringo, and by what alchemy our ancestors fused the two” (Griest xviii). When Griest profiles Lionel—​an activist and local among the colonias—​she dutifully observes his life and work among those he seeks to help, but always with her own tensions—​a truly empathetic perspective that stands in awe of the enormity of the need but also feels powerless to address them. She questions the value of writing when there are so many immediate, practical needs: This is the key difference between writing about a far-​flung community and your own. The decision to wield a pen rather than, say, a hammer gets increasingly hard to justify … I have vowed to stop trying to describe things and start trying to change them, but each time, I’ve concluded that words are the only tools I know how to use. (Griest 25) As she documents this place and its abuses and neglect by government agencies and industrial polluters alike, she is an ever-​present guide, acknowledging what it is to confront what she observes, and to confront those things as herself. In the added prologue to the 2020 paperback edition of All the Agents and Saints, Griest talks about her own battle with ovarian cancer following the publication of the hardcover edition. She had no family history or genetic predisposition, and after writing about the environmental pollution and illnesses that highly probably resulted, she wrote that her experience with cancer made her feel connected to her homeland (Griest xii). Each chapter crosses paths with many people but primarily focuses on a different individual (or two, or an object like the border wall itself ), along with the life, place, and circumstance they represent by synecdoche—​each one a new protagonist leading Griest, who remains the constant as her readers’ guide dispensing relevant research for context and contrast to the scenes she observes. She, like Jamison, metanarrates her research within the work itself, questioning her subjects’ motivations to, say, take on the ethically fraught role of becoming a border patrol agent (Griest 75). She interviews and renders the agent with humanity but doesn’t let the reader forget that humans are vulnerable to believing racist stereotypes, particularly those who uphold and are sculpted by racially discriminatory institutions. She goes on to cite historical and contemporary examples of American officials associating immigrants with disease and does so at the moment she catches herself going along with the agent’s explanation that disease is why he can’t allow her speak with any of the immigrants being held in his detention facility. This attention on context the agent she interviewed either didn’t have or didn’t acknowledge, and not simply taking that subject’s word for its surface values, can be seen as responsible journalism, but it is also an essay tactic, overtly contemplating, making

82  Literary Journalism meaning, grappling with ethical questions, and thus requiring the reader to grapple with them likewise. A travel writer, practitioner of creative nonfiction, and journalist with attention to social justice, Griest’s gaze tends outward, but there is always a self from which that gaze originates. All the Agents and Saints is a “A Sort of Homecoming” (the title of Chapter 11). A Tejana with a long family history across the shifts in the southern border of the US, she devotes Part II of the same book to a spot on the (current) US northern border, where she moved for a visiting professorship at St. Lawrence University, seeing clear parallels between her own place of origin and people and those of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation. There, too, a people lived in a place before the current nations and borders were made, and so neither community crossed these borders; the borders crossed them. In some ways, the conditions and history and culture of the Akwesasne Nation felt recognizable to her as home. Although she is careful not to overwrite the story she knows from her own place 2,000 miles away onto the people she’s just come to, the similarities she sees are undeniable. The comparison is ultimately a critique of the systems that produced the local struggles in both communities, as well as how both those preexisting cultures evolve in response and in resistance to those repressive systems. There is no neutral, truly objective way of presenting information. Simply aiming attention onto a thing is a value judgment, a result of inescapable bias. As are the decisions of arrangement, how much time and emphasis to give or take away from a given detail or issue, which voices are centered or minimized, what context is relevant and how it applies, what to summarize vs. dramatize, what language and voice and point of view to use, whether to describe vs. react vs. reflect, what audiences to imagine and how to appeal to them, and how and when and why to employ these and limitless other techniques. In the hands of contemporary literary journalists, various uses of the first person and the personal are common but are not markers of a hybrid genre; they are techniques. Like all nonfiction writers, literary journalists use whatever tools seem appropriate for the occasion. Griest’s literary journalism (and that of countless others) features a self as it confronts others to yield a synthesis—​a dialogic understanding of both, even as both are somewhat changed in the interactions. Ojibwe novelist David Treuer’s nonfiction book Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (2012) does more work in what might be called memoir, but that word doesn’t capture the work. He tells stories of his early life and family, but his testimony is set among those of all the others in the ensemble, as he investigates the society, culture, and history of the place to which he is both insider and outsider. He writes, “I wrote this book not as an expert and actually because I felt like I didn’t know nearly enough about the true dimensions and complexities of the place that I was from” (Conan). The investigation leads Treuer to distinguish between himself and those who lived far more of their lives on the reservation, regularly using collective

Literary Journalism  83 pronouns as he writes toward a shared identity, building a case for their Indigenous language as essential toward preserving everything else of their identity and culture, and seeking out models for how those identities can evolve in the rapidly changing world. John M. Coward writes of Treuer’s very different situated ethos from most others who share his tribal identity, noting that his father was a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to America from Austria, his mother was a Leech Lake Ojibwe with a law degree, and that Treuer himself is highly educated with a Ph.D in anthropology. Coward writes, “Treuer’s insider/​outsider position allows him to locate and tell intimate stories of the Ojibwe and other reservations using local knowledge as well as his deep reservoir of legal, political, and anthropological information” (Coward 31). Treuer is a uniquely situated protagonist/​observer, motivated to observe and understand, and to preserve, to defend, and to advocate, not for some pitiable Other, but for the people he legitimately claims as his own, though (maybe in some ways because) his position is a liminal one. Whether or not you separate “literary journalism” of this stripe from “travel writing,” travel writing has often done the same to the complete outsider. Though the traveling narrator may have no experience or personal identity connected to the place and the people they’re visiting, they too are changed by their journeys and their witnessing. And by vicariously recreating those changes for a reader, the writer invites empathy and identification and works to inspire similar changes in the reader. When the positionalities of the writer and the audience align with each other and not with the people who are the object of attention, there is a risk of Othering, of stereotyping, of building difference (and often superiority and pity) rather than identification and empathy. So much depends on how critical such a positioned outsider writer can be of themselves and their own assumptions as to how the audience is invited to regard the journey’s subjects. Anthony Bourdain, mostly through his multiple television shows like No Reservations and Parts Unknown, did exactly that work. Episodes set in Vietnam, for example, grapple with the legacies of America’s war there, what Bourdain himself felt as an American representative doing the looking, and his repeated injunction to American viewers that they should look likewise and feel some sense of consequence and responsibility. Far from the travelogues of superficial tourists and the promotional frivolity of travel bureaus, travel writing that attempts the “Literary” is a subcategory of literary journalism, even when it’s in the form of television. Nomenclature and Distinguishing Characteristics For about the last century and a half in America, critics and curators alike have struggled with defining literary journalism, and with agreeing what to call it. Much energy has been spent on defining “literary” as well as what it means when affixed to “journalism,” but that is the term that has emerged, and it

84  Literary Journalism has been in circulation since at least around the turn of the twentieth century (Hartstock 9). Josh Roiland critiques a conference talk by the scholar Nicholas Lemann, who also worked to define the genre. In his talk, Lemann emphasized the “journalism” part of the term and its associated duties to the public good, warning that any fabrications allowed to wear the label of nonfiction eroded trust in nonfiction of all kinds. Roiland sees a false binary here between practical work and something that’s not practical work, and it depends on a false assumption about the term “literary.” “It should be understood as a descriptor of the range of literary elements that avail themselves to writers of nonfiction and fiction alike” (Roiland “By Any Other Name” 62). Hartstock considered adopting the term “narrative journalism,” defining it as “written largely (but not exclusively) in a narrative mode … since such works are fundamentally narrative rather than discursive,” but ultimately settled on “literary journalism,” recognizing the potentially endless territorial disputes as to what might constitute “literature” and what might constitute “journalism” (Hartstock 11). Some have resisted the term “literary journalism” as trying to pompously inflate the writing into something grandiose or that claimed superiority over other journalistic forms. Others resisted because they thought it begged for legitimacy and thus suggested the genre was illegitimate on its own. Still others contended that attaching “literary” undermined journalism’s claim to trade in factual accuracy, as if “literary” meant “fanciful.” (Roiland “By Any Other Name” 71–​74). Roiland’s argument against the false binary underpinning these positions seems to involve people mistaking literary techniques for literary goals. Literary journalism uses factual material, rendered through artful technique, toward literary goals, seeks to make symbols, icons, metaphors, even myths from them. These works are about more than their contents. They stand in for larger trends, larger groups of people, larger somethings. They work to exemplify in microcosm some larger pattern of culture, society, history, life. Christopher P. Wilson sees “ethnographic realism” as the default mode in which much journalistic nonfiction is written: The consciousness of characters is then typically conveyed through a free indirect discourse that blends narrative authority with their interior thoughts … informant testimony is coordinated with dispassionate but customarily sympathetic observation that makes the completeness of the characters’ social world seem “real” to readers and that testifies to the journalist’s own immersion. (Wilson 493) Contemporary writers who spend time hanging out and observing often work in this mode. Alex Kotlowitz and Susan Orlean are two notable literary journalists who work in this “dispassionate but customarily sympathetic” mode of observation, and yet the selection and contextualization of their cases always

Literary Journalism  85 suggest each individual subject is a manifestation (in some ways unique and in other ways representative) of larger systems and issues. There are other modes. Jon Krakauer, along with others like Sebastian Junger and Anthony Bourdain tend to take a more traveler-​adventurer approach, similar to their forebears like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, who are better known for their fiction. Kelly Kennedy draws from her knowledge, experience, and professional membership among her subjects (as a military veteran herself ) in her coverage of US combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similar to Griest, Treuer, and Isabel Wilkerson, hers is an insider’s investigation based on personal experience. “Literary Nonfiction” is too general, because it includes personal essay, lyric essay, memoir, and more. “Narrative nonfiction” is also inadequate, because it includes all subgenres and forms of nonfiction that work in narrative modes and excludes works of literary merit that take forms of non-​narrative nonfiction. Non-​narrative nonfiction may also take literary approaches to the work documentary and journalism. Roiland puts it like this: “Literary” … denotes the use of rhetorical elements ranging from scene, character development, plot, dialogue, symbolism, voice, et cetera … elements that are often beyond the conventions of standard journalism … Journalism distinguishes itself from other forms of nonfiction by one important component: reporting. (Roiland “By Any” 71) These criteria emphasize techniques of writing, holding that separate from the goals a given piece might seek to accomplish. It may be some combination of both “literary” techniques and “literary” goals with at least a large portion of observed factual material outside the self that best approximates the unmarkable borders of literary journalism. Facts and Fictions Fiction can be put to similar goals as literary journalism and employ similar techniques, with the obvious difference being that it is not claiming to be a factual representation. Too often, literary journalism is defined in comparison to the novel, by the things it is said to have stolen from the novel, as if the novel entirely owns those techniques. We do not, however, constantly remind fiction writers that many of their defining techniques were taken from drama and oral storytelling. A number of nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century works of realist fiction tried to do with invented stories, in both goals and techniques, exactly what we’ve come to expect works of documentary-​advocacy storytelling to do—​except use facts to do it. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A

86  Literary Journalism Girl of the Streets (1893), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), to name just a few, are all works of an author imagining the tragic plights of some community of people outside their own identity and experience. And they were each an attempt at exposing through fiction some injustice in the physical, nonfictional world to an audience either unfamiliar with it, or as yet unmoved to address it. They are explicit works of advocacy through narrative fiction. And as we’ve seen in more recent scandals of fictionalized facts, the knowledge that a character or event never really existed makes all the difference in how we read it. It’s not fiction, but deception that people react to so badly—​the presentation of fiction as fact. Even the most thorough research is always incomplete, memories are fallible, and none of us can be certain we aren’t actually a disembodied brain in a vat dreaming all this, but epistemological uncertainty doesn’t excuse deliberate deception. To cast off all distinction between fiction and nonfiction and call it all “art” crosses into territory Hannah Arendt warned against in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Nabeelah Jaffer explains how far Arendt knew it could go: Totalitarian ideas emancipate their believers from reality … Truth is simply not as relevant as what seems to be the truth. When Arendt argued that loneliness was the common ground of terror, she was not thinking of individual acts of terrorism perpetrated by those on the margins—​but of the terror of authoritarian ideologies and governments being slowly embraced by society’s dominant majority. The ideal subject of these governments, she argued, was not a convinced extremist but simply an isolated individual, too insecure in himself to truly think: someone for whom the distinction between true and false was beginning to blur. ( Jaffer) Names and a general category of fact vs. fiction are important to establish reader expectations, a sense of shared history, a shared code of professional ethics, and in the case of anything with the word “ journalism” or even “nonfiction” attached to it, very practical and even legal implications, particularly in a culture saturated with deliberate, malicious efforts to confuse fiction and fact, to sow doubt into every public issue for authoritarian political ends. One of the beautiful things about making art from facts is that newfound facts constantly challenge the writer’s prior assumptions, and so even in the span of a single work, the writer is forced to grow in their perspective, to deepen their understandings, to refine their philosophies. For a nonfiction writer to say they are an artist, not a journalist is to defer to whatever story they already carry, and to commit to staying exactly as stupid as when they began. It should raise deep suspicion when anyone is not faithful to facts but refuses to call those moves acts of fiction, refuses to identify which facts are actually imagined.

Literary Journalism  87 At its worst, the result is propaganda that repeats and deepens an established assumption or stereotype, with lethal consequences. But any pretense toward objectivity is and has always been a lie. It is itself a fictional conceit. One can be fair. One can seek to embrace as many valid perspectives and as much evidence as possible. But no one can be truly objective. Simply selecting a single fact as important enough to repeat to another person is a result of a judgment, and that judgment is based on an entire system of ethics, assumptions, biases, incomplete information, contextual lenses, audience considerations, and an infinite list of interpretive criteria. Another key distinction of literary journalism—​both in goals and techniques—​is not only the overt presence of the author, or at least their perspective, in full acknowledgment of that subjectivity, but also that this subjectivity is doing its level best to contend with empirical reality. Any given technique is exactly as ethical as the person wielding it. Jamison’s title essay in Make It Scream, Make It Burn is at most levels a work of criticism of James Agee’s writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). She also uses Agee’s biography and personal writings, sketching a portrait of a man furiously frustrated that it is impossible to legibly translate his experiences into words. On another level, it is a way for Jamison to grapple with questions of writing about others when you are not them and their story is not yours. She writes, “[Agee] rails against the fantasy of objectivity. He maps the ‘taint of artistry’ by exposing himself as an author disgusted and betrayed by his own representational materials … Amid his thousand-​and-​one metaphors, he suggests the inadequacy of metaphor itself ” ( Jamison, Make It 114). The preface and other “preliminaries” to Famous Men are both kinds of apology for the entire project—​a regretful lament at all the impossibilities of getting it right, and a passionate justification for doing it anyway, knowing he was presenting lives of white Alabama sharecroppers to another American audience wholly unfamiliar with them in human terms. But the doubts and inadequacies come in louder and longer as he recognizes the relationships he and Walker Evans developed with their subjects changed the way they documented them, and every effort Agee made at doing so seemed insufficient and “obscene.” He writes, so does the method of research which was partly evolved by them, partly forced upon them; so does the strange quality of their relationship with those whose lives they so tenderly and sternly respected, and so rashly undertook to investigate and to record. (Agee 8) Praise is made of his interactions, his relationships, and his presence among the people he met and stayed with in Hale County and Perry County, Alabama, that elicited the responses he observed.

88  Literary Journalism In a supplemental forward added in 1960, Evans described Agee in 1936: The families understood what he was down there to do. He’d explained it, in such a way that they were interested in his work … He won almost everybody in those families—​perhaps too much—​even though some of the individuals were hardbitten, sore, and shrewd. (Agee xi) Even if Agee had attempted a more observational style of writing, as he did in an earlier article about these travels, the things he observed would still have arisen from his presence there. A different observer would have behaved differently and therefore elicited different behaviors to observe in the locals. When Evans said “perhaps too much,” he’s likely alluding to Agee’s infatuation with Emma, a young, married Alabama woman about whom he narrates his own protracted sexual fantasies. Jamison gives some analysis to these sections, seeing that Agee has confined Emma into the life he’s imagined for her, which involves his desire for her and the desire he assumes she feels for him: “Sex represents the ultimate access … If Agee conjures the orgy as a fantasy of reciprocity and closeness, he also fears that journalism is more like onanistic spillage, an observer getting off at the expense of his subject” ( Jamison Make It 120–​121). The double consciousness of Agee’s writing in Praise is perhaps a key to its enduring presence in the loose canon of American literary journalism and in the fascination of its contemporary practitioners. There Is a Dishonest Subjectivity Hartstock builds on the work of Michael Schudson, who distinguished between the “story” mode of journalism and the “information” mode—​“narrative literary journalism” vs. “objectified factual journalism.” (Hartstock 55). He argues that “factual objectified news style” sought to shut down all questions before they could be asked, which is at once epistemologically impossible and means “the reader’s subjectivity is excluded from imaginative participation” thus increasing the distance “between the reader’s imaginative participation and what has become an objectified world” (57). If literary journalism works to close the distance between subject and object, objectified journalism works toward the opposite. But Hartstock sees a similar problem in sensational journalism’s rampant, dishonest subjectivity. “Sensational journalism attempts to cause repugnance, horror, or terror by emphasizing differences between subjectivities, not by attempting to narrow the gulf between them [and] reenacts the epistemological problem inherent in objectified, ‘factual’ journalism” (57).

Literary Journalism  89 That problem is an unearned sense of certainty, authority, and superiority. Both sensational or “yellow” journalism and objectified journalism discourage empathy, resist subject-​ audience identification, and dominated American news media from the end of the Civil War until the 1890s. Even in reports suggesting that bad things should not happen to “those poor people over there,” the objectified approach invites pity, which is built on difference between viewer and viewed, and a sense of superiority of the looker to the looked at. Sensational journalism emphasizes difference, but frequently from the powerful and privileged in revulsion toward the powerless. It is against this underscoring of difference (on the flawed pretense of objectivity) and within a rapidly transforming world filled with new tensions and new crises and new technologies, Hartstock says, that American literary journalists like Crane and Riis responded. Agee’s agitated narration in Praise might largely have been because the gap between himself and his subjects proved impossible to close, but the struggle to tell the story is essential to the story because it shows all the ways he tried. “New” Journalism While the English writer Matthew Arnold is credited with coining the term in 1887, it seems to only have come to more definitive use to describe the “New Journalists” in the 1960s. Tom Wolfe’s introduction to The New Journalism (1973) is a manifesto attempting to claim a broad literary territory for a small number of writers, and install Wolfe himself at the head of it. This group was and remains highly influential, but they were not the beginning, and they are certainly not the end. It was a time of much experimenting, and so much blurring of fact and fiction that both Capote’s In Cold Blood [1966] and Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/​T he Novel as History [1968] tried out the genre label “nonfiction novel,” largely to justify the vivid scenic depictions of moments neither writer had actually witnessed and didn’t necessarily have a subject’s precise testimony to support. Imagined, reconstructed, and composite scenes are sites of great ethical conflict among literary journalists. These are concrete, dramatized moments that the writer was not present for, and at best extrapolated from interviews and other evidence, or imagined based on the writer’s assumptions they used to fill the gaps in their knowledge, or at worst, outright fabricated based on the story the writer preferred to have happened instead, thus manufacturing their own story instead of seeing one across the patterns of evidence in their research. Wolfe specified that the genre was defined by four techniques. The first two are scene-​by-​scene construction and dialogue. The fourth is thoroughly recording “everyday” details, but in a way that makes each detail do more work than just being a fact—​description could also be symbolic or metaphorical, for

90  Literary Journalism example. Wolfe called these “status details” that work to define character and mark identities like cultural membership and socioeconomic class, thus using an individual person and these individual details to characterize larger groups. The high risk of stereotyping is obvious. None of that is particularly new, and it also wasn’t new in 1973, but Wolfe’s third technique bears a closer look: “third-​person point of view,” the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it. (Wolfe) He implied it was somehow narcissistic to acknowledge the point of view from which observations were made: Journalists had often used the first-​person point of view—​“I was there”—​ just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—​h imself—​a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. (Wolfe) But what is and isn’t ethical when it comes to that work of reconstructing both events a writer didn’t experience and a whole other person to experience them through? Wolfe says thorough interviews justify writing not just the second-​hand scenic action, but also a character’s interiority and reflection. Of course, a piece of writing is not the events or the people it portrays. Every nonfictional text is a reconstruction of a thing, not the thing itself. Research will always be incomplete. Memories are notoriously inaccurate, selective, prone to confirmation bias, and sometimes even entirely fabricated by delusion. These are inevitable complications of working with attempted-​factual material. But at a certain point, Wolfe isn’t just describing one subjectivity regarding and empathizing with another; this formulation of a writer’s subjectivity claims ownership of that other, hollowing it out wearing its skin. Identification brings subjectivities closer, but it cannot collapse two into one. Empathy is always an act of imagination. A writer doesn’t have to belong to a community in order to write about it, but too much unearned ownership across too much difference between author and subject leaves the literary journalist playing dress-​up, especially if an individual journalist is writing from a greater position of socioeconomic power and sense of superiority to their subject. Isabel Wilkerson, in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), recreates past events fairly scenically, based on extensive interviews and research, giving us chronological narratives of three Black

Literary Journalism  91 Americans and their families as they left the south for hopes of better lives elsewhere. One of her main subjects, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, is rendered in scene, driving and thinking about leaving his Southern home: He knew he was as smart as anybody else—​smarter, to his mind—​but he wasn’t allowed to do anything with it, the caste system being what it was. Now he was going about as far away as you could get from Monroe, Louisiana. The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with each plodding mile on the odometer. Like many of the men in the Great Migration and like many emigrant men in general, he was setting out alone. He would scout out the New World on his own before sending for anyone else. (Wilkerson 27) Here, she renders something like Foster’s interiority, but it comes as exposition—​information plausibly gleaned from his recountings (“Resentments had grown heavy …” “He knew he was as smart …” “life seemed”) not as a puppeteering of his character by a writer trying to tell a different story. Wilkerson narrates in her own register, rather than attempting to imitate Foster’s. Further, Wilkerson carefully chose each of her three primary subjects for the book, using them both as distinct stories and as representative examples of certain trends (“Like many of the men …”). She stands close to her subjects to present us with their experiences—​retelling to us what they told her—​then pulls back to a broader view to situate them in specific contexts available to her as a researcher and historian. Ultimately, empathy and identification are acts of imagination: a writer or a reader did not literally have the experiences the subject did and do not own the identities that arose from those experiences. Writers and readers may be changed by visiting the lives of their subjects, but they can only ever be visitors there. Among most literary journalists, there seems to be an ethic of being constantly aware of that. Self and Otherness Wolfe frequently regarded his subjects as a colonial-​ British anthropologist might—​observing them as separate from him, concerned with the status individuals and groups hold in a social hierarchy. His emphasis on “status details,” as he called them, positions each character within a class and relative to those of other classes and often looks upon them with a superior gaze. Hartstock sees literary journalism’s goal as “embracing an understanding of the social or cultural Other” (Hartstock 22). It’s a subtly but significantly different formulation of the relationship between writer and subject from the one Wolfe described, which claimed to know the benighted subject better than they could know themselves.

92  Literary Journalism Wilkerson had a challenge in interviewing subjects who were nearing the ends of their own lives. In an interview, she describes how one of her subject-​ characters died, forcing her to decide whether she could continue with him as a character. She said, “[T]‌h at meant my project had changed from journalism to biography, from reporting to history. And I then had to turn to archives. I had to turn to the newspaper stories that might have mentioned him.” (Forde). Point of view is a powerful consideration in any narrative (some say that’s the only decision a writer makes, and all others arise from it), but especially in telling true stories about real characters who are not yourself. Wilkerson chooses a limited third person. With limited information available to approximate each character’s experience, she extrapolates from other evidence and gives probable interpretations as to what each would have been thinking about in the moment—​and what they couldn’t have known in such a moment—​but there is a line she does not cross in taking Foster’s story away from him, even as she recreates it for the reader to vicariously experience. She writes, perspective … guides the writer through the entire narrative … At certain points, the reader knows only what the character knows … It deprives readers of knowing what it’s like to be this person if they know too much at a certain point in the narrative. And yet they need to know enough to be able to experience the thrill of discovery as life unfurls for the character. (Forde) Here, reserving some information for later is a move of honesty, rather than dishonesty. Questions of Fact; Questions of Interpretation To bear witness is to carry what you witnessed, and to carry it to someone else. The writer is the medium. Debates persist in how that medium inevitably shapes the message and how much that inevitability justifies (or doesn’t) one or another kind of deliberate manipulation. The first decade of twenty-​fi rst century America produced a series of ferocious debates among nonfiction writers—​particularly literary journalists—​ that took serious consideration of the lineage of the genre and began to draw hard lines about every writer’s duty to veracity in nonfiction. How far could one go in reconstructing a scene and still call it nonfiction? Maybe it’s a Ship of Theseus question: how many parts of the same ship can be replaced individually before it is an entirely different ship? How much non-​fact can nonfiction bear? Composite characters? Omitted characters? Dialogue modified beyond the needs of clarity? Maybe there are certain justifiable changes, like concerns over a subject’s privacy, reputation, or safety. One justification might be that the

Literary Journalism  93 alteration doesn’t substantively change a character or a story but brings clarity, as in omitting ancillary characters from a scene, or collapsing multiple sit-​down interviews into a single conversation. Griest, in the prologue of Saints, gives the disclaimer that she did modify the identity of several of her interview subjects for their privacy and their safety against “possible reprisals.” She wrote multiple separate interviews as single scenes. She also allowed her subjects to tell their own stories, writing “While I fact-​checked the ‘verifiable truths’ that appear in these pages—​stats, dates, and so on—​I took the personal stories at face value, however whimsical they may have seemed” (Griest xxi). The choice many authors make is to simply announce when they’re imagining, compressing, or otherwise editing the raw material of their research, experience, observation, and second-​hand retellings. This can happen within the text itself (“I imagine it goes like this …”), or within some kind of disclaimer in the front or back matter. Wilkerson includes “notes on methodology” in the back matter of Other Suns to describe how she used multiple sources to verify one another, including driving each of her primary subject’s migration routes herself, and hundreds of hours of interviews with “secondary informants,” particularly where the memories of her three primary subject-​characters were less precise. If anything, Wilkerson’s descriptions of her process underscore her diligence to be as accurate as possible and assure us that the stories she tells are a synthesis of multiple sources. And, similar to Griest, her personal stake in the story heightens both her sense of responsibility and our sense of the stakes of the investigation, since Wilkerson’s own parents had also left the South in the Great Migration, and so faithfully understanding her subjects is also a way of locating herself within a larger context. While the oral historian’s finished products differ from those of the literary journalist—​fi rst person accounts from the subject, rather than from the author—​m any of the ethical concerns are the same. In the preface to the oral history All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974)—​a Black man in rural Alabama who worked as a sharecropper and was involved in a movement to unionize sharecroppers in 1931—​Theodore Rosengarten recounts, from his own perspective, his relationship with Shaw, the epic storytelling sessions Shaw virtuosically performed for him, and the delicate challenge of ordering and synthesizing the different parts, especially when Shaw would tell the same story in several different ways and to several different purposes. He also acknowledged how the first-​ person-​ through-​ Shaw recounting throughout the book could never approximate the presence of the man himself: I have not reproduced a southern or black accent because I did not hear it. I did hear the English language as I know it, spoken with regional inflection and grammar … Shaw’s vocabulary is remarkably broad and inventive, enriched here and there by words not found in the dictionary … His gestures,

94  Literary Journalism mimicries, and intonations—​a ll devices of his performance—​are lost. No exclamation point can take the place of a thunderous slap on the knee. (Rosengarten xxiv) He also felt the need to change the names of “all the people and most of the places,” including Shaw himself, to grant “a measure of protection and privacy,” which is understandable with the lingering racism and resentment some might carry against Black Alabamians involved in the Communist Party’s labor organizing in rural Alabama. All of this, though, was necessary to record the stories themselves, and preserve in America’s cultural record what Rosengarten calls in the opening line an “autobiography of an illiterate man.” There are inevitable distortions in translating real life to the written word, just as there are with translating a globe onto a flat map. But some distortions are more unethical than others. In About a Mountain (2010), John D’Agata used back matter to acknowledge and attempt to justify a lie he told in the body of the book: “There is no explanation for the confluence that night,” he wrote, “of the senate vote on Yucca Mountain and the death of a boy [16-​year-​old Levi Presley] who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino” (D’Agata About 42). Though in the notes, he corrects, “I should clarify [sic] here that I am conflating the date of the Yucca debate and the suicide … In reality, these two events were separated by three days” (209). Arguably, that conflation gained the book zero artistic benefit, especially considering the multiple layers of brilliance the book actually does achieve, and the artful questions that it raises despite that alteration, not because of it. This one lie alone, despite—​or partly because—​of the coy disclaimer, triggered serious backlash from much of the creative nonfiction community. That year, many nonfiction panels at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference turned into a referendum on D’Agata. Leading writers, scholars, and editors all felt pressed to weigh in, even if reluctantly. It was D’Agata’s position as a leading nonfictionist himself, editing influential anthologies and serving as a professor at the University of Iowa—​ America’s flagship university creative writing workshop—​that likely drew such a visceral response from so many, along with his insistence on turning that response into a protracted publicity stunt for his problematic philosophy against anyone expecting facts in nonfiction. About a Mountain is set up solidly in the register of literary journalism, implicitly promising, through genre expectations, fidelity to the truth wherever possible. Like Griest and so many others, D’Agata conflates multiple time periods into one. But Griest collapsed multiple interview sessions into one. That choice had no substantive consequences in understanding people or events and allowed for an easier management of the information and narratives her subjects were talking about. D’Agata’s changing of the date of the death of a focal character in order to manufacture a shallow coincidence reads differently. It wasn’t an

Literary Journalism  95 attempt to reconcile different versions of the same story, and was the opposite of a compromise toward clarity. The artistry and drama of the book work in perfectly the same way without that lie. In fairness, he did admit the lie in the end note, but many didn’t think that was enough because it did not justify the alteration. Novelist Charles Bock wrote a review that captures the dominant sentiment among fellow writers at the time: [T]‌he problem isn’t solved by a footnote saying, “Hey, this part of my gorgeous prose is a lie, but since I admit it, you can still trust me.” Rather, it damages the moral authority of D’Agata’s voice, which is his narrative’s main engine … D’Agata might argue that such questions are just part of the truth-​w isdom debate in which his book engages … [but] this singular author unnecessarily compromised an otherwise excellent book. (Bock) Two years later, D’Agata published The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), co-​authored with fact-​ checker Jim Fingal, along with a number of public statements attempting to invalidate distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, at least in literary writing. Framed as a conversation between a writer and his fact-​checker as they work through drafts of the story of Pressley’s suicide, it reads as an insufferably ironic answer to the question “why did you lie when you didn’t have to, when you knew better, and when there was not even a good artistic reason?” In an interview in The Kenyon Review, D’Agata and Fingal characterize their dialogue in Lifespan as, itself, a caricature (a fictional recreation in which—​to read generously—​the reader is invited to see each speaker as representing the too-​far extreme of art vs. facts but left to guess how much these are distortions-​ for-​entertainment of straightforward conversations between the real D’Agata and Fingal). D’Agata refers to his own persona in Lifespan in the third person: I believe in his claim that no one—​not readers, critics, other writers, or cultural institutions—​has the right to say what can or can’t be done in an art form, no matter the medium … I defend his right to fudge whatever he wants, because I want the right to do whatever I need to in order to create the best possible reading experience. (Cutter) This formulation is a false dichotomy between art and facts. It’s a different matter to acknowledge inevitable uncertainties and to consciously substitute fiction for fact. In an interview with PRI, D’Agata said: I don’t consider myself a journalist … I like playing with the idea of journalism and our expectation of journalism. So I like making something feel journalistic and then slowly reveal that that approach isn’t really going to

96  Literary Journalism give us as readers what we want from the text, that we need to try a different sort of essaying, and then the essays become a lot more associative and the perhaps become a bit more imaginative and start taking the problematic liberties. I think it is art’s job to trick us. (“In Fairness”) A lot of other nonfiction standard-​bearers weren’t having it. An artful surprise is not the same thing as a lie. If a nonfiction artist can’t make art out of factual material, the non-​D’Agata sentiment held, the fault lies with the artist. Dinty W. Moore posted about this controversy—​and his wish he didn’t have to—​in the blog attached to his online nonfiction journal Brevity: I want a world where genre distinctions, the place of the essay in the nonfiction spectrum, and the role of artistry in nonfiction writing can be debated … [b]‌ut I am distressed by how John D’Agata is raising the question, by his seeming disrespect for the rest of us, his dismissal of legitimate concerns and questions, by the fact that even his discussion with the fact-​checker turns out later to have been fabricated, and by his idea that art has to “trick” us … I reserve the right to complain, and to call something a self-​promotional manipulation, when I see it that way. (Moore) This cultural moment showed that nonfiction writers feel duty-​ bound to a shared code of ethics and will vigilantly hold one another accountable. Generally: don’t present something as factual when you know it isn’t. Don’t ignore and invalidate things where evidence exists for them. Announce questions rather than manufacture answers. Work to get all the information you can with the time and resources you have, knowing it will always be incomplete. Don’t pretend it’s complete. Understand that memory, your own and your subjects’, is faulty. Make it clear when you interpret, speculate, reconstruct, or imagine. Provide the evidence and the contexts that prompted these leaps. Tell it as honestly as you can within those constraints. What if D’Agata had decided it would have been more “artful” to claim Native American identity for himself, and write about Yucca Mountain as if that were his perspective? What if he’d thought it would have given a better reading experience to pretend to be a member of Presley’s immediate family? He does nothing so egregious, but “philosophically,” it sounds as if he wouldn’t rule it out, even if he implies in interviews that he wouldn’t go that far personally. Some writers have presented themselves more fully as journalists working in literary modes, and D’Agata’s impish experiment in fact abuse pales in severity to the scandals there. Janet Cooke’s Jimmy’s World (1981) tells the story of an 8-​year-​old heroin addict. The problem was that Jimmy wasn’t real. Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, only to have it swiftly withdrawn when she “could

Literary Journalism  97 not produce Jimmy (or the academic credentials she had claimed in her job application)” and “later claimed Jimmy was a ‘composite character’ put together from accounts of social workers” (Warnock 467). It may be common practice to collapse multiple ancillary characters into a composite, but Cooke drastically leapt over any gray area to land squarely in fiction and called it the opposite. John Warnock argues that Literary Journalism should be distinguished not just from news journalism, but from fiction “based on” fact … Tom Wolfe allowed it in new journalism, although he would not have allowed Janet Cooke’s use of it, since she admitted she had not actually seen the originals herself. (Warnock 468) Stephen Glass wrote for prestigious glossy magazines like Harper’s and Rolling Stone and worked on staff for The New Republic, building a stellar career as a literary journalist right up until it was revealed in 1998 that he’d routinely made up details and even whole stories. His friend and honestly accomplished nonfiction writer Hanna Rosin said: we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic’s fact-​checking department.) (Rosin) Glass tried to return to journalism in 2003 with an article in Rolling Stone and his own “biographical novel” The Fabulist, but the reactions were not positive, particularly among his peers, and he left journalism permanently afterward. Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair triggered a similar scandal with his own fabrications and plagiarism from other journalists from 2002 to 2003. During the 2000s, American journalism saw several more public controversies over failed fact checking, plagiarism, misrepresentations, and other things that journalists themselves saw as undermining public trust in the profession. Journalists and editors largely policed and punished these crimes themselves. The usual punishments are loss of jobs and publishing contracts, deplatforming, public disgrace, and professional exile. During the same period, writers in other genres did similar self-​corrections. Memoirist James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) is a conspicuous example. A 2006 article on the website The Smoking Gun called out Frey on numerous, severe lies and exaggerations. Though claiming to have spent 87 days in jail, “The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he

98  Literary Journalism once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond” (“A Million Little Lies” 2). The fallout led to Frey’s notorious face-​ to-​face dressing-​down by Oprah Winfrey on her show. Winfrey had previously chosen the memoir as a selection for her book club, and so felt compelled to perform the betrayal she and so many readers (and her own viewers) felt. In 2011, the prolific literary journalist Jon Krakauer published Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. In it, Krakauer challenges stories Mortenson tells in his books Three Cups of Tea (2007) and Stones into School (2009), alleging both journalistic sins and financial crimes in his mismanagement of his charity, the Central Asia Institute. Famously meticulous and tenacious in his work, Krakauer followed up in subsequent years with additional reporting and arguments, hoping to hold Mortenson—​and by extension others—​accountable, if only in public reputation. He writes, His invented tales of derring-​do turned Mortenson into a celebrity and generated $80 million in donations to CAI. But they also distorted the reality of life in the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where most of the CAI schools have been built, smeared the reputations of colleagues and villagers who assisted him, and promulgated ugly cultural clichés about the violent nature and religious fanaticism of the tribal communities he purported to help. (Krakauer, “3000 Cups of Deceit”) Krakauer himself, though—​a s do all who try to write truthfully about real people—​has gotten his share of criticism for his writerly choices. In Into Thin Air, recounting his own participation in a disastrous expedition to summit Mt. Everest in 1996, Krakauer includes an epilogue that quotes from letters he received following the September 1996 issue of Outside magazine, which carried the story that became the book. Guide Scott Fischer died during the trip, along with seven others, and gets a complex characterization in Krakauer’s writing, including instances where Krakauer sees him making mistakes and not following protocols. Krakauer provides this excerpt from a letter from Fischer’s sister, Lisa Fischer-​Luckenbach: Based on your written word YOU certainly seem now to have the uncanny ability to know precisely what was going on in the minds and hearts of every individual on the expedition. Now that YOU are home, alive and well, you have judged the judgments of others, analyzed their intentions, behaviors, personalities and motivations. You have commented on what SHOULD have been done by the leaders … and have made arrogant accusations of their wrongdoing … What I am reading is YOUR OWN ego frantically struggling to make sense out of what happened. (Krakauer 285)

Literary Journalism  99 Uniquely, Krakauer was both an observer and a character, having participated in the disaster and having been a mountaineer for years himself. Fischer-​ Luckenbach is in the throes of grief, of course, and most of her admonishments sound a lot like descriptions of the basic tenants of literary journalism, challenging not his objective facts, but his subjective interpretations. Nonfiction as a professional field, especially nonfiction that has public-​ minded goals, seems to have some built-​ i n cultural mechanisms for self-​correction against narrative fraud. To be fair, D’Agata’s dismissal of nonfictional ethics in the name of “art” is a very far cry from totalitarian propaganda, but the phenomenon of offering lies and implying they are an essential component of totalitarian propaganda, as Hanna Arendt argued throughout her career. Tucker Carlson, a longtime right-​w ing media commentator on the Fox News Network, won a 2020 defamation suit on the grounds that, according to US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s opinion echoing the arguments of Fox News’s attorneys: “The ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-​ l iteral commentary’ ” (Folkenflik). Therefore, Carlson (and all others) may legally lie about key facts concerning crisis-​level issues with many of the misleading style markers of nonfiction news because the words are branded as art and entertainment. But because loyal viewers believe Carlson is acting in good faith honesty, speaking on a network labeled as “news,” they overlook any such disclaimer and develop a correspondingly disconnected sense of reality. If the label “fiction” or “nonfiction” didn’t matter to either D’Agata or to Carlson, then they’d have had no problem doing exactly what they did, but calling it fiction. It’s only in calling it nonfiction that the dark magic works. Such acts only do the public rhetorical work they do through the purposeful deception of putting one label on the bottle but a different liquid inside, then blaming the poisoned drinker for not getting the joke. True Crime Drawing a line from the “hardboiled reporter/​ detective” trope (naming Lincoln Steffens and the late-​1800s Muckrakers) through Noir crime fiction and film, Wilson sees About A Mountain as largely written in the Noir mode and suggests that D’Agata directly imitated Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966) in order to do it. Both, he says, work in the grammar of Noir—​the long and ominous establishing shot, the callous and self-​absorbed contexts in which a death is about to be situated, the certainty that this death should say something about what’s wrong with all this, but ultimately won’t change anything—​and that these ways of looking that a nonfictional Noir

100  Literary Journalism mode provides are different from the ethnographic realism of so much writing about crime, corruption, and the frustrations at power structures that can’t be fully known, let alone effectively toppled. While true crime sometimes works in a more detached, documentary/​ biography style, much of it does track with the conventions of contemporary literary journalism. Throughout true crime, authors, audiences, and subjects, all tend to be very strict about fidelity to the facts and precision in identifying doubts. While television and film often embrace the bleak settings, hardened characters, and cynicism of Noir styles, modern true crime literature uses more ethnographic modes of inquiry. Investigative true crime writers may pull their audiences in with the deviant, graphic, lurid, or ludicrous, but the best true crime endures through its ability to situate crime within social and historical contexts, and to examine crime through lenses of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomics, religion, region, and more. To analyze (and, in some cases, to even try to solve) a crime is to also diagnose the conditions that helped produce or perpetuate it, and to study crime’s effects on specific communities and identity groups. Writers of true crime may or may not be journalists by trade, but they are storytellers—​their narratives populated by a variety of stakeholding characters (victims, perpetrators, police, DNA lab techs, lawyers, judges, prison officials …), their settings rich in detail, and their plots dramatized using scene, dialogue, and description that result from deep research as well as imagination. In 2008, the Library of America recognized this major literary genre with its release of True Crime: An American Anthology. The collected works include an account by William Bradford on the execution of a murderer who came to the New World on the Mayflower, as well as Pillars of Salt, Cotton Mather’s documentation of criminal executions (Mather would go on to pen his 1689 Memorable Providences, wherein he describes the alleged afflictions of the Goodwin children of Boston and is considered by Mather’s seventeenth-​century critics to have contributed to the infamous Salem Witch Trials). Works by Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain also round out early American true crime, largely establishing America’s fascination with the spectacle of violence and capital punishment. The anthology then recognizes early modern works by Susan Glaspell, H.L. Mencken, James Thurber, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston covered the trial of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman convicted by an all-​white jury for the murder of a prominent white doctor. Hurston’s coverage focuses on the judge’s silencing of McCollum, whose trial was attended by members of the Ku Klux Klan, to discuss in court or with the press the broader abuse she suffered at the hands of the doctor, which may have corroborated McCollum’s claim of self-​defense (Lynn). Hurston understood that Ruby McCollum’s crime and trial could not be separated from her race and gender—​they informed everything about her experiences with the white

Literary Journalism  101 doctor and the way she was treated in the courtroom. This recognition injects Hurston’s reportage with the subjective narration that can make true crime a form of literary journalism. Hurston, writing for the primarily Black readership of the Pittsburgh Courier (once the country’s most widely circulated Black newspapers), may have employed certain conventions of journalism, but her interest in Ruby McCollum was also personal. It was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) that exploded the genre’s interest in criminal minds. Through his intimate portraits of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock—​convicted of brutally murdering the Clutter family in their pastoral Kansas home only to rob them of less than fifty dollars—​Capote closed the distance between the law-​abiding and law-​breaking, showing how psychological damage brought on by desperate living (Smith’s upbringing was marked by his father’s abuse and mother’s alcoholism, and then years orphaned and raised by severe Catholic nuns) can contribute to someone committing a senseless crime. Hickock and Smith are murderers. Capote humanizes them not to excuse their crimes, but to better understand how and why they happened. Capote spent 4 years getting close to the killers, learning their histories, which he then recreates in astonishing (which is to say, occasionally suspect) detail. He also documents the investigation and the murders’ effects on the community of Holcomb. But like Bradford and Mather, Capote also documents Hickock and Smith’s executions, narrated to him by sheriff and F.B.I. special agent Al Dewey, whose perspective Capote inhabits in the scene. Dewey had been mostly indifferent to Hickock, whom he regarded as a “small-​t ime chiseler who got out of his depth, empty and worthless” (Capote 340). But when it was Smith’s turn to hang, Dewey found he had to look away: He remembered his first meeting with Perry in the interrogation room at Police Headquarters in Las Vegas—​the dwarfish boy-​m an seated in the metal chair, his small booted feet not quite brushing the floor. And when Dewey now opened his eyes, that is what he saw: the same childish feet, dangling. (Capote 341) To Dewey, as to Capote, Perry Smith had become more than a murderer—​ he was sensitive, traumatized, intelligent, and ruthless. Capote gives full citizenship to the killer of an entire family and, in doing so, unlocks new potential in true crime literature to see crime in social and psychological, rather than only legal terms. Mark Bowden, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979 to 2003 and the author of Black Hawk Down (1999), builds on a story he helped cover in the early 1980s. Finders, Keepers: The Story a Man Who Found $1 Million (2002) investigates an infamous theft on the south side of Philadelphia—​a neighborhood once populated by blue collar workers and dominated by the presence of the Mafia, and for which Bowden shows measurable affection as a local

102  Literary Journalism journalist. Using recreated scenes that bring the caperish plot to life, Finders, Keepers applies Bowden’s intimate knowledge of Philadelphia at that time in his portrait of Joey Coyle, a dock worker down on his luck and in the grip of drug addiction, who finds a tub of $1.2 million dollars that quite literally fell off an armored Purolator truck. Bowden follows Coyle through his weeklong run from the law, which culminates in Coyle’s capture as he tries to flee the country with envelopes of money stuffed into his socks and boots (Bowden 137). In Bowden’s eyes, Coyle is a native son and product of his environment—​the waning economic opportunities on the docks, the rise of methamphetamine, the allure and terror of organized crime. Coyle’s inability to keep his extraordinary find to himself, coupled with the drug addiction that fuels his paranoia, is cast equally as humorous and tragic. In an attempt to locate the house of a friend who has promised to help him, Coyle accidentally walks into the wrong house, startling a married couple asleep on their couch. After some yelling, the couple notices Coyle’s “sudden pleading manner and obvious drunkenness” and the scene turns to laughter (77). Coyle excuses himself to find his friend but later returns to the couple’s home to apologize. “[The husband] and his astonished wife fixed coffee in the kitchen,” Bowden writes, “and Joey promptly explained to them that he was ‘the guy’ who found had the Purolator money.” Coyle, whom Bowden characterizes an affable and generous man who wants to use the money to save his troubled family and friends, offers to pay the mortgage on the couple’s house and, when they politely decline, gives them each a hundred-​dollar bill, stopping to kiss the wife on the cheek before leaving (78–​79). Bowden also follows the narrative of detective Pat Laurenzi, whose hunt for the money also relies on his familiarity with the way things work in Coyle’s neighborhood. “This was South Philly,” Bowden says of Laurenzi’s strategy. Nobody in these row-​house blocks was going to find more than a million dollars without confiding the discovery to someone. And once that someone knew, somebody else would get the news, then someone else, and so on … Pat knew he had only to stick around and be ready. (57) Such a contextualized study of crime—​ emphasizing the conditions that enable specific people to commit specific crimes—​ is echoed in Sheelah Kolhatkar’s Black Edge (2017), which epitomizes the history of Wall Street hedge funds through the meteoric rise and failed investigation of Steven A. Cohen, founder of SAC Capital. Like Bowden, whose stake in the Coyle case comes in part from his personal connection to Philadelphia, Kolhatkar’s interest in the federal investigation of predatory hedge fund practices stems from her own past life as a hedge fund analyst. In Black Edge, however, Kolhatkar does not

Literary Journalism  103 sympathize with Cohen. Her characterization of him as a cunning financial predator willing to sacrifice his own employees to save himself and his fortune is complex, but decidedly unflattering. But Kolhatkar’s analysis of how Cohen avoided prison for insider trading extends to the culture that produced and then protected Cohen. Kolhatkar indicts the loopholes and unholy alliances between the US government and Wall Street (along with other industries) that allowed Cohen to get away with flagrant exploitation of his employees and the companies whose futures he gambled with. Kolhatkar writes: Hedge fund investors, the people whose money Cohen had such a talent for multiplying, were a predictable and self-​serving group. Many of them, including university endowments and pension funds managing retirement accounts for public school teachers and police officers, were only too happy to overlook the questionable things hedge funds were doing—​a s long as they made money. (Kolhatkar 214) Kolhatkar recognizes, as both a journalist and a former member of Wall Street’s exclusive club, that it takes a village to raise a Steve Cohen. The garden in which a future criminal is planted also figures heavily into Alex Marzano-​Lesnevich’s hybrid true crime memoir The Fact of a Body (2017). Focusing on the story of Louisiana pedophile and murderer Ricky Langley, who was placed on death row for the murder of Langley’s 6-​year-​old neighbor, Jeremy Guillory, in 1992, The Fact of a Body attempts to understand how we can restore humanity to those who have hurt us most—​those we most justifiably despise. Its subtitle, “a murder and a memoir,” indicates the book’s twinned narratives. One narrative follows the life, crimes, and multiple trials of Langley; the other excavates the sexual abuse of the book’s author. Throughout their early childhood, Marzano-​Lesnevich (who is non-​binary) and their sister were sexually abused by their grandfather, and these memories color their initial impression of Langley, whom they encounter in a video while interning at a law firm working to overturn death penalty sentences. Marzano-​Lesnevich, until then staunchly anti-​capital punishment, found themselves thinking a startling thought as they watched Langley’s taped confession: I came here to help save the man on the screen. I came to help save men like him. I came because my ideals and who I am exist separately from what happened in the past. They must. If they don’t, what will my life hold? But I look at the man on the screen, I feel my grandfather’s hands on me, and I know. Despite what I’ve trained for, despite what I’ve come here to work for, despite what I believe. I want Ricky to die. (Marzano-​Lesnevich 188–​189)

104  Literary Journalism The book’s structure at first alternates chapters between the two main narratives, but slowly, the stories link as Marzano-​Lesnevich works to understand their entanglement in their own psyche, and what that could mean for anything resembling personal healing. Marzano-​Lesnevich’s journey as narrator is partly undertaken on behalf of Jeremy Guillory’s mother, Lorelei, who also learned enough about Ricky’s tragic past—​including the death of his siblings in a car accident and his attempts at 19 years old to confess his pedophilia and request institutionalization from local health authorities, all of which were ignored or denied—​to plead for Ricky’s life in the courtroom. Marzano-​Lesnevich wants to understand how Lorelei could extend such compassion, and their quest to learn how so many people and systems failed Ricky is not in service of forgiving his crimes, but an empathy that allows survivors like Lorelei and Marzano-​ Lesnevich to avoid complicity in the death of another, no matter how justified their pain and rage toward the men who took so much from them may be. While Bowden and Kolhatkar rarely include their investigative processes within the plot of their books (Bowden briefly refers to interviews, while Kolhatkar includes chapter notes), Marzano-​ Lesnevich documents research meticulously. Not only does the book contain extensive chapter notes that form a subnarrative on information-​g athering, but Marzano-​Lesnevich also addresses their investigative process throughout the book, explaining their methodology, legal roadblocks, and personal ethics, indicating when there are differing accounts of what happened, or the use of the author’s own imagination to create scenes or speculate about characters’ emotions. The Fact of a Body also opens with a note from Marzano-​Lesnevich, whose credibility does not rest on longtime press credentials, like Bowden’s, and whose non-​binary identity perhaps fuels anxieties about being believed. The note describes several strategies designed to strengthen trust between author and reader. “For every event I record here, I have at least one person’s statement that it happened, or it is a composite event constructed from several different descriptions,” Marzano-​ Lesnevich discloses (n.p.). But because The Fact of a Body is as much about its narrator’s life as it is about Ricky Langley’s, Marzano-​Lesnevich guides the reader with something of a philosophy we could apply to much of what we call literary true crime: This is a book about what happened, yes, but it is also about what we do with what happened. It is about a murder, it is about my family, it is about other families whose lives were touched by the murder. But more than that … it is about how we understand our lives, the past, and each other. To do this, we all make stories. (n.p.) Toward the end of the book, Marzano-​Lesnevich, who has, in the course of their research, visited the graves of both Jeremy Guillory and Ricky Langley’s

Literary Journalism  105 family, decides they must also visit their grandparents’ graves (while Marzano-​ Lesnevich’s grandmother did not participate in her husband’s abuse of their grandchildren, she quite likely knew about it). “I can’t say that I forgive them,” Marzano-​Lesnevich writes. “Only that forgiveness is too simple a word. They helped make me. They did such harm” (305). As the victim in their own story, Marzano-​Lesnevich’s exploration of their life both during and after the abuse they suffered ensures that at least one victim’s story is centered in The Fact of a Body. But Marzano-​Lesnevich does not forget the other victim. “The only photographs I’ve seen of Jeremy are the ones in which he is alive. But that’s not how his story ended,” they write (257). Marzano-​Lesnevich requests copies of the crime scene photos from Jeremy Guillory’s murder. When they arrive, it’s an agonizing scene, written in the urgency of present tense that makes the reader look too: “It is the gun that does me in. Jeremy’s BB gun … poking up from where Ricky tucked it. My own cry startles me. My sobs” (295). We have focused on literary works of true crime that use a journalist’s sensibilities to investigate crime and examine its social implications. Television certainly offers what critics often call lowbrow true crime—​the sort popularized by Dateline or Unsolved Mysteries that can, at best, feel like rubbernecking someone else’s tragedy and, at worst, interfere with investigations and prosecutions by exposing key aspects of a case to the public. Critic Alice Bolin says, “This blurred line between professional and amateur, reporter and private investigator” is nothing new. Citing the 1897 competition between William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, she says Hearst amassed a group of reporters he dubbed the Murder Squad, who carried badges and weapons to create “an extralegal police force that both assisted and muddled official investigations.” Modern-​d ay iterations of this muddling proliferate—​ Bolin also calls out Netflix’s Making a Murderer for its selective omission of evidence that did not fit the innocence narrative the creators advanced. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the issues or causes that spark interest in a subject can obscure inconvenient facts. And with access to millions of lay-​sleuths, these stories invite a hungry public to weigh in on the facts and theories, which can further traumatize real-​life victims and their families (Bolin). Bolin claims both “highbrow” and “lowbrow” true crime suffer from a synecdoche problem overgeneralizing from a single crime to represent aspects of systemic injustices such as corruption, climate change, wealth inequality, and racism: “These are large-​scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming,” she says. “Focusing on one case, bearing down on its minutia and discovering who is to blame, serves as both an escape and a means of feeling in control, giving us an arena where justice is possible” (Bolin). In Bolin’s view, this has the danger of limiting perspective and creates a false sense of satisfaction. But the need for justice—​even the mirage of it—​ often hinges on where authors locate themselves within the stories they tell. Bolin identifies what she calls the “post-​true crime moment” exemplified by

106  Literary Journalism certain contemporary texts, such as the podcast My Favorite Murder, whose hosts, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, not only summarize the absorbing circumstances and details of murder cases but also interrogate their own interest in the cases they present. Bolin writes that interrogating our fascination with crime has itself become a new narrative for the genre to explore. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2018) goes into her self-​appointed mission to unmask the infamous Golden State Killer—​who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s with serial burglary, rape, and murder—​k nowing that her own ego at least partially underpins her obsession. It takes hubris to think you can crack a complex serial murder case that a task force representing five California jurisdictions, with input from the FBI, hasn’t been able to solve, especially when your detective work is, like mine, DIY. (McNamara 3) Following a scene in which she leaves her comedian husband Patton Oswalt at a Hollywood party, citing the need to get home to their infant daughter but really leaving so she can return to her DIY digging, McNamara even admits some anxiety about her obsession. “To say I’d like to stop dwelling is beside the point,” she says. “I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write” (29). I’ll Be Gone in the Dark chronicles the prolific criminality of the Golden State Killer (identified in 2018 as Joseph James DeAngelo) as well as the decades-​ long investigations that spanned the state of California. But McNamara’s probe, which began as installments on a true crime blog and then shared in a 2013 article in Los Angeles Magazine that prompted renewed public interest in the case, resists not only particular conventions of the genre, but also Bolin’s concern that true crime risks interfering with official investigations. Perhaps the most important challenge to convention lies in McNamara’s narrative focus: the Golden State Killer’s victims. While many books and documentaries have examined the dangerous intelligence and charm of serial killers, as well as their motivations for violence (traumatic childhoods abound in the serial killer world), McNamara is not especially interested in what made the Golden State Killer so violent. For each of the crimes McNamara discusses at length, the narrative is told from the victim’s perspective and includes documentation of the lifelong consequences those who survived have endured. Describing one survivor’s trauma after an attack, McNamara writes, She found she had a lot of nervous energy, and one night when she was using it to furiously vacuum, she blew a fuse, and the whole house and backyard

Literary Journalism  107 went dark. She became hysterical. Her neighbors, a kind elderly couple who knew what happened, rushed over and fixed the fuse. (80) Meanwhile, the survivor’s husband, also a victim in the attack, began secretly meeting up with another male victim in the neighborhood to conduct early morning patrols, still searching for the perpetrator. “The two men’s bond was unspoken,” McNamara says. “Few men would experience what they had, would understand the shattering rage of lying face down on a bed, bound and gagged, as your wife whimpers in another room” (80). The attention McNamara pays to the after-​effects of crime shifts the focus from what Capote wanted from Perry Smith—​a reason he killed an entire family—​and places it instead on the traumatized lives that did not go on to inflict their private pain on others. But even more than Capote, who endeared himself to investigator Al Dewey, McNamara won the respect, and eventually the trust, of the detectives and scientists who dedicated large swathes of their lives to solving the GSK case. In the prologue, McNamara admits that her attraction to the case was that it “seemed solvable” due to advancements in technology and genealogy tools such as ancestry.com (5). In pointing out new avenues for research, she is careful not to criticize either the efforts of detectives working with limited technologies, or the barriers they faced working across jurisdictions. She interviews them extensively, showing deference to their knowledge and recognizing the emotional toll these unsolved cases had taken on the detectives’ lives. Searching for items stolen from crime scenes by the GSK on eBay and other websites, McNamara comes across a pair of cufflinks that resemble those taken from a victim’s house. She buys them immediately, even paying the $40 overnight shipping charge (5–​6). Then, she takes the cufflinks to her interview with Larry Pool, an investigator in Orange County working the case. Intimidated by Pool’s seriousness and admiring of his continued dedication after 14 years chasing the killer, she tentatively hands over the cufflinks in their small plastic baggie. “He allowed the slightest hint of a smile,” she says of his reaction to her impulsive purchase. “ ‘I think I love you,’ he said” (188–​189). However, McNamara never loses sight of her own complex motivations (which began in adolescence after a brutal murder near her Oak Park, IL home), nor what they might say about herself. “There’s a scream permanently lodged in my throat now,” she writes. She describes almost hitting her husband with a lamp after he startled her one night (273). Working in partnership with another web sleuth, whom she affectionately dubs The Kid, McNamara even notices “how much our frenetic searching mirrors the compulsive behavior … of the one we seek” (175). HBO’s docu-​series of the same name reveals that McNamara coped with the stress of her investigation and looming book deadline with prescription medication (I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—​H BO). On Apr. 26, 2016, McNamara

108  Literary Journalism was found dead at home from mixed drug intoxication that triggered an undiagnosed heart condition. Her work still unfinished, The Kid, whose real name is Paul Haynes, teamed up with investigative journalist Billy Jensen to comb through McNamara’s hard drive containing 3,500 files, along with 37 boxes of materials McNamara had been given by an Orange County prosecutor who had also come into her confidence (285). Haynes and Jensen summarize McNamara’s research, including the avenues she felt technology had opened, such as geolocation and the familial DNA that would eventually catch DeAngelo. Whether McNamara’s research actually led to DeAngelo’s capture is debated by experts, but Haynes and Jensen see McNamara’s writing as essential in revitalizing the case with public interest. They also describe her relationships to the investigators she met along the way. Detective Paul Holes is quoted: We were constantly in communication … Michelle was able to accomplish gaining not only my trust but the trust of the entire task force and proved herself as a natural investigator, adding value with her own insights and tenacity … I think this private/​public partnership was truly unique in a criminal investigation. Michelle was perfect for it. (314) Empathy and Advocacy Literary journalism often informs, but when it does, it doesn’t only inform. It might not even primarily seek to inform. Though “journalism” derives from the French “Jour,” meaning “day,” the priority on timeliness of news journalism seems a lower concern for literary journalists, who take a slower, longer approach to make more durable and deliberately artful works than journalism, which Matthew Arnold famously described as “literature in a hurry.” Literary journalism seems to work toward something less timely and more timeless, and attend with a deeper eye toward recreating the small details of concrete, daily experience by which to do it. Roiland said, “the genre’s democratic impulse to capture the quotidian is one of the main differences from conventional journalism’s conception of news as timely information about people and events of consequence.” (Roiland, “Just People” 18). The dailiness of literary journalism is less concerned with up-​ to-​ the-​ moment developments in current events than it is in the moments of daily experiences of people that are evidence of larger patterns of their lives, communities, and society. Political and social polemics throughout the history of print might be called works of advocacy too, but those typically never emphasized the artful tactics of rendering lives and experiences that might qualify a work as “Literature.” In that spirit, though, early advocates for literary journalism grew out of the more polemical approaches to news writing. Many point to

Literary Journalism  109 Lincoln Steffens in particular, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, as a key influence—​a mong several others of the muckraking era of progressive journalism from about 1890 to 1910—​a s a suitable beginning point to understand the genre’s evolution. Early in this era, Elizabeth Cochran (a.k.a. Nellie Bly) also pioneered a new form of investigative journalism, notably going undercover as an asylum patient to investigate abuses of the mentally ill, which she documented in Ten Days in a Mad-​House (1887). But reporting on encounters with “the other” long predates anything we’d even call journalism in America. Narratives of encounter and capture written by early European colonizers may more typically be labeled as memoir, but they functioned exactly as embedded, first-​person journalism does. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) was a memoir of her experience, but one that stood as an example of a very colonial gaze upon the lives and habits of Indigenous peoples. And like Sensational and Yellow Journalism, it very much ignited fear and disgust of the Other. A literary journalist, by choice or circumstance, is immersed in an Other’s culture, reports their experiences and observations back to their own, applies their own interpretive lenses (in this case, colonial prejudices and judgments) to the subjects, and thus invites the audience to position themselves in a similar relationship as the author to the subjects. The most ethical journalism often has a bent toward advocacy, attending to the social issues of the day and the lives of those most affected by them, who are also usually the least powerful in the face of them. It is the same with literary journalism. Though it is not an absolute. Tom Wolfe’s writing did not attempt advocacy any more than Mary Rowlandson’s did and admittedly worked to justify or even strengthen the existing social hierarchy, rather than challenge it. Alex Kotlowitz made extensive observations of communities he did not personally belong to but did so in an attempt to humanize them for an audience who were also separate from those communities and who tended to subscribe to racist and classist stereotypes about them. In There Are No Children Here (1992) and The Other Side of the River (1998), to name two of his works, Kotlowitz does what he calls a “journalism of empathy.” It is an advocacy through the humanizing effect of the quotidian. In that view, working as an outsider to honestly humanize marginalized or maligned groups through small daily experiences works in the same advocacy tradition as Crane and Riis, though attempting to center the subject more than the writer and their pity for them. It is not a self-​ appointed savior’s pity. It is a plea for the audience to identify with those living different lives from them. While Kotlowitz rarely works in the first person, and even then only lightly, Philip Gourevitch takes a more Didionesque position in We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998) as he interviews victims and perpetrators alike from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, complexly humanizing everyone along the way. Later, he and filmmaker Errol

110  Literary Journalism Morris took a more documentary-​fi lm-​style approach in Standard Operating Procedure (2008), later republished as The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. In it, unforgivable behaviors of US soldiers are not forgiven or excused but located in the context of massive systemic failures of leadership, protocol, and organization. Prisoners of war were subjected to torture but qualified US intelligence professionals deeply understood that torture is not a way to get reliable information. Gourevitch learns that US interrogators avoid torture not only because it is a war crime, but also because torture victims, if they talk at all, are apt to say whatever makes the torture stop, which means whatever the torturer wants to hear, which means the assumption the torturer already carries and only wants validated. And so torture-​for-​information is an act of confirmation bias. He finds that the reason torture went on in Abu Ghraib was because flawed systems, and the tendency of some career military personnel to not voice problems they see in that system, granted unqualified people far too much authority (Gourevitch). While the guilty remain guilty, we are forced to see them as human, and to recognize how uncomfortably close we could all come to the same crimes if put under similar circumstances by similar systems. An advocacy emerges here, but one with a very broad vision where systems are more the villain, and everyone within them—​even the torturers—​is a kind of victim. Often, we think of journalism and advocacy as being done by outsiders—​ one of the more powerful and privileged deigning to act on behalf of someone who can’t act for themselves. But much history of African-​A merican journalism is a history of writers advocating from within, sharing a subjectivity with the narrative subjects, and so is a way of subjects speaking for themselves. Ida B. Wells-​Barnett’s reports of lynchings transformed them into the systemic horrors they were, in contrast to the more “objective” reports from white authors who normalized lynching and treated it as inevitable, even if they lamented it. Jacqueline Jones Royster writes, “She sought to recast lynching in the public eye so that it was no longer perceived as an understandable though unpleasant response to heinous acts but as itself a crime against American values” (Royster 27). Understandably, advocacy remained a key part of the ethos of early African-​A merican journalists, even as trends shifted away from advocacy and toward “objectivity” in the mainstream White press after the Progressive Era. Early Black newspapers through abolition naturally focused on abolition, but also on positive, humanizing representations and racial advocacy. In the introduction to a special issue of Literary Journalism Studies focused on African-​ American literary journalism, Roberta Maguire writes, if the mainstream press took sides in political arguments so that papers challenged each other, the black press was much more concerned with

Literary Journalism  111 presenting a united front against slavery, a common foe imposed from without. Since slavery was replaced not with equality but rather segregation and discrimination, the black press’s advocacy on behalf of African Americans continued unabated into the twentieth century. (Macguire 10) Macguire considers that many of the features often assigned to distinguish “literary” from other flavors of journalism among white-​dominant authors and audiences were present in African-​A merican news journalism throughout its existence. Already otherized and marginalized itself, Black American news media’s subjectivity was both imposed from without and embraced from within. Depicting Black perspectives at all under such conditions is an act of self-​ advocacy. Whether it’s Langston Hughes’s dispatches from Spain during the Spanish Civil War or Albert Murray’s writings of his Alabama origins from the vantage of New York City, Wells-​Barnett’s insistence on situating individual atrocities as manifestations of white supremacist systems, Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published biography of the last surviving slave carried across the Middle Passage (Barracoon 2018), or the humble, small-​town storytelling in Black newspapers throughout the country, all these acts of self-​ representation in the face of direct oppression are urgent and sincere works of literature that illustrate exactly why it would be both dangerous and insulting to treat fiction the same a fact, or play coy genre games with the facts of people’s lives. As social media, digital publications, and other digital platforms make “content” readily accessible even (to varying degrees) without paywalls or subscriptions and sites like Longreads and Long form aggregate newer and older nonfiction alongside each other, keeping the back-​issue content of periodicals readily at hand for readers, digital technology has opened an access and vastly expanded audiences to literary journalism, and vastly expanded the opportunities for the quantity, the quality, and also the abuses of literary journalism. Digital environments give practitioners the ability to make and distribute multimodal forms of the genre, adding comic-​book style graphic narration, video, photography, hyperlinks, interactive infographics, and beyond. Newly afforded techniques are only enabling more ambitious and varied works, and digital access is giving far and wide reach to all that work. As this genre continues to grow at rapid pace into this next era, those same questions of fact and fiction, honesty and dishonesty, subjectivity as an ethical guide or an unethical manipulation, writing in good faith or writing in bad faith, will only grow more fierce along with it. No matter what changes in technology or techniques or accessibility, the persistent questions of all literary journalism will concern who is looking, at whom, why, for what audience, and most crucially: how.

112  Literary Journalism Works Cited Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1980. “A Million Little Lies.” The Smoking Gun, 4 Jan. 2006. www.thesmo​k ing​g un.com/​ docume​nts/​celebr ​ity/​m ill ​ion-​l it ​t le-​l ies?page=​0,0 Bock, Charles. “American Wasteland.” The New York Times Book Review, 28 Feb. 2010, p. 15(L). Gale Literature Resource Center. link.gale.com/​ apps/​ doc/​ A 219931877/​ LitRC?u=​m lin_ ​b_ ​suffuniv&sid=​bookmark-​LitRC&xid=​716ffe51 Bolin, Alice. “The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime.” Vulture, 1 Aug. 2018. www.vult ​u re.com/​2018/​08/​t rue-​crime-​eth ​ics.html Bowden, Mark. Finders Keepers. New York, Grove Press, 2002. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York, Vintage Books/​R andom House, 1993. Conan, Neal. Interview with David Treuer. “Ojibwe Writer Celebrates the Beauty of ‘Rez Life.’ ” NPR, 20 Feb. 2012. www.npr.org/​t ran​scri​pts/​147156​103 Coward, John M. “Writing from the (Indigenous) Edge: Journeys into the Native American Experience.” Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2018. https://​ s35​767.pcdn.co/​w p-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2018/​05/​Ind ​igen​ous-​LJ- ​8 - ​69.pdf Cutter, Weston. “Doubling Down: An Interview with John D’Agata and Jim Fingal.” Kenyon Review Blog, 23 Feb. 2012. https://​kenyo​n rev ​iew.org/​2012/​02/​doubl ​i ng-​ down-​a n-​i nterv​iew-​w ith-​john-​d ag​ata-​a nd-​jim-​fi n​g al/​ D’Agata, John. About a Mountain. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. Folkenflik, David. “You Literally Can’t Believe the Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox’s Lawyers.” NPR, 29 Sep. 2020. www.npr.org/​2020/​09/​29/​917747​123/​you-​ litera​l ly-​cant-​beli​eve-​the-​f acts-​t uc​ker-​carl​son-​tells-​you-​so-​say-​fox-​s-​lawye Forde, Kathy Roberts. “An Interview with Isabel Wilkerson.” Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2013, 111–​123. Gourevitch, Philip and Errol Morris. The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. New York, Penguin, 2008. Griest, Stephanie Elizondo. All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Hartstock, John C. A History of American Literary Journalism. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. “In Fairness to John D’Agata.” Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, 12 Feb. 2012. https:// ​brev ​ity. wordpr​ess.com/​2012/​02/​12/​i n-​f airn​ess-​to-​john-​d ag​ata/​ Jaffer, Nabeelah. “In Extremis.” Aeon, 19 Jul. 2018. https://​aeon.co/​ess​ays/​lon​elin​ess-​is-​ the-​com​mon-​g ro​u nd-​of-​ter​ror-​a nd-​extrem​ism Jamison, Leslie. Make It Scream, Make It Burn. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2019. Krakauer, Jon. “3000 Cups of Deceit.” Medium, 20 Jul. 2014. https://​med ​ium.com/​g all​ eys/​g reg-​morten​son-​d isgra​ced-​aut​hor-​of-​three-​cups-​of-​tea-​belie​ves-​he-​w ill-​have-​ the-​last-​laugh-​76094​9b1f ​964#.y5cstq ​jek Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. New York, Villard, 1997. Lynn, Denise. “Silencing Black Women in the White Courtroom.” Black Perspectives, 6 Feb. 2019. www.aaihs.org/​silenc​i ng-​black-​women-​i n-​the-​white-​courtr​oom/​ Maguire, Roberta S. “African American Literary Journalism: Extension and Elaborations.” Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2013. https://​ialjs.org/​ vol-​5 -​no-​2 -​f all-​2013/​

Literary Journalism  113 Marzano-​L esnevich, Alex. The Fact of a Body. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017. McNamara, Michelle. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. New York, Harper Collins, 2018. Moore, Dinty W. “D’Agata’s Trickery and Manipulations: Dinty W. Moore Speaks Out.” Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, 27 Feb. 2012. https://​brev​ity.wordpr​ess.com/​2012/​ 02/​27/​d aga​t as-​t rick​ery/​ Roiland, Josh. “By Any Other Name: The Case for Literary Journalism.” Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 7. no. 2, Fall 2015. https://​s35​767.pcdn.co/​w p-​cont​ent/​uplo​ ads/​2016/​01/​062-​091-​LJS_​v​7n2.pdf Roiland, Joshua M. “ ‘Just People’ Are Just People: Langston Hughes and the Populist Power of African American Literary Journalism.” Literary Journalism Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2013. https://​s35​767.pcdn.co/​w p-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2014/​01/​015- ​036_ ​J​ust-​peo​ple.pdf Rosengarten, Theodore. All God’s Dangers. New York, Knopf, 1975. Rosin, Hanna. “Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.” The New Republic, 10 Nov. 2014. https://​newr​epub​l ic.com/​a rti​cle/​120​145/​step​hen-​g lass-​new-​repub​l ic-​ scan​d al-​still-​hau​nts-​h is-​law-​car​eer Royster, Jacqueline Jones, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-​Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–​1900. Boston, Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 1997. Vasudevan, Raksha. “Leslie Jamison Is Hauling Out Her Emotional Baggage.” Electric Literature, 23 Sep. 2019. https://​ele​ctri​clit​erat​u re.com/​les​l ie-​jami​son-​is-​haul​i ng-​out-​ her-​emotio​nal-​bagg​age/​ Warnock, John. Representing Reality. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, Penguin Random House LLC, 2010. Wilson, Christopher P. “When Noir Meets Nonfiction” Twentieth-​Century Literature, Volume 61, Number 4, Durham, Duke University Press, December 2015. Wolfe, Tom. “Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore: A Treatise on the Varieties of Realistic Experience.” Esquire. Originally published December 1972, republished 15 May 2018. www.esqu ​i re.com/​l ifest ​yle/​money/​a 20703​846/​ tom-​wolfe-​new-​jounal ​ism-​a meri​can-​novel-​essay/​

4 Lyric Essays

Those who enroll in creative writing programs through universities or nonprofit organizations are frequently taught that the content of their writing should give rise to the form it takes. The relationship between the subject or experience of an essay and the way it is organized, including its visual aesthetics, should emerge organically while drafting and then be honed and shaped in revision. Because personal essays contain a mix of narrative and expository techniques such as reflection, meditation, interrogation, and speculation, they tend to employ standard paragraphing that explicitly moves the reader through both an essay’s core experiences and its narrator’s process of making meaning out of them. But not all essays that incorporate personal experience are constructed with narrative as their primary apparatus. Some essays, and even entire books of creative nonfiction, rely on other forms and structures. When an author chooses a specific form to house and rearrange their experiences and insights, they draw attention to the form as another rhetorical, analytical, and aesthetic tool. Any form, even a “standard” or “mainstream” one—​assumed to be transparent, but of course that’s an illusion—​can’t help but influence the author’s and then the reader’s perspective. Lyric forms are more noticeable as mediums as their writers choose, challenge, and manipulate forms as part of the art. Form gives rise to perspective. Lyric essays repurpose existing forms and invent new ones in service of finding new perspective on lived experience. Not all lyric essays fulfill our definition of life writing by centering or heavily applying their author’s own stories to bigger subjects. But many more use their forms to reframe personal experience. In A Harp in the Stars (2021), Randon Billings Noble compiles contemporary lyric essays under a variety of established but adaptable forms such as segmented essays, braided essays, and hermit crab essays. Noble’s introduction previews and sketches loose definitions of the forms she has collected and provides a glimpse into the genre’s history. Tracing possible roots to Sei Shōnagan’s tenth-​century pillow book of lists and aphorisms and Montaigne’s sixteenth-​century essais, Noble wonders if a true origin can be known for a genre built on reimagining

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-5

Lyric Essays  115 experience through form and association. She examines the etymology of the word lyric; its Greek origin is “lurikos, from lura lyre” (Noble xi). In Greek mythology, she explains, the lyre was mastered by the musician Orpheus, his talents renowned and nearly powerful enough to save his wife from the underworld. “Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than they answer,” she says (xii). Noble’s research and anthology arose from her profession as a writing teacher hoping to bring her students aboard a ship forever under construction, or at least since the early 1990s. She notes in the book’s introduction that it was the author Deborah Tall who allegedly coined the term in an email to her former undergraduate student John D’Agata in 1993 (xi–​x ii). In 1997, the Seneca Review published its own definition, which doubled to announce the journal’s intention to showcase lyric essays with Tall and D’Agata at the helm: These “poetic essays” or “essayistic poems” give primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information. They forsake narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. The lyric essay partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language. It partakes of the essay in its weight, in its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form. (D’Agata and Tall) D’Agata and Tall’s definition places the lyric essay on a continuum between prose and verse, employing hallmarks and strategies of both (and sometimes other kinds of texts). Lyric essays may visually look like poems, incorporating white space, asterisks, numbered sections, line breaks, and associative leaps between experiences and ideas. Such an essay might juxtapose, in a deliberate way as determined by its form, personal experience against related images, sensory descriptions, interesting facts and research, and visual texts like graphs, diagrams, or drawings. Or an essay may inhabit a familiar form in order to remake its content into a completely different kind of text—​a syllabus, a recipe, pink slips, playlists, or, as Miller so delightfully discovered, rejection letters. D’Agata builds on his Seneca Review definition that lyric essays privilege “artfulness” over the “conveying of information” in his own anthology, We Might As Well Call It The Lyric Essay (2015). Other anthologies edited by D’Agata include The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), and The Making of the American Essay (2016). Though D’Agata would prefer the broader term “essay” to encompass the widest possible range of expressions and structures, including lyric essays, his own work (and its controversies, see Deresiewicz) has prompted him to embrace Tall’s original phrase. Essays, D’Agata argues, are too often held to journalistic standards of accuracy, which,

116  Lyric Essays to him, are only one kind of accuracy. “What I love to read in nonfiction often exists between those poles of what’s verifiable and what’s simply not. I love the in-​between, which is where I think the most truthful struggles with reality exist,” he writes (D’Agata, We 8). What is not verifiable, we might infer, is how we perceive subjective experience—​how our lives feel to us is as true as it is impossible to fact-​check. Getting the facts of our experiences right is not only impossible, according to D’Agata, but hardly the point. “Knowledge,” he says, “real knowledge, is problematic the moment we start trying to nail it down” (9). We Might As Well Call It The Lyric Essay acknowledges that lyric essays have a longer and richer history that was, for D’Agata, obscured by the millennium-​ era saturation of memoir (7). Joanna Eleftheriou sees D’Agata’s acknowledgment as “instructive: that what felt like a revolutionary act of invention was later configured as an act of restoration” (Eleftheriou). While often critical of D’Agata’s tendency to rely on loose binaries such as “art” vs. “information,” Eleftheriou praises the emergence of genre terms that “opened up avenues of essay writing and reading that had almost closed” (Eleftheriou). Lyric essays did not emerge in the late 1990s, but a term that can be applied retrospectively as a lens did, and the expansion of the genre in our perception has popularized lyric essays in more contemporary American literature. Just as a genre can arise from the crossroads between prose and verse, so too can invention and tradition co-​exist in lyric essays. Many critics have taken issue with D’Agata’s claim that some knowledge cannot be “nailed down,” seeing his view as a slippery slope justifying fictionalization in the name of aesthetics, as we describe in the previous chapter. Noble sees no reason to fictionalize in any essay, and other practitioners note that an essayist is always free to use speculation and imagination; essays both recreate and distill the mind at work, and our minds constantly posit other possible realities, making those imaginings part of our lived experience. But they should signal to the reader when they do so. Lyricism and aesthetics of uncertainty don’t preclude telling the truth to the best of our ability, even if we tell it using other methods besides linear narration. Lyric essays recast, reimagine, and even disguise actual experience through experimentation of form. For example, Lauren Trembath-​Neuberger’s “Drug Facts” (2011) describes its narrator’s emotional dependence on sex work in the form of a standard facts sheet accompanying a medical prescription. With recognizable categories such as “uses,” “when to use this product,” “directions,” “active ingredients,” and “inactive ingredients,” Trembath-​Neuberger obliquely explains how she became a sex worker to try and stamp out her true sexual orientation after she came out as gay. For example, under the “warnings” section, she describes the lack of support she received from family and friends: “Your mother hasn’t spoken to you without sobbing since you came out. She doesn’t know what you need, doesn’t know how good it will feel to have a purpose, to

Lyric Essays  117 be certain of your body, to know its uses” (Trembath-​Neuberger). The content of “Drug Facts” comes from the narrator’s own life, but the form and its “doctorly” second person point of view glances at both her queerness and choice of sex work as a coping mechanism through the lens of a pharmaceutical warning. Proceed with caution, the form says about this choice. Trust me, I would know, the narrator no longer has to say. Noble describes a lyric essay as “a piece of writing with a visible/​stand-​out/​ unusual structure that explores/​forecasts/​gestures to an idea in an unexpected way” (Noble xiii). But she also cautions against too rigid an understanding of the lyric: if you try to set it within a taxonomy, it will pose the same problems as a platypus—​a mammal, but one that lays eggs; semiaquatic, living in both water and on land; and venomous, a trait that belongs mostly to reptiles and insects. (xiii) The platypus represents evolution’s confounding twists and turns. How did such an animal come to be? We don’t exactly know. But it has evolved the traits of many kinds of living creatures in order to live, successfully, in its own unique way. Each essay we study in this chapter will embrace a similar genre hybridity. Each will also use its mixed conventions and structural qualities to discover truths that might be unverifiable in the journalistic sense, but that don’t claim to be, and that spring both from the author’s life and a form’s unique interpretation of it. Segmented Essays Noble identifies several varieties of segmented essays, all of which use white space to “allow the reader to pause, think, consider, and digest” along the way (xiv). White space is not simply an absence of text, but another kind of text. Often, the pattern formed by an essay’s white space can provide instruction on how to read the essay. She lists subforms, including fragmented, paratactic, collage, and mosaic essays, which each offer slightly different organizing strategies for segmented essays (xiv–​x v). At first, Sarah Einstein’s “Self-​Portrait in Apologies” (2011) cues the reader through its title—​a n essay about the author’s regrets that add up to a picture of who she is. Told in the second person to those Einstein has wronged, each segment offers a different “apology” from her life. The relationship between the apologies and what they ultimately say about the narrator is left implicit, but readers are led across each segment like stepping stones directing their interpretive leaps.

118  Lyric Essays Einstein’s apologies vary between serious offenses and lighter ones that sometimes implicate the recipient just as much as the author. In the opening segment “Apology to an Ethically Inconsistent Friend,” Einstein apologizes to a friend for picking the chicken out of the soup and telling you it was vegetarian. I was broke, and there wasn’t anything else in the house to offer you. Besides, the last time I saw you, you were eating a cheeseburger and smoking a Marlboro. (Einstein) But in the apology subtitled “In This Story, Christmas Past is the Second Ghost,” Einstein recalls a car accident on Christmas Eve 1977 in which a neighborhood boy was killed by a drunk driver in front of Einstein’s childhood home. The apology is to the dead boy for the way the narrator behaved toward his younger brother, who was ostracized from the other kids in the wake of the accident because they, including the narrator, didn’t know what to say to him (Einstein). Whether or not the reader truly blames or judges Einstein for what she admits gets decided in the white spaces between apologies, but the whole essay amounts to a life that is recognizable by the contours of its regrets. It’s also possible to view Einstein’s essay as fragmented, with the white space after each apology depicting a breakage in Einstein’s identity or experience caused by an action that haunts her. In her craft essay “Of Fragments and Segments,” Heidi Czerwiec defines subtle but significant differences between fragmentation and segmentation when it comes to the functionality of white space. Both terms, she says, “suggest separate pieces. But what is the role of agency in each? … And who does the breaking—​the author? Or is the content already broken, and the brokenness is just being represented?” (Czerwiec). Czerwiec studies theories advanced by Joanna Eleftheriou and Sandra Beasley to examine fragmentation as a possible rendering of trauma or “rupture and lack: of access, agency, power” (Czerwiec). Einstein’s white spaces separate incidences of regret—​ a single strand of Einstein’s life broken into distinct, but presumably related memories. But is this fracturing experience a representation of Einstein’s lack of agency or a testament to Einstein’s trauma stemming from these particular incidents? Its content, in which Einstein takes responsibility for wrongs and hurts committed against others, suggests that Einstein’s agency wasn’t under threat (if occasionally limited by age or circumstance). And while certain regrets clearly unsettle her, the notion of the essay forming a portrait suggests a wholeness retained or even built by her use of white space. Here, white space may adopt what Czerwiec describes as a “fungal” sense of connection: “In this case, the fragments would represent the mushrooms, the fruiting bodies popping up, seemingly random yet connected and communicating below the surface,” she says, following Noble’s impulse to describe lyricism in figurative terms that focus on the importance of an essay’s structure to its larger meaning (Czerwiec). While the

Lyric Essays  119 title of Einstein’s essay provides the basis for connection between her sections, how and why these particular apologies form a broader understanding of the narrator live in the mycelial circuitry below the surface. For example, the reader could link Einstein’s apology to her vegetarian friend with the apology in which she rings her own doorbell in order to get off the phone with a complaining friend by recognizing a pattern in both moments: the author’s tactical avoidance of confrontation. Eleftheriou’s ideas about fragmentation and agency, which posit that a “fragmented structure permits representations of selves that claim to be experienced as fragmentary” (Eleftheriou), may be better applied to a segmented essay like Natalie Lima’s 2019 “Snowbound.” At first, “Snowbound” appears to read as a mostly linear narrative broken into five numbered sections. The numbers themselves suggest linearity. But the white space between them, as well as Lima’s sometimes-​subverted retelling of her college experience as a Latina raised by a single mother in poverty feel more like an attempt to order what only makes sense through lenses of racism and classism. Lima writes in the second person to her 18-​year-​old self, as if to warn her of the frigidity that the essay’s title promises. The first section recalls Lima’s acceptance to a prestigious Chicago university where Lima, raised in Florida, will finally see snow. The second section follows Lima’s immediate actions after the acceptance—​sending the paperwork back, which deepens Lima’s inhabitation of her former self, the one that “killed it on the SAT” and feels she has earned her college acceptance. Time skips ahead slightly in the third section to the younger Lima acclimating well to university life until she overhears her classmates expressing surprise about how “super smart” she is, even on subjects like art history, a subject often associated with the sophistication of the idle rich. The fourth section takes the biggest leap in time, but backward, recalling a dream Lima had while still in high school wherein she swam in the college pool with her new friends. “Your round body—​the circumference of which felt like the entire world itself—​a lways seemed destined to float, to rise above the surface,” Lima writes (Lima). Her language of floating and rising above metaphorically implies that Lima already knows the slights she has endured, because of her background and size, and understands the demand that she behave and perform better than those who commit them. The final section returns to the moment after Lima overhears her classmates talking about her. She goes into her dorm and flings her new winter coat across the room. “Eventually, you turn and glance out the window. The sky is gray, almost white. You’ve read about this, about this exact moment: the turning of the seasons, the freezing of water vapor, ice particles. It’s finally starting to snow” (Lima). The ending bitterly calls back to that hopeful first section when the younger Lima was excited to see snow and renders the experience overhearing her classmates as a crystallizing moment. Lima’s accomplishments and performance

120  Lyric Essays will never shield her from assumptions—​Lima knows this now, looking back on this experience from the vantage of having had many others like it (though, like snowflakes, never exactly the same). While the ending is clear in its metaphor, it offers something less definitive in its imagery: we cannot, nor can Lima, fully apprehend the cumulative effect of microaggressions or racist and classist assumptions on one’s life. Fragments, like snowflakes, are pieces of something too vast to see in its entirety, but individually small enough to fill the crevices of our consciousness. What lives between segments may be time, or a mirror, or an invisible scaffold enveloped by the text it upholds. Brooke Champagne’s “An Essay Entitled ‘Mrs.’ ” uses a segmented structure of three numbered sections—​similar to Lima’s “Snowbound”—​posing as the outline of an essay about domestic violence as experienced by three generations of women. For the first two sections, Champagne refers to herself, the narrator, in the third person as a woman trying to parse the cycles of violence both her mother and sister have entered into with various men. “It is an essay told in three parts: the narrator’s sister is the titular main character,” Champagne writes in the opening line, introducing the layer of meta-​narration that refers to the construction of an essay we are not actually reading but also are reading in metanarrative form. (Champagne). Though the narrator describes the various moves her essay will make—​where, for instance, historical research on the emergence of “Mrs.” as a title for married women will go in order to give a breather from descriptions of violence—​this is not exactly shorthand. The reader is taken through the essayist’s “plan,” but it’s a detailed plan that understands the conversation between sections and the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual reasons for her digressions into research. “The first section ends by returning to our Mrs.: how had she allowed this to happen?” Champagne writes. What follows in the subsequent section is “the answer,” which is that both the narrator and her sister had seen their mother abused by three different husbands. This consideration of the past, Champagne says, will prompt questions of what is inherited biologically from our parents vs. what we learn by watching them. The judicious use of colons and dry directions alerts readers to Champagne’s deliberate structural choices, designed to make painful experiences more palatable at a remove comparable to that of a researcher recording observations and the questions they elicit. While the reader likely understands that this “outline” of an essay is, in fact, written about the author’s real experiences—​that it is the essay allegedly under construction—​the tone of an outline allows Champagne to dispassionately describe life-​shaping events of the past, thus actually heightening their emotional effect. Her almost ethnographic approach evokes a scientific curiosity about the emerging field of epigenetics, the value of a diary as evidence of what happens to women behind closed doors, and the history of language that names women in relation to the men of their lives—​fi rst their fathers and then their husbands. But the third section then claims outright the real stakes

Lyric Essays  121 for Champagne. “Where the narrator reveals her use of third person as obfuscation: that she has feigned ethnographer when she’s the autobiographer,” Champagne says. This revelation matters because the third section also reveals that Champagne, too, has been the victim of domestic abuse and now has a daughter of her own, who is the real impetus for writing the essay. If abuse encodes itself into what is passed between mothers and daughters, Champagne hopes her daughter will not repeat this particular family legacy, but that her body will carry its warning: I long for this: that should she meet some version of him, in a classroom, in a bar, she’ll find something so recognizable, so uninteresting in his demonic smile, she won’t be tempted to learn how that story will end. (Champagne) The segments indicate the invisible tethers between sister, mother, and narrator. Champagne understands that the essay allegedly under construction can only ask questions of what, ultimately, her daughter will inherit. The fear of domestic violence in her daughter’s life leads Champagne to try to order the violence that marked her own life, and within that segmentation is a wish: that if, as parents, we can make a pattern visible, our children will break it instead of perpetuate it. Braided Essays Noble defines braided essays as “segmented essays whose sections have a repeating pattern—​the way each strand of a braid returns to take its place in the center” (Noble xv). In 1972, John McPhee introduced braiding to a wide readership with his essay “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” originally published in The New Yorker. McPhee, an avid Monopoly player, uses segments separated by triangle-​shaped glyphs that resemble Monopoly “houses” in order to weave three strands of inquiry and narrative together. One strand follows an intense seven-​ round game of Monopoly between McPhee and his unnamed opponent, with whom McPhee has played thousands of games over the years. The strand provides not only a narrative spine but also a place in which to describe the strategies of playing Monopoly, and how those strategies mimic American capitalism. A second strand explores the history of both Monopoly and the city on which it is based—​Atlantic City, New Jersey, designed by R.B. Osbourne in 1852 to be a cultural and financial mecca, a playground of America’s richest citizens. A third strand situates McPhee in the Atlantic City of 1972, which has fallen into disrepair, wealth inequality, and criminality that spares the rich and punishes the poor in the abysmal, mattress-​less city jail. The essay’s title comes not only from a purchasable spot on the Monopoly game board, but also McPhee’s on-​the-​ground search for it amid the brokenness of the

122  Lyric Essays once well-​heeled avenues, only to find that it’s a suburban enclave for the wealthy so far removed, physically and experientially, from Atlantic City’s decay that most city-​dwelling people cannot find it, either (McPhee). McPhee skillfully applies the rules of the game—​ accumulating property such as houses, hotels, and railroads in order to strangle one’s opponents financially—​to an essay structure that ultimately comments on the racial and economic disparities of the time in a city that caters to the rich at the expense of the poor. The segmentation allows readers to move between McPhee’s three strands with ease, traversing time, physical distance, and narratives (the game’s dramatic present as McPhee and his opponent go head-​to-​head, the history of Atlantic City itself, and McPhee’s visit there). The game also provides a rather literal roadmap for the essay’s structure: as McPhee and his opponent land on the infamous streets of the game, McPhee leaps to his other strands, describing what these landmarks look like in 1972 and also the complicated class history they hold. While Einstein’s “Self-​Portrait in Apologies” uses white space to build underground connections, McPhee’s white space guides the reader through his “moves” of gaming and traveling (both across Atlantic City’s well-​k nown streets and through time), all of which are taking place decidedly above ground. Because of their recursive layering, braided essays often engage with subjects and histories raised by their authors’ experiences. They tend to situate those experiences within broader (or very specific) contexts and use personal narrative as a rhetorical tool in conversations of public significance. McPhee’s seven-​ round Monopoly tournament becomes an occasion to consider American capitalism through the lens of Atlantic City’s history and 1970s decay. Shortly after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in November 2016, Elissa Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, published “Apocalypse Logic,” a braided essay weaving Washuta’s family history with the history of broken treaties between the US and the Native American tribes they colonized, subjugated, and killed; the election, still fresh at the time of the essay’s writing; and the complicated nature of Johnny-​Come-​Lately white political resistance to an unpopular new administration whose threats to Indigenous communities were anything but new. Like Einstein’s “Self-​Portrait in Apologies,” Washuta’s essay is anthologized in Noble’s A Harp in the Stars. It begins with the story of Washuta’s great-​g reat-​ great grandfather Tumalth, signatory on the Kalapuya treaty of 1855, who was hanged by the US Army on fabricated charges of treason. Tumalth signed the treaty with an X, which Washuta repurposes to separate her essay’s sections, writing her ancestor’s mark between segments exploring different facets of historical and ongoing Native American extermination and erasure. Washuta informs the reader in the essay’s third section that in the mid-​twentieth century the US government ended recognition of many Native American tribes, and in particular those whose reservations had produced wealth through natural resources. With this revocation went any treaty agreements with those

Lyric Essays  123 tribes. Washuta’s ancestry—​her family had lived along the Columbia River for thousands of years and were once nearly exterminated by white disease—​was finally eradicated in this chilling fashion, at least as far as the US government was concerned. Washuta compares such denial after the horrors of colonization to the sexual violence she has also experienced. “Maybe my triggers are many,” she writes, “because to live in the United States is to wake up every day inside an abuser” (Washuta). With each X, Washuta gestures to the evidence of her ancestors—​her great-​ great-​g reat grandfather’s mark upon the broken treaty—​and their extraction from the official memory of the country that invaded and conquered them. X marks the spot where Edward Curtis once photographed Virginia Miller, one of Tumalth’s daughters, in her canoe—​a place currently threatened by the fossil fuel industry, which Washuta compares to the Standing Rock protest that was already months in progress at the time of Trump’s election. X marks the long-​ gone scaffold on which her ancestor died. X represents a name wiped from a record (though not the only record, as Washuta’s research proves). X is evidence even if that evidence is an absence of something that now only exists in memory and the occasional artifact. Language is one of these artifacts. Washuta explains that the Chinuk Wawa word for “white” or “white people” is boston or boston-​ tilixam. For the majority of the essay thereafter, Washuta refers to white people as bostons or boston-​tilixam. Describing the line to get into a community forum in the wake of the 2016 election, Washuta writes: Two boston-​t ilixam asked the people in line behind me, “Is this the line to get in?” When they heard that it was, they went to the front of the line. Inside, a volunteer said that people who live north of the ship canal would meet in a gallery down the block; people south of the ship canal would stay here and split into groups by neighborhood. A group of boston-​tilixam didn’t want to be split up. The volunteer assured them that it wasn’t mandatory that they separate. The boston-​tilixam, relieved, chose a group they could all agree upon. (Washuta) By consistently using “boston” and “boston-​ t ilixam,” Washuta both reclaims the local language spoken among the tribes of her ancestral homeland and uses it to refer to those settlers and their ancestors who took that language away—​those readers “who have already made up their minds about their own whiteness” (Washuta). She observes the behavior of the boston-​t ilixam as they enter an Indigenous resistance waged for hundreds of years. Boston-​tilixam want to keep their groups intact and do not see the irony of that (Tumalth’s surviving family was sent to Fort Vancouver after his death). White people, Washuta says, have been asking her how they can help Indigenous resistance, and although Washuta tells them about the threats to the Lower Columbia

124  Lyric Essays River Estuary, she knows they would never accept her real answer: to give back the land and sovereignty they took. Such present-​d ay scenes, where the echoes of the past are deliberately written into them, demonstrate the power of braiding to tell multiple stories as strands come together not only across sections but also within them. Within each section are the echoes of others. Washuta’s Xs may be points of fracture in history or identity, or perhaps the author repairing them herself, like stitches that mark a wound, like the safety pins many Americans fastened to their coats and bags in 2016 to signal their resistance (an image Washuta skillfully wields, as well). They knit together what colonization sought to unravel. Although braided essays, like segmented essays, frequently use white space to establish and then weave their strands, not all braided essays rely on white space, and some eschew it if their essay demands. Wendy Rawlings’s 2014 essay “Let’s Talk About Shredded Romaine Lettuce” has three distinct strands, but no white space, in an effort to create a sense of overwhelm and anxiety in the reader about inhumane labor practices, illustrating how the plight of far-​flung workers is connected to American readers through our consumerism. Because all things flow from a harrowing experience Rawlings had with her 11-​year-​ old niece, the essay begins there: Rawlings’s niece, Amy, is mysteriously sick the night after Christmas, camped out in the bathroom vomiting and bleeding while her family sleeps off the holiday. Keeping Amy “company” is her iPad, which introduces the second strand. Without transitioning via white space, Rawlings immediately pivots from Amy’s dire situation in the bathroom to a factory in Chengdu, China where iPads are made. She focuses on a single factory worker, Lai, who works grueling hours buffing iPad cases for little pay and a rodent-​infested dorm room. An explosion at the factory due to poor ventilation kills Lai, who is only identifiable to his girlfriend by his legs. “Giant bummer for everyone,” Rawlings writes, deliberately adopting the flip tone of sadness at a remove that one might encounter on social media or in the comments section of a news article (Rawlings). Again, Rawlings pivots. Back to Amy, who has now been discovered in the bathroom by her horrified mother. And then another sharp pivot to the State Garden brand of lettuce that may (though it is never determined) be responsible for the Escherichia coli now ravaging Amy’s body. Rawlings, using the present tense to place the reader within the urgency of Amy’s health crisis, watches Amy being carted off to the hospital, clutching her iPad with the computerized cat she made to comfort herself on the bathroom floor. For the remainder of the essay, Amy’s story forms the central strand of the braid but provides details—​ the iPad, the poisoned lettuce—​that prompt Rawlings to spiral out from Amy to others whose stories her suffering encompasses. In the essay’s third strand, we meet Paco, an undocumented migrant worker in California who cannot take bathroom breaks and must therefore defecate in the fields he’s harvesting,

Lyric Essays  125 possibly contaminating the greens that caused Amy’s renal failure. “So basically we are talking about commerce,” Rawlings says. “Commerce in lettuce, spinach, and iPads” (Rawlings). Throughout the essay, Rawlings moves cinematically, zooming in on Amy at the hospital as she endures treatment for E. coli, and then zooming out to other parts of the world where Amy’s food and entertainment are created under conditions that also endanger workers. Using sentence fragments that frequently drop verbs (e.g. “Ever seen a dirty logo? Dirty logos not good for business”), Rawlings creates the effect of an emergency too dire to type every word—​ an emergency not just lived by Amy, but Lai, Paco, and millions of others (Rawlings). The shorthand also allows Rawlings to move quickly between strands, weaving at the rate of an ER doctor. Through braiding that refuses to visually separate its strands, Amy is connected to Lai, Paco, and all the other workers whose grueling labor create conveniences for Americans who, despite saying “giant bummer” when we learn of such tragedies, are unwilling to give up those conveniences. This unwillingness justifies Rawlings’s flippant affect. By foregoing white space, Rawlings insists that readers—​who may well be reading on an iPad while munching on a salad—​feel their proximity to the pain and suffering we usually keep hidden behind slick packaging. Hermit Crab Essays Some lyric essays come wearing the shell of something else. Hermit crab essays inhabit existing forms—​especially those outside literature, favoring forms that come from daily life. Like their namesake, an animal born without a shell of its own who then must find one in which to house itself, hermit crab essays may take on the form of an application, a recipe, a pink slip, a syllabus, or just about any other text one could name. Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You” takes the form of a series of rejection letters that house the story of Miller’s unfulfilled desire for children. Writing in the form of rejection letters to describe her grief over infertility, Miller says that since her chosen form uses standardized, unsentimental language that doesn’t dwell or pontificate, she could approach an emotional subject from the more protected vantage of convention. “So I’m going along chronologically, calling up (and enhancing, exaggerating, manipulating) all the slights and hurts of an ordinary life,” Miller writes in “The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study.” “I’m submitting to the voice of the essay, allowing the form to lead me where it will go” (Miller). Because real-​life rejection letters are written to strangers who have, say, submitted a short story to a literary journal, applied for a grant, or sought admission to a school, there is no need for Miller to coddle herself. In fact, treating herself as the recipient of bad news that she is also cooly delivering makes room for the absurdity often nested within our most painful experiences:

126  Lyric Essays The form of the rejection note—​though it began as a technical exercise—​ created an entirely new universe in which one’s personal narrative does not really belong to you. And because it doesn’t belong to you, it can create meanings—​perhaps better meanings—​than any you might have thought up on your own. (Miller) Lauren Trembath-​Neuberger’s “Drug Facts” discusses addictive facets of sex work as prescription information. Because the form of a hermit crab essay mediates and modulates its content, many essayists have situated some of their most troubling or ambiguous experiences in a form that provides both familiarity and safety through the way its conventions impose themselves. “These extraliterary structures can protect vulnerable content,” Noble says, “but they can also act as firm containers for content that might be intellectually or emotionally difficult, prodigious, or otherwise messy” (Noble xvi). Miller says the response to “We Regret to Inform You” was the largest she’d ever received and contemplates the function of form to foster unique connections with readers. “By being ensconced in a more objective form, the essay provides what I’ll call a ‘shared space’ between reader and writer,” she writes (Miller). Because hermit crab essays come from the world around us, the reader brings their own knowledge of a form’s conventions. While segmented and braided essays instruct their readers through white space, associative leaps, and strands that create callbacks and other patterns, hermit crab essays (which may at the same time be segmented or braided) often come visually packaged so that their readers automatically know how to interact with their organizations. Samantha Irby begins her hermit crab essay “My Bachelorette Application” (2017) by picturing herself as an applicant for The Bachelorette reality TV series. She writes, I am squeezed into my push-​up bra and sparkly, ill-​fitting dress … I have been listening to Katy Perry really, really loudly in the limo on the way over here. I’m about to crush a beer can on my forehead. LET’S DO THIS, BRO. (Irby 3) Irby is not actually applying to be on The Bachelorette, but the imagined scene then transforms into a questionnaire that looks identical to the one on the show’s website. Irby uses the questions to meditate on herself as a single, Black woman living in Chicago and working at an animal hospital, reflect on her prior relationships, and interrogate the premise of the show and its promises of true love. The form’s bolded questions about the applicant’s hobbies, family, and what they’re looking for in a partner would seem innocuous if not for Irby’s expanded, often unflattering or defiant answers. Because hermit crab essays

Lyric Essays  127 often riff on their forms by changing small details, Irby also supplies a list of her “qualifications” should she agree to be the bachelorette. These stipulations reimagine the show more realistically. “We’re shooting it in Chicago,” she says. “And I don’t need a fancy wardrobe or a stylist. I’d wear my own terrible clothes” (15). While frequently turning the humor on herself in her “answers” by making fun of her apartment, her breakups, and her sex life, Irby also calls out the show’s prudishness regarding sex between contestants, its history of eliminating Black contenders, and its preference for model-​like bachelorettes instead of real women looking for partners. Like The Bachelorette, dating sites also ask users about themselves, providing a vehicle for Silas Hansen’s “An Annotated Guide to My OKCupid Profile.” The title describes Hansen’s form (as many hermit crab essay titles do), in which he has replicated his OKCupid profile and then provided annotations and footnotes containing an essay about trans identity and the parts of ourselves we suppress or amplify in an effort to attract others. For Hansen, revelation comes with high stakes—​rejection is only one fear he has about claiming his trans identity online. But the questions prompt an urgency of truth, and Hansen writes in his essay what he could not write on his actual profile (at least not at the time of the essay’s writing). He describes his testosterone injections, how he once studied the character of Sully on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman for his masculine presentation, and his dating history. But like anybody on a dating site, Hansen is self-​conscious about things unrelated to being trans. He writes, “A short list of things I’m not good at, which I don’t include on my profile.” These include “falling asleep, waking up, math, science, visual art, languages other than English, understanding English grammatical structure, respecting boundaries, trusting, controlling my temper” (Hansen 78). Hermit crab essays also frequently comment on their forms, either implicitly or explicitly. Hansen explicitly analyzes how the dating site has set up its profiles—​what and whom they exclude (Hansen notes that “transgender” was not an option for identifying his sex), how they tempt users to spin their lives for consumption, and how the inclusion of photos forces agonizing choices in which so much is invisible to the viewer but never the profile creator. In a footnote for one photo, Hansen writes: I have just gotten a new pair of glasses … I am desperately trying to look different from the way I’ve always looked before. I don’t know how I want to look; I just know I don’t want to look like I used to. (75) Noble, too, has contributed a hermit crab essay to A Harp in the Stars. Originally published in Brevity magazine, “My Heart as a Torn Muscle” takes the form of a medical diagnosis that might be found on a website such as WebMD or in handouts given by a doctor after a diagnosis. The narrator’s heart is “torn” by a temptation. In the “Overview” section of the essay, we learn that

128  Lyric Essays although she is happily married, she meets someone to whom she is attracted enough to consider adultery. The “Symptoms” section blends the conventions of the form with the content: the narrator’s heart causes her pain in the form of sleeplessness and a persistent ache when it “beats to force blood through your femoral arteries … each expanding and contracting to force your legs to walk away, from him, from thrill, from all the promise and potential of an alternate future” (Noble 197). Under “Self-​Care,” the narrator recommends to herself that she “ice” the temptation through various kinds of distance or making a pro/​con list about starting an affair. And should self-​governance fail, in the next section, titled “When to Seek Care,” the narrator advises herself to reach out to both her “youngest and most bohemian friend” and her “closest and most trusted friend,” who provide opposing answers to the narrator’s dilemma—​both of which she wants to hear. Noble even provides a “Recommended Reading” list of novels such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (199). Ultimately, the form assumes Noble’s condition as one she will heal from—​which is to say, she will not have an affair—​w ith the right course of treatment. “The lyric essay is, at its heart, an act of generosity,” Sarah Einstein writes in her accompanying craft meditation for A Harp in the Stars. It doesn’t pronounce, as Thoreau did, on how one should live one’s life. It doesn’t say goodbye to all that, as Didion did, or argue against joie de vivre, as Lopate does. Most often, it eschews the polemical altogether, offering up instead the artifact. (262) In Noble’s essay, the artifact is her own heart turned into extended metaphor; for Hansen, his OKCupid profile turned site of suppressed narrative; for Irby, her imagined application that replaces canned dreams of love with more realistic ones. Each is handed to the reader for examination dictated but never settled by its shell form. Other Lyric Essay Forms Writers of lyric nonfiction are not limited to the forms previously discussed and have adopted or invented many others that de-​center narrative in favor of other techniques that communicate personal experience. Found essays, for example, compile and arrange other texts in order to highlight patterns and consider the stories lived by entire communities and identity groups. In her essay “Transgender Day of Remembrance” (2015), Torrey Peters remixes the “Remarks” section of a 2014 report on transphobia—​a report that includes sobering statistics and qualitative evidence about violence against trans people. Rearranging narrative details from cases spanning the globe, Peters constructs an essay that focuses on

Lyric Essays  129 the horror wrought upon trans victims; her arrangement identifies patterns to this violence—​the unsettling number of murders committed by members of law enforcement, the number of trans victims whose faces were in some way disfigured, and the number of victims murdered while doing sex work, to name a few. Similarly, Amy Butcher’s found essay “Women These Days” (2017) is constructed using news stories about gender-​based violence that occurred over the year that the #MeToo movement exploded in the US. The abecedarian, a form frequently encountered in poetry, has also been used by essayists. Dinty W. Moore’s “Son of Mr. Green Jeans” (2003) uses the alphabet to organize an essay about fathers and fatherhood. His first entry, “Allen, Tim,” informs the reader that actor Tim Allen’s father was killed by a drunk driver when Allen was 18 and begins a strand of meditations on famous TV dads that occur throughout the essay; other strands include Moore’s own trajectory to becoming a father, facts about fathers in the animal kingdom, and natural selection. Similar to the abecedarian, writers have used indexes to house essays organized around a single letter, such as Gina Frangello’s “The Story of A,” which acts as the prologue to her memoir Blow Your House Down (2021). “The Story of A” uses the letter “A” to summarize the implications of the extramarital affair at the center of the memoir. A is for adulteress, who wears the scarlet letter. Noble’s anthology includes flash essays, which she describes as, “short, sharp, and clarifying. The shortest ones illuminate a moment of a realization the way a flash of light can illuminate a scene” (xiii). Most flash essays are capped at 1,000 words or fewer—​the standard-​bearer of flash nonfiction, Brevity magazine (founded in 1997 by Dinty W. Moore) accepts work of 750 words or fewer. We classify flash essays as personal essays if they are narratively driven, and some are discussed in the personal essay chapter of this book. But we take Noble’s classification to heart, recognizing that achieving the sharp sensory or emotional blast of a flash essay requires different sensibilities about narrative than a longer personal essay. Beth Ann Fennelly’s “Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True” is technically a segmented essay with two sections but is only 114 words. In the first section, subtitled “Then,” the narrator reflects on her childhood dream to become a mermaid, describing the long hair and ample breasts she thought she needed to lure “sailors with my song.” The second section, “Now,” leaps to the present day, where Fennelly’s hair and bosom are both abundant, and where the reader—​presumably an adult—​waits to hear how Fennelly came to realize she would not become a mermaid. “But you’d be wrong,” she says in the closing lines. “Dead wrong. I must have become a mermaid: look at my wrinkly skin. What could have caused me to wrinkle, if not hours spent submerged, frolicking in the sea?” (Fennelly). In barely a breath, Fennelly traverses time and delivers a startling but uplifting turn that reframes aging as a transformative experience for women, making them more powerful and majestic.

130  Lyric Essays While hard lines have been drawn about unacknowledged fictionalizing in works of creative nonfiction, many lyric essays play in the borderlands between fiction and nonfiction. In the foreword to Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere (1990), Richard Howard describes Cooper’s collection as “meditations … neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions” (Cooper xi). But in the essay “Capiche?” Cooper delineates. Most of the essay takes place in Venice, where the narrator takes Italian lessons from Signora Marra and meets a man named Sandro in the Piazza San Marco. “We were, I think, instantly in love,” Cooper writes (19). Sandro gives the narrator a blown glass ashtray, and the narrator struggles to communicate what the gift means to him. Capiche, in Italian, means to understand. “No capiche,” the narrator says to Sandro (20). Then Cooper lets the curtain fall away. “Everything I have told you is a lie,” he admits. “Almost everything” (20). The narrator has never been to Venice or taken Italian lessons. The stories of Venice, Piazza San Marco, and Sandro aren’t real. However, the narrator’s intentions are real, and they make the essay snap into place: the truth is that the narrator has just awoken to a “Chianti” sunrise, birds chirping and rooster crowing, and felt moved “by the strange, abstract trajectories of sound” that he felt roused “to take you somewhere with me, somewhere old and beautiful, and I honestly wanted to offer you something” (20). The essay is about creating a gift as inexplicable and astounding as Sandro’s glass ashtray. Here, the truth frames the fantasy. The fiction is the gift, but the essay is the true story of wanting to make it and give it away. Book-​L ength Lyric Essay and Memoir Using Richard Howard’s description of Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere, it’s reasonable to view the book as a collection of lyric essays. “No event in this intimate collection leads to any other event: nothing eventuates, then, but everything recurs, everything celebrates a perpetual efflorescence in Cooper’s star-​system,” Howard says (xi). The book is not narratively organized, but the experiences and images cohere in other ways, even if the threads connecting them are the gossamer threads of sensuality instead of storytelling. The vast majority of the essays are flash-​length, and their flashes accumulate into a disco ball whose shards each glitter as it turns. Other authors have applied the formalism and non-​n arrative techniques of lyric essays to book-​length publications, as well. Sejal Shah’s This is One Way to Dance (2020) collects segmented, braided, and flash pieces into a lyric memoir that focuses on “growing up Indian, in non-​I ndian places” (Shah ix). In “Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps,” Shah uses a numbered list to catalogue microaggressions she has regularly experienced. The numbers form a list of evidence presented to the reader and also represent the psychic accumulation of such moments on the narrator. A mosaic of rings—​their

Lyric Essays  131 different metals and functions and acquisitions over time—​organizes Shah’s “Ring Theory,” which meditates on Shah’s desire not to let marriage subsume her identity. “Once I married,” she says, “I found it almost impossible to be the self I previously forged. Isn’t the point of an engagement ring or wedding ring that it should trump your other rings?” (148). In her New York Times bestselling collection, World of Wonders (2020), Aimee Nezhukumatathil uses species from the natural world as symbols to contain pieces of her life. Each essay pairs a natural “wonder,” such as fireflies, dragon fruit, the corpse flower, and whale sharks, with associations from her life that are often related to the places Nezhukumatathil has lived and where nature has helped root her as a Filipina and Malayali Indian American who often felt out of place. In her essay “Axolotl,” which refers to an amphibian that lives only underwater but can also walk, Nezhukumatathil inhabits the axolotl’s distinctively wide but subtle smile to educate her younger self on how to respond to racist assumptions: An axolotl can help you smile as an adult even if someone on your tenure committee puts his palms together as if in prayer every time he sees you off-​ campus, and does a quick, short bow, and calls out “Namaste!” even though you’ve told him several times already that you actually attend a Methodist church. (Nezhukumatathil 45) By adopting an axolotl-​like smile, the narrator can project peace even when threatened, confident in the knowledge it can regenerate most things that it might lose. But while World of Wonders includes difficult moments, its essays are more interested in how Nezhukumatathil has taken refuge in nature, to find within it palpable pleasures and curiosities that make the world—​and the self—​ feel new. In her essay on dragon fruit, she first educates us: To get to this intensely colored fruit, we begin with one of the most ethereal displays of blossoming I have ever witnessed. The flowers bloom in full for just one evening. That means they have one precious night to be pollinated by a bat or bee, turn the flower into a dragon fruit. (114) The narrator’s personal associations—​a trip to Singapore, a favorite summer cocktail—​are equally singular and bright. Some books of lyric nonfiction are not compilations, but continuous. These books tend to run on the shorter side, particularly when authors eschew traditional chapter structures. World of Wonders is only 164 pages. Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate (2013) is even shorter at only 89 pages (we might compare this to the novella in fiction). But because of its segmented and braided

132  Lyric Essays structure not broken into smaller pieces, it feels richer than its brevity suggests, akin to a full-​length poetry collection. Fusselman uses numbered sections to braid the recent death of her father with her own desire to have children—​the narrator and her husband are in the midst of fertility treatments—​w ith her father’s journals from his time in the Merchant Marine beginning in 1945. The journals provide insight into the man Fusselman’s father was before he was her father. They also offer images that Fusselman works into the other strands of the book. In section 15, she writes: Yesterday I was at the gym, on the elliptical trainer. I was thinking about my uterus, which, I have read, is almost infinitely expandable. And I was picturing my uterus, with its lining of blood, empty except for once a month when the microscopic eggs bob around in it like a single life preserver in the ocean. (Fusselman 21) Fusselman’s engagement with the metaphor of the life preserver dovetails back to her father, whose presence she senses in “the air in front of my elliptical trainer” (21). The journals have opened a portal to Fusselman’s father, while her grief keeps her curious about both his past and what it means to pursue the making of new life in the wake of loss. Fusselman embraces a certain mystery about the connections between the living and the dead, which allow her to hop between strands in a way that feels open-​hearted and almost whimsical—​ death expands Fusselman’s understanding of life in terms of limitlessness. But she avoids sentimentality. The feeling of her father’s presence passes after a few minutes, and Fusselman returns her focus to exercise, “moving my legs in the uphill egg shape, like I already had been doing the whole time” (22). Eula Biss in On Immunity (2014) also uses a braided-​segmented structure, but on an even more expanded plane, and with far more than three strands. At 163 pages, not including Biss’s extensive end notes, she constructs a book-​ length lyric essay, weaving the fear she felt as a new mother with the history of vaccine technology, historic epidemics, her father’s practice as a physician, and literary metaphor for infection and how we can and can’t know things, such as those found in Dracula. Taking an inquisitive rather than judgmental stance toward anti-​vaccine fears, Biss explores the ways in which we talk about (and therefore conceptualize) vaccines, illness, the body’s immunity mechanisms, to find the ways in which our words and our politics and our actual bodies are not so separate as we like to assume, steadily sketching some understanding for the complicated, multifarious reasons people might not trust vaccines (without actually agreeing with that position herself ). Every bit of white space between segments or sections is a connection. The end of any one segment echoes clearly into the next, presenting a clear arc of thinking that organizes and unifies everything.

Lyric Essays  133 But she consistently returns to her own motherhood—​her desire to keep her son safe from environmental hazards, such as the plastics in his mattress; her terror when he developed croup; her boiling of any object he put into his mouth during the H1N1 epidemic that began shortly after his birth. The personal urgency of her research becomes a subtle narrative spine for the book, even when Biss allows it to be subsumed by other strands that illustrate why people obsess over vaccines. Even terminology fascinates Biss. “The very expression herd immunity suggests that we are cattle, waiting, perhaps, to be sent to slaughter,” she writes. “And it invites an unfortunate association with the term herd mentality, a stampede toward stupidity. The herd, we assume, is foolish” (Biss On Immunity 20–​21). Biss’s mind leaps between such interrogations of history, literature, language, and her own experience, separated not by chapter numbers, but white space both within chapters and across them—​each “chapter” is really the start of another section, which picks up a strand and continues the braid, ultimately illuminating the ways in which our bodies themselves create the body politic and creating a subtly persuasive line of inquiry illustrating how in neither knowledge nor in health does any body stand alone. The abecedarian scales up in Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2005), a lyric chronicle of Rosenthal’s life until age 39 (Rosenthal died of ovarian cancer in 2017 at 51). Instead of splicing her autobiography into chapters covering different periods of time, or focusing on a single, contained narrative, Rosenthal uses the alphabet to access and organize her memories along with ancillary observations and questions and the world events, cultural symbols, and technologies that form an evolving context. Under the letter “F,” for example, the reader learns that famous actress Cameron Diaz is the narrator’s cousin; that her fears include the dark and “mirrors at night”; that she can name all 50 states in alphabetical order; that she loves the 1972 Free to Be … You and Me album; and that she once deduced that a friend had confided in others before confiding in her, making her feel less special (Rosenthal 98–​99, 102, 105–​106). Her entries are made even more intricate by the inclusion of hermit crab essay forms such as timelines, tables, and indices, and collage-​style use of “found” items such as yearbook notes, photos, and sketches. Though the title calls the book an encyclopedia, it feels equally like a meticulously crafted scrapbook, and perhaps most surprisingly, it includes opportunities for readers to participate in its construction. The book begins with a “Reader’s Agreement” that asks, among other unexpected and seemingly unrelated things, that the reader confesses that “your favorite word is your own name—​don’t worry, that’s normal” (v). The chapter for X is predominately a survey in which the reader is invited to mark their own responses, such as how often they wash new clothes before wearing them, tell the truth even if it’s painful for others to hear, or fret about getting buried alive (216). The effect of this participation is that the reader constructs their own history alongside Rosenthal’s, comparing their

134  Lyric Essays life to hers on the basis of largely accessible, mundane categories that nevertheless produce the kind of specificity illustrating how ordinary lives are equally connected and unique. The quotidian is fruitful ground for essaying, and this finds two different expressions in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (2019) and Sonya Huber’s Supremely Tiny Acts (2021). Gay’s collection of flash essays, or what he calls “essayettes,” is the product of an experiment in which Gay spent one year, beginning on his birthday, writing “a daily essay about something delightful” (xi). Gay’s “essayettes” cover everything from a friend’s photo of a peacock (and her joy in it) to nicknames to the delight of skipping a day in one’s routine. In the collection’s preface, Gay says that he employed certain rules, such as writing his essays in short order and by hand. He also explains that his daily delights helped him identify “patterns and themes and concerns” in his life. “My mother is often on my mind,” he says. “Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind” (xi–​x ii). Through dutiful, near-​d aily accounting, Gay elucidates how what we notice about the world—​and what lenses we apply through which to see it—​t rains our mind to notice more deliberately. Noticing delight, he claims, begat noticing more delight (xii). Huber’s Supremely Tiny Acts works almost inversely. If Gay’s mini-​essays attempt to string daily delights into a kind of governing principle for living, Huber’s memoir illustrates how a single day contains the whole of our lives. Ostensibly, Huber’s memoir takes place on the day in which she must both appear for court after being arrested at a climate protest and take her son to get his learner’s permit. We follow Huber’s moves from the moment she wakes up after a mostly sleepless night to when she washes her face before bed again. But we do not simply watch her navigate a complex day—​we enter the narrator’s interior day, where portals to the past and future open up all around her. Seeing others at the courthouse who were also arrested gives Huber occasion to recall what happened at the protest and after Huber was arrested and taken to a New York City jail. Reading her students’ essays on the train produces a meditation on teaching. The day lived inside the mind is far more expansive than the day lived corporeally. At a Chinese souvenir shop Huber visits after court, she searches for a small gift for her son and lands on a glass egg. The egg reminds her of seeing glass blown as a child, her mother, her childhood in the Midwest, her family’s German heritage, and what it means to belong to a place or a people. The egg also gives Huber cause to reflect on the idea for this book: Somehow it’s the beautiful glass egg in my bag that makes me think I should write about this day, because it’s a beating glowing bright heart of surprise. But then I have to fight with myself, like right, typical of you to choose a day to write about where you seem all activist-​y and engaged … And then is

Lyric Essays  135 this inner bully yet another smokescreen to show how aware I am, to deflect feared external criticism? Russian nested dolls. (Huber, Supremely 126) Huber’s mind leaps between the concrete and the remembered, the imagined, the esoteric, the spiritual. Though it is functionally a narrative—​a “memoir of a day,” the subtitle says—​the day is an opening to other days, other lives, the choices we make and what is forced on us, and how hard it can be, sometimes, to tell the difference. Huber’s narration is both of the moment and how the solid things we encounter become doors, openings, and time loops. We live so many lives at once, Huber’s experiment shows. Who we are is always an amalgamation that any single moment makes of us. Conclusion In “Success in Circuit: Lyric Essay as Labyrinth,” Heidi Czerwiec says, I’m trying to articulate how—​rather than a piece advancing by plot, with narrative or story moving us forward, and instead of logic advancing the argument of a piece—​there are essays that are circuitous, nonlinear, that spiral around a central concept or incident or image, accruing meaning as they move. No forks, no false moves, no misdirection, only perhaps a pleasant disorientation as the writing twists and turns. (Noble 217) She compares lyric essays to labyrinths in which the path that leads both in and out is a “via negativa,” where one defines something as what it isn’t rather than what it is. The space in a lyric essay is not absence but an artistic space to move through, to engage with—​both the literal white space employed in fragmented lyric essays, but also the figurative white space, the lyrical lateral leaps in logic across which we bound faithfully, propelled by the prose. (218) While lyric essays challenge their readers to follow non-​narrative structures and risk that “pleasant disorientation,” they also promise to teach the reader how to read them, how to move through their circles, spirals, and switchbacks. While the structures of conventional storytelling may feel more familiar, and comfortable, linear narrative structures are just as imposed on experience as any other form. The story of what happened and what to make of it can be crafted in many different ways.

136  Lyric Essays Through segmentation, fragmentation, shell forms, flashes, and other techniques that enable associative thinking, lyric essays may better capture the way lived experience goes on living in the brain, called up by the world’s constant reminders. Any individual memory—​of a day, of an image, of something overheard that changed everything—​suggests its own connections. Our minds link a certain song to a certain person, who reminds us of a certain time in our lives, which takes place somewhere specific and during certain historical and cultural periods. But they also link the taste of a restaurant’s marinara to the one our grandmother made, which makes us wonder about the origins of marinara, which prompts us to research our family’s Italian history, which leads to a scene—​wholly imagined—​about how our great-​g randmother may have brought tomato seeds aboard the ship that carried her to America. And maybe we think, too, of that Frank Sinatra song, “Come Back to Sorrento,” one of the few recordings he made in Italian—​a song that made our grandmother cry, a song our father loved, a song we played at our wedding. Perhaps we write this essay as the recipe for that marinara (or as annotations to our grandmother’s recipe, which we may also have to reconstruct with footnotes about the guesswork because she never actually wrote it down). Perhaps we tell the story of our grandparents’ Italian-​A merican marriage through the lens of Sinatra’s lyrics. “The lyric essay allows the self to encompass or become encapsulated within another structure in order to reorient the self to the mysteries, conundrums, complexities, ironies, wonders, or mishaps of existence,” writes Jenny Boully in her craft meditation in A Harp in the Stars. “A lyric essay is always trying to find its way out of what it thinks it knows” (255). Where Czerwiec uses the phrase “pleasant disorientation” to describe the experience of reading a lyric essay, Boully sees this disorientation as part of the writer’s experience, as well. Some truths only come when we disrupt the stories of our lives as we’ve been taught to tell them. To change the form of the container can change our understanding of the substance inside. Works Cited Biss, Eula. On Immunity. Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2014. Champagne, Brooke. “An Essay Entitled ‘Mrs.’ ” Waxwing, no. XVII, Spring 2019. https://​ w ax ​ w ing ​ m ag.org/​ i tems/​ i ssu​ e17/​ 52 _ ​ C h ​ a mpa ​ g ne- ​ A n- ​ E ssay- ​ E ntit ​ l ed-​ Mrs.php Cooper, Bernard. Maps to Anywhere. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1997. Czerwiec, Heidi. “Of Fragments and Segments.” Hippocampus Magazine, 7 Apr. 2022. https://​h ipp​ocam​pusm ​a gaz​i ne.com/​2 022/​04/​craft- ​of-​f ragme​nts-​a nd- ​segme​nts-​by-​ heidi-​czerw ​iec/​ D’Agata, John. We Might As Well Call It The Lyric Essay. Geneva, Seneca Review Books, 2015. D’Agata, John and Deborah Tall. “The Lyric Essay.” Seneca Review, 1997. www.hws. edu/​senec​a rev ​iew/​lyr ​ices​say.aspx

Lyric Essays  137 Deresiewicz, William. “In Defense of Facts.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic Media Company, 10 Dec. 2016. www.thea​t lan​t ic.com/​m agaz​i ne/​a rch ​ive/​2017/​01/​i n-​defe​ nse-​of-​f acts/​508​748/​ Einstein, Sarah. “Self-​Portrait in Apologies.” Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2011. www.sundr​essp​ubli​cati​ons.com/​bes​tof/​2011/​einste​i ns.htm Eleftheriou, Joanna. “Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in Historical Context.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, no. 4.1, Fall 2017. www.assay​jour​nal. com/​joa ​n na- ​elef ​t her ​iou-​i s-​g enre- ​ever-​new-​t he​oriz ​i ng-​t he-​l yric- ​e ssay-​i n-​its-​h is​ tori​cal-​cont​ext.html Fennelly, Beth Ann. “Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True.” Brevity, no. 51, 18 Jan. 2016. https://​bre​v ity ​m ag.com/​non ​fict ​ion/​some-​childh​ood-​d re​a ms-​ rea ​l ly-​do-​come-​t rue/​ Fusselman, Amy. The Pharmacist’s Mate. San Francisco, McSweeney’s, 2013. Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 2019. Hansen, Silas. “An Annotated Guide to My OKCupid Profile.” The Normal School, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 2014. pp. 75–​80. Huber, Sonya. Supremely Tiny Acts. Columbus, Mad Creek Books, 2021. Irby, Samantha. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. New York, Knopf, 2017. Lima, Natalie. “Snowbound.” Brevity, no. 62, 13 Sept. 2019. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022. https:// ​bre​v ity ​m ag.com/​non ​fict ​ion/​snowbo​u nd/​ McPhee, John. “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” The New Yorker, 9 Sept. 1972. www. newyor​ker.com/​m agaz​i ne/​1972/​09/​09/​the-​sea​rch-​for-​m ar ​v in-​g ard​ens Miller, Brenda. “We Regret to Inform You.” The Sun, Nov. 2013. www.the​sunm​agaz​ ine.org/​iss​ues/​455/​we-​reg ​ret-​to-​i nf​orm-​you Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. World of Wonders. Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2020. Noble, Randon Billings. A Harp in the Stars. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Rawlings, Wendy. “Let’s Talk About Shredded Romaine Lettuce.” Places, Mar. 2014. https://​places​jour ​n al.org/​a rti​c le/ ​lets- ​t alk- ​a bout- ​s hred ​d ed-​r oma ​i ne- ​lett ​uce/​?cn-​ reloa​ded=​1 Rosenthal, Amy Krouse. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. New York, Crown, 2005. Shah, Sejal. This Is One Way to Dance. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2020. Trembath-​Neuberger, Lauren. “Drug Facts.” Pank, 6.16, Dec. 2011. https://​pankm​agaz​ ine.com/​piece/​d rug-​f acts/​ Washuta, Elissa. “Apocalypse Logic.” The Offing, 21 Nov. 2016. https://​ theof​fing​ m ag. com/​i nsi​g ht/​apo​caly ​pse-​logic/​

5 Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches

Diaries The terms “diary” and “journal” have become muddled and are sometimes used interchangeably. At times, they’ve been used separately in hierarchically gendered ways (diaries as feminine and journals as masculine, with the usual gender bias), or to suggest difference between a more private and a more official use, but ultimately they both describe dailiness, writing from the perspective of a single moment, not knowing what will happen later. These forms are not written in the long retrospection of the memoir or autobiography. Their recollections typically emphasize the recent—​the daily account—​rather than scenes at years, decades, or a lifetime’s distance across increasingly fallible memory. Its potential for dramatic irony (where the audience is aware of things the speaker/​author/​ character is not), the immediacy of the form, and the nature of diary entries as textual evidence of a historical life and the world it occupied, providing clues the reader is encouraged to assemble into a larger narrative, are all features that have made diary forms (and letters) attractive tropes for novelists throughout the last couple of centuries. Actual, nonfictional diary forms can but don’t necessarily use recorded daily experiences and feelings to launch the deeper and broader philosophical explorations of the essay. And, typically written with intentions other than to produce a literary narrative, they may be a good deal messier than the strategic inventions the form is used for in fiction. Public vs. Private Diaries

Whether intended as a personal meditation or a deliberate public act, to write a diary entry is to create a historical artifact, whether for oneself or for one’s family, descendants, profession, culture, geography, community, town, state, nation, species. Having infinite disparate uses, diaries as we understand them arose from a confluence of practices: clergy, then laypeople, using daily reflective writings as part of their spiritual practice and self-​d iscipline; the keeping of commonplace books filled with found quotations, bits of knowledge, and scraps of daily ephemera; the daily record of an ongoing project DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-6

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  139 kept by travelers, researchers, builders, engineers, managers; figures from the famous to the unknown documenting and reflecting upon the world’s changes as they were happening; recording and organizing personal and professional life with schedule planners and almanacs and the new standardizations and technologies of the industrial and digital revolutions; domestic figures, typically women, chronicling household experiences that would otherwise be ignored or forgotten; travelers chronicling a journey as it progresses; “self-​care” devotees using fill-​in-​the-​blank-​g uided journals and affirmations as self-​help and self-​ improvement both physically and psychologically. One might imagine holding their diary as a fully private conversation with themselves, but since those same diaries might be discovered by friends or family or enemies, subpoenaed in court proceedings, brought to public use posthumously by historians, or revisited later by the author’s own older self, even the most private daily writings have the potential to find a public audience, whether the author consciously thinks so or not. Karsonya Wise Whitehead writes: Writing, even in a diary, is not a private act. It is a public act, where the writer is attempting to share himself or herself with others. It is part of a larger discourse that shapes how and what we remember … The moment you record something on paper; that record has the potential to find its way into the hands of others—​even if it takes years to get there. (Whitehead 2) Then, of course, there are diaries purposefully written for public use, whether immediately, or with the hope of writing oneself into history, thereby shaping future public memory through one’s individual point of view. The diaries of influential figures and leaders in politics, military, business, science, culture, and beyond may more likely be written with that public-​facing awareness than that of someone with no celebrity brand (or sense of self-​importance) to cultivate and protect. During the US Civil War, diaries like those of Mary Chesnut (the wife of a Confederate officer) and New York lawyer George Templeton Strong have endured as valuable and well-​k nown first-​hand accounts of civilian life in America at the time. In her anthology Diary as Literature: Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America, Angela Hooks assembles scholarship that analyzes diaries of the American Civil War, travel journals of diasporic experience, family diaries, and prison diaries, all of which underscores how any single diarist can complicate the more generalized narratives that come to dominate the discourse about any given place, identity group, or historical moment. Individual voices are at once representative of their larger communities and yet remain unique cases that can insulate us against the oversimplifying generalizations of stereotypes.

140  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches Anthony David Franklin examines William P. Woodlin’s diary, which he kept as a Black Union soldier during the civil war, giving lie to the assumption that Union armies were institutions of equality. To say nothing of basic daily treatment of Black soldiers, between Confederate armies conscripting Black Americans late in the war and Union armies seizing them as contraband, Woodlin understood that “both sides viewed them as a resource to be claimed” (Franklin 33). The private(ish) and candid nature of diary entries also creates the possibility for the perspectives and experiences of oppressed people to be registered far more honestly than on other occasions for those same subjects to record their stories. American slave narratives were typically co-​w ritten, edited, or influenced by white abolitionists with their own agendas and political reasons for the former slave telling their stories in certain tactically calibrated ways. Corey D. Greathouse notes that slave owners would sometimes send spies to question their own slaves about their treatment, often under the guise of pure curiosity or even sympathy. Knowing that giving the wrong answers about their masters could get them beaten, sold, or killed, slaves would tend to speak cheerfully of their stations and their masters. So even legitimate interviewers asking in good faith would often not get an honest answer, even from those who had been emancipated for decades (Greathouse 6). Theoretically at least, the private nature of the diary removes the need for the rhetorical maneuvering of oppressed people telling their life stories in any other context. This doesn’t make any given diary superior to other forms of text in terms of historical reconstruction, but it does constitute another node of narrative perspective and circumstance to read in conversation with the others. Diaries as Historical Narrative

Also in contrast to more memoir-​like slave narratives, daily diaries of slaves are rare, for obvious reasons. Still, some were kept and a precious few survive, usually handed down through families. Law scholar William B. Gould IV published a transcript of the diary his great-​g randfather, William B. Gould, kept during his time in the US Navy from 1862 to 1865 in Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (2002): “… because of the subjectivity diary writing provides, Gould is rendered human in opposition to the objectivity deemed by terms like slave, chattel, and contraband, the nominal markers given enslaved African Americans by the white authority of the time” (Greathouse 3). In Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis (2014), Karsonya Wise Whitehead supplies historical context around the diaries Davis kept in Philadelphia from 1863 to 1865, primary texts which were not available to scholars until they were acquired by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1999. She writes:

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  141 Her ordinary has been rendered extraordinary simply because it has survived … Because of Emilie’s choice to keep a personal diary—​her conscious act of identity assertion—​she has moved from invisibility to visibility and been added to the literature on everyday, working-​class free black American women. (Whitehead 1) By presenting the diaries in their entirety and supplementing individual entries with italicized annotations, Whitehead both reproduces the primary text and guides us through her efforts at forensic history, biography, further research on the other characters and locations Davis encounters, and plausible interpretations, like the fact that Davis was able to afford writing supplies at all spoke to some degree of economic privilege, and what her “mulatto” status (according to US Census records) might have meant against her self-​identification as “colored.” Especially when surrounded by a historian’s interpretive contexts, this kind of life writing can illuminate less public lives and serve as evidence of past moments in those writers’ societies. Diarist as an Embodiment of Time and Culture

In 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight kept a journal during a five-​month business trip from Boston, MA, to New Haven, CT, and then New York, NY. Likely originally intended to not be circulated beyond her closest friends and family, The Journal of Madam Knight was not published until 1825 and remains a staple example of writing from colonial America. Knight’s trip as a woman alone, fully in command of her own personal and financial affairs, has been held up as a contrast to the prim, obedient, saturated-​in-​spirituality woman that has elsewhere typified the Puritan feminine ideal. Her self-​characterization can be read as a larger than life figure swaggeringly adventuring in ways respectable society women of the time simply did not do. Scott Michaelsen, critiquing such readings of Knight’s Journal, writes: This sort of bland, bourgeois “feminism” … merely celebrates the arrival of the “strong woman” on the scene, and is blind to the manner in which women’s empowerment is linked in Knight’s text to the domination of others. Knight’s Journal, ultimately, has everything to do with … how she negotiates a sense of her own class positioning in relation to others. (Michaelsen) Throughout her entries, Knight—​a successful boarding house keeper in Boston at the time—​encounters many lower class and rural New England residents she would not otherwise, as her journey necessitated stops and stays at taverns and boarding houses well beneath her station. Knight’s descriptions of

142  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches those she encounters are full of mocking judgment at the amusingly unmannered and unworldly backwoods white characters, Indigenous Americans, and African Americans she meets. In this way, the most revealing thing about her judgments is what they reflect about Knight herself and the society she belongs to. Calling her an “early-​ A merican white supremacist,” Julia Stern observes that Knight regularly dehumanizes the nonwhite people she sees, and holds as uncouth those lower class whites she hears air their personal complaints in public spaces, such as taverns, and that this judgment is particularly harsh on women. Knight congratulates herself as adhering to some proper woman code by keeping her own complaints—​which are many—​to her journal (and presumably to her close friends back in Boston with whom she shared it). Stern argues, though, that Knight’s literacy gave her the space to put her mind into her journal, whereas the lower classes who were denied literacy had nowhere else but communal spaces in which to do that same journaling work orally and socially (Stern 8). Ignoring how she herself defies gendered expectations of the time by taking on the masculine roles of solo traveler, business owner, and executor of an estate, Knight holds lower class women in contempt for speaking too boldly or bawdily, adopting both that time’s masculine behaviors and its patriarchal judgments. We can take it as Knight’s unintentionally honest accounting of herself and her reactions to others, more than a journalist’s analytical portrait of what she observed. So, Knight’s value to our understanding of colonial America is not that of a scholar or documentarian, but as an unwitting embodiment of the gendered and racialized class hierarchy of the time. Diary as Literary Construction

Some diaries are not formed in such a linear, unrevised way but are written with more literary purposes in mind, to transform raw experience into art, shaped by a deliberately cultivated vision, insight, and self. Six volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin were published between 1966 and 1976, which narrate her life between 1931 at age 13 and 1966. At the time, she edited and transcribed from her actual handwritten diary, which she kept almost daily until her death in 1977, amassing thousands of pages and an entire lifetime of thoughts and experiences. Over the next seven years, a seventh volume would be published posthumously, along with four volumes of her Early Diaries. Situating herself among modernist writers like Marcel Proust, her early influence D.H. Lawrence (about whom she wrote her first published book), and her sometimes lover Henry Miller—​and keeping company with so many other Modernists, Postmodernists, and Surrealists on the literary, theater, and art scenes—​Nin was also heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. Having moved back and forth between Paris, France, where she spent her early life, and the United States several times before finally settling more permanently in

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  143 America after fleeing Europe in 1939, she traveled among the expatriate, international Modernists of the time, and identified with the movement’s feelings of dislocation, fragmentation, and performance of self as creation of self. Drawing from the French tradition of the journal intime, which emerged in the early nineteenth century, Nin negotiated that typically private form into a more public one. Throughout the diary and elsewhere, she talked about crafting a persona through it, about acting and playing a role, about attending to more of a psychological truth than a strictly factual one, and about the fragmentary concept of self she developed along with her Modernist contemporaries, perhaps qualifying her lifelong work closer to Modernist autofiction than to autobiography. Elizabeth Podnieks writes, “Let us admit, then, as Nin was wont to do, that her diaries are not factually genuine. But let us also admit that they are a genuine self-​portrait. Each diary is a version of self that Nin believed in” (Podnieks 287). An influential feminist, particularly during the movements of the 1960s, Nin’s diary worked as her own psychological self-​study, continually exploring and challenging all of the things that composed herself, with particular attention on the tensions between being a modern, professional, artistically accomplished woman and following the model of subjugated-​housewife-​w ith-​a-​hobby. A frequent theme throughout her life concerned gendered expectations through her daily experiences. A committed non-​monogamist to say the least, she became known for her approach to women’s self-​possessed and self-​determined sexuality as empowerment. For some second-​wave feminists, she was a fraught icon. Some applauded her for claiming an autonomy and female power as a skilled literary figure, and for charting a self-​d irected model of femininity both in concert and in contrast to the expectations surrounding her. Others took issue with the fact that she so depended on her husband financially that she could have neither her art nor her wide-​ranging sexual experiences without his support. Still others thought that she reinforced the negative stereotype of artistic and independent women as pathologically oversexed, either lacking self-​control or adopting a predatory nature. Much of the erotica Nin would become known for had been omitted from the earlier published diaries. Nin and others had said that earlier omissions and alterations were to preserve the privacy of those who were characters but did not want to be known as such. After the deaths of all the principle people, including Nin herself, yet other versions of her diary were released, edited by trusted others, but others nonetheless: Henry and June (1986), Incest (1992), Fire (1995), and Nearer the Moon (1996). Podnekis tracks Nin’s evolution across her work, which has one chronology, and her actual biography, which has another. She shows how Nin, in her fiction and diaries, holds up the probable incestuous/​abusive relationship with her father as the foundational experience that gave rise to her evolving self over the

144  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches years, through her marriage, her sexual awakening as a way to reclaim power, and her continual reinvention and analysis of a self through her diaries, the earliest of which were addressed to her father. Her diary is an example of a self both deluding itself at times, and sharply critical of itself at others: Marriage, like her childhood, made her unhappy. The diary was used, with all its linguistic and imaginative possibilities, to convince herself and any possible readers of just the opposite: that she was happy and the marriage plot successful. But other, less-​g uarded passages reveal how unsatisfied she was, as a woman and as an artist, and in her later diaries she began to rewrite the blissful ending. This revision was, however, psychologically taxing. She would spend her life doing editorial battle with herself as she tried to integrate romance and modernist narratives. (Podnieks 302) Sometimes she altered not so much events but her explanations of them, particularly her own reactions and motivations. As she matured, though, she saw herself increasingly as doing rigorous self-​psychoanalysis, rooting down to the true motivations for her behaviors, becoming aware that much of her sexuality was a way of revisiting and revising her first incestuous and abusive introduction to sex at the hands of her father. Ponekis observes a particularly revealing quote from Nin: she was a real woman and she remains a textual construction. She cunningly told her diary: “There was once a woman who had one hundred faces. She showed one face to each person, and so it took one hundred men to write her biography.” (Podnieks 344) Diary to Supplement Celebrity

When a celebrity, already famous for something else, publishes a diary, it becomes supplementary material to their larger public ethos—​or their brand—​ and is often regarded as bonus material for the hardcore fans or gossip fodder for the voyeurs. Artists, musicians, actors, and other figures from popular culture fall into this category. Sylvia Plath’s poetry earned her renown, alongside her storied marriage and creative partnership with poet Ted Hughes, and the mythic status that she ascended to following her suicide in 1963 at age 30. Not published until after Hughes’s death in 1998 (the same year he published his 88-​poem collection Birthday Letters about his relationship with Plath), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath seems largely regarded as biographical material more than a deliberate work of art in itself.

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  145 Cynthia Ozick, noting that she is moved by the journals, but feels the massive “abyss” between them and Plath’s poems, writes, The mistake is this: that a poet’s life weighs in the same scale as the poems themselves … Virginia Woolf ’s diaries rest easily alongside the body of her other writing; they are an equal masterwork. Artistically, they are all at high tide. Sylvia Plath’s journals are not; they are jagged things. (Ozick 100–​101) Famously, Hughes, the executor of Plath’s estate, reordered the poems, removed some, and added others to the manuscript of Plath’s most famous collection, the posthumously published Ariel (1965). This was seen by many as an act of self-​defense against the most angry and critical of her confessional poems. Others have made the case that, while that might still be true, Hughes’s longtime literary partnership with Plath, and what some critics have seen as excessive repetition in the original Ariel manuscript, suggests that the changes he made were also literary decisions (Enniss 70–​71). All the material survives, and in 2004, Ariel: The Restored Edition was published according to the manuscript’s arrangement at the time of Plath’s death. When it comes to the journals, however, Hughes notoriously burned Plath’s final journal, which she kept in the months preceding her suicide, of course fueling accusations of Hughes using his control over Plath’s literary estate to his own self-​serving ends: “Hughes had destroyed the last one because he did not want their children to read it: ‘In those days’, he said, ‘I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival’ ” (Brown). And so it wasn’t until the end of his life that he published Birthday Letters, a collection of poems written over 25 years starting a few years after her death. In some ways, he borrows her style, working far more confessionally than in his other poetry, addressing them to Plath in the second person and using them in part to tell his own versions of events Plath had also written in her journals. It’s also possible that the fraught narrative of Plath and Hughes had become so established, and since so much time had passed since Plath’s most definitive literary achievements, that the Journals could only be seen by an eager public as more evidence of a relationship at once loving and scandalous, intimately partnered and hostile, companionable and abusive. They entered into a tabloid landscape already in progress, and so the writing, no matter its style or substance, could only be subsumed into that larger narrative. Selected entries from Kurt Cobain’s handwritten and hand-​d rawn journals were collected and published eight years after his 1994 suicide. Though heavily curated by his estate and the publisher, the undated entries remain far more fragmentary than most diaries that make it to publication. Here, too, the journals entered into a narrative in progress—​including mountains of tabloid blame aimed at his marriage to Courtney Love—​and served as supplementary,

146  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches diagnostic material to the other art forms Cobain fans had defined him by. Cobain’s diary is not a tranquil reflection on the events of the day. It’s not usually scenic or narrative. Typically abstract and concerned with the tension between the self he’s struggling to define and the ill-​fitting options of self hood the world seems to present him, his entries are more like eruptions, even in the drawings and comic-​book-​style sequences, some of which are detailed enough that they would have taken considerable time and care to produce. The open-​ channel, uncrafted, near stream-​of-​consciousness approach of both Cobain’s journals and song lyrics are easily connected to the punk-​rock ethos of unfiltered spontaneity as essential to authenticity. Jessica Wood writes: Cobain articulates a … “primal sincerity”, symptoms of which include misspellings, scatological metaphors and runaway sentences generated by free-​ a ssociation. (This deliberate carelessness corresponds to the “anti-​ talent” prized within the punk formulations of authenticity …) … scatological language is linked to the “primally sincere” mode of writing. (Wood 335) Cobain’s journals, as they were published in 2002, come across as an embodiment of his multifarious internal identity conflicts. Largely fragmentary, seemingly incoherent, cluttersome, recursive, they document a fraught self in struggle to become, to negotiate its competing pressures, to reconcile some punk-​rock sense of authenticity with so much it could not control. It can be read as the outpouring of a prolonged identity crisis related to fame, the music industry as bifurcated between indie/​underground and corporate, social class, depression, drug addiction, gender, and race. Despite any contradictions and disjunctions in the Journals, a number of organizing binaries emerge: authenticity vs. conformity, art vs. commercialism, anti-​ establishment vs. becoming co-​ opted by the establishment, sadistic “ jock” heterosexual masculine vs. emaciated masochistic queer masculine, oppressor vs. oppressed, a belief that he could change irredeemably corrupt systems from the inside vs. (perhaps) the persistent knowledge that he was part and profiteer—​fi nancially and culturally—​of those same systems. If read solely through the lens of gender, Journals might be a fitful and unaware manifestation of the renegotiation of American masculinity, attempting to reject a concept of maleness as defined by and dependent upon its place in a violent hierarchy of power and domination over other gender identities and non-​heterosexualities. Arthur F. Saint-​Aubin notes that Cobain rails against being confined to a male body … the actions that are prescribed for his male body do not coincide with what Cobain feels and desires to be authentic and subjectively real … These compulsively reproduced images also reveal,

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  147 therefore, Cobain’s desire to re-​code his body, to reinvest it with a different meaning and potential. (Saint-​Aubin 17) Further written in the body and through bodily metaphor are the privileges of race and gender—​despite his lower class origins—​ideas and language that were just beginning to enter American popular consciousness in the late 1980s, just as Cobain was struggling to find his own vocabulary for his place in it. Throughout the Journals, Cobain identifies in opposition to more conventionally masculine figures—​a s gay, as a woman, as Black, as an authentic artist feeling persecuted for those same artistic principles, consciously identifying with those he identifies as oppressed—​a flawed pattern which can be read as attemptedly progressive against the larger swath of “colorblind” white America throughout the 1990s, which assumed that America had settled its racial inequalities and had achieved a post-​racial era of true equal opportunity. Despite recognizing that racial and gender oppression remained persistent and defining features of America, Cobain’s flailing attempts are still infected by white supremacy and patriarchy, though he seldom seems to realize this. “Cobain bemoans his whiteness yet he does not explicitly and consistently contest his colour to the same degree as he does his maleness and his straightness” (Saint-​Aubin 16). In that light, Cobain’s status as representative of Generation X (or at least certain demographics within it during the 1990s) makes sense. American popular culture moved Cobain and others from the underground to the mainstream just as it began to move these questions of gender and race into a new phase of public discourse. Cobain was an icon for a cohort of Americans that called out these issues but had not yet implicated themselves in those critiques. Celebrity diaries are an extension of whatever we symbolically use them to mean through their larger public persona. Sometimes they are just capitalistic merchandizing; other times they might offer a unique glimpse into a life known to us in other ways. In either case, these diaries, to both our pride and shame, embody something about the cultural moment that produced them, whether the author realizes it or not. Embodying their cultural moment is, after all, the purpose of celebrity in the first place. The Diary’s Daily “Ongoingness”

Sarah Manguso takes up the opposite end of the self-​awareness spectrum. About two decades after Cobain’s suicide, she takes a meta-​nonfiction approach to the diary in her novella-​length-​f ragmented-​personal-​essay-​m arketed-​a s-​a-​memoir Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Having amassed more than 800,000 words of actual diary entries from adolescence through her early 40s, Manguso quotes from almost none of it. We do get an order of events from college relationships

148  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches to marriage to the death of her husband’s mother to the birth of her son and the perspective-​a ltering experiences of new motherhood, but the arc of Ongoingness is the evolution of Manguso’s thinking about why she’s kept and continues to keep a diary at all. In her earlier diary work, she held an increasingly intense need to write as a way to live, to create herself, to guard against losing life to the passage of time, to record her life so she wouldn’t miss it, to be sure it all really happened. But even during her attacks of hypergraphia, she understood the impossibility of recording every experience in words, especially in the full complexity and context. The diary and this book about the diary explore the anxieties of forgetting and being forgotten. When writing about the last people dying who knew you or who knew your name, she says, “Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death” (Manguso 37). She locates a pivot in her use of the diary and her feelings about memory and time in the experience of becoming a mother. The “pregnancy brain,” the protracted periods of nursing, the immediate needs of her son, who “needed me more than I needed to write about him,” (84) lead to her no longer fixating on the tragedy of forgetting, or no longer seeing forgetting as a tragedy, but a part of the “price of continued participation in life” (85). Throughout, she circles the ways in which life is an ongoingness beyond what any number of pages can contain: I used to harbor a continuous worry that I’d forget what had happened, that I’d fail to notice what was happening. I worried that something terrible would happen because I’d forgotten what had already happened. Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments—​an inability to accept life as ongoing. (79) The concept of privacy in diary is a fairly new one. Locks on diaries only began to be commercially introduced in the mid-​n ineteenth century, the technology suggesting a change in diary use. Lee Humphreys said, “You really don’t get a sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century, so it makes perfect sense that diaries or journals prior to that time were much more social in nature.” Further, from her research analyzing journaling habits both before and after the advent of social and digital media, she concludes that “people journal as a way of strengthening ‘kin and friend’ relationships.” (O’Donovan). As we see in this volume’s “Life Writing Online” chapter, much of the social “kin and friend” functions of the diary have shifted onto digital platforms, enabling public diary practices, perhaps again relegating paper diaries even more solidly into the private sphere. However, digital platforms are definitely not replacing paper journals, diaries, and notebooks. One analysis notes

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  149 upward trends predicting that the global paper notebooks market will grow by $16.55 billion during the years 2022–​2025, with the largest growth happening in technologically advanced nations like the US, China, Germany, the UK, and India (Paper notebooks). This may suggest that, if anything, the increased ability to record, write, communicate, and broadcast life stories through digital platforms is also increasing people’s desire to do so on physical paper with analog tools. With so much of ourselves made so public so easily through social media (and the constant possibility of data breeches, hacking, and doxing), with so much time spent looking at screens, with the constant temptation of editing and revising as we write, it may be the amount of time people spend in digital spaces that drives them to seek out physical paper for its tactile joys, its unplugged privacy, its unerasable ink flow that prevents us from second-​g uessing every word we put down and write committedly forward. Epistles Repurposed Correspondence

Some diaries are epistles in that they are addressed to a particular person or to the log itself. Letters are defined by some specific second-​person audience and by the occasion to which they respond, but unlike even epistolary diaries, letter forms are generally even more immediate than diaries, with the intention of at least their named addressee reading it. Historians spend entire careers examining letters from the era of their study, from influential people to the little-​k nown civilians, so it would be impossible to justly summarize here the examples of life writing contained in them across the full spectrum of American life since the beginning. Letters created within the complex personal situations of countless individuals across the infinitely varied rhetorical situations within so many major events, time periods, and shifts in history would take lifetimes to truly do justice to. So we’ve chosen only a few examples of the many that have attained public notoriety. Unlike, say, the letters between Martha and Gorge Washington—​nearly all of which Martha destroyed following her husband’s death—​and those Thomas Jefferson had exchanged with his wife, Martha, which he also burned, a great many of the letters between John and Abigail Adams (as well as John Adams’s exchanges with Jefferson and many others) survive and have long maintained a prominent place in the American canon of correspondence as a literary form (Norton). Published in various forms and ultimately donated by the Adams Manuscript Trust to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956 as part of a huge trove of papers from this dynastic American family, the letters between John and Abigail were published most completely and most recently in My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams in 2007, edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor.

150  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches From their courtship in 1762 to John’s letter to his son John Quincy Adams after Abigails’s death in 1818, the letters mostly represent when John was away for years at a time as a diplomat in Europe, or in his domestic political roles in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The privacy of these writings at the time saw John and Abigail writing in ways so open and candid that—​despite some archaic variations in spelling, syntax, and diction—​t heir exchanges have struck many as almost modern. They regarded each other with the respect of peers, Abigail frequently advising John on both personal and professional matters, as well as the more expected wifely role of cautioning pragmatism and calming his temper and ego through one tense political situation or another. While Abigail held economic, social, and racial privilege, she and the women who were her contemporaries were very aware of the gender inequalities they lived within. In her often-​quoted letter to John, who was in Philadelphia at the time, dated Mar. 31, 1776, Abigail wrote some advice in building new laws for a new nation: in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. (Adams) Elaine Forman Crane notes that John’s reply letter “acknowledges male power but dismisses Abigail’s objections by insisting that in reality men are ‘subjects’ who ‘have only the Name of Masters,’ ” and yet that John went on to respond to James Sullivan as if he were responding to Abigail’s argument, strongly advocating for women’s political participation (Crane 756). Ultimately, Abigail developed a style of writing to John that typically avoided direct challenges and call-​outs of the fullest implications of his words and positions regarding women and “did so circumspectly, surreptitiously, and with covert humor” (Crane 761). Though exceptional in the endearing portrait of such a mutual partnership as American society afforded husbands and wives of the era, their letters have contributed much to the historical narrative of America and American lives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Political Public Force of Private Letters

Letters of prominent individuals form collections oriented around those individuals’ lives. For others who were never exalted to lifelong fame, at least not

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  151 beyond a particular moment, letters might be collected from many individuals, oriented around a particular historical event, era, location, shared identity, or collective experience. These function in similar ways to oral histories, though not originally addressed (as oral histories are) to an interviewer or to posterity in general. They are first-​hand accounts curated and re-​presented in a mosaic of a larger experience. Lydia Maria Child, the abolitionist who also helped Harriet Jacobs publish Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861, edited the 1865 collection The Freedmen’s Book, which compiled writing from abolitionists and former slaves with the goal of presenting freedmen as worthy of suffrage. It contained one letter in particular from a former slave addressed to his master, which in recent years has been resurrected through circulation in social media. Jourdon Anderson’s former owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson, had written to him in a desperate plea to find workers to bring in his farm’s harvest, promising him fair treatment as a free worker, even though the colonel required a war and federal legal action to force him to address Jourdon as a human, rather than as property. Jourdon Anderson’s reply, “written just as he dictated it,” has recirculated widely on recent social media and captured twenty-​fi rst-​century America’s attention for good reasons. First, there are his logical arguments: his descriptions of the good life he’s living in Ohio with his family, the doubt the colonel could provide better and safer conditions, and his move to “test your sincerity” by requesting the money he and his wife were owed in wages and interest for the colonel’s longtime failures of payment. He graciously offers to deduct what his former master spent on their clothing and medical expenses (for only three doctor’s visits and one extracted tooth). Second, there’s the rare written example of the kind of deadpan humor developed in such oppressive conditions as slavery. He writes: I have often felt uneasy about you … I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kills the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. (Anderson 266) He closes the letter, “Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me” (Anderson 268). First-​person life writing from within oppressed and marginalized communities has long been used in overtly political ways. Just as with any museum exhibit, the curation and presentation of letters and artifacts from members of specific communities further define group identity through the individuals who constitute them, and this act of communally authored

152  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches self-​d efinition is powerfully important both for the community’s sense of itself and for influencing other, dominant groups who are implicated in the oppression. As digital technology affords greater access to materials and greater abilities to arrange and share them without fear of damaging the originals, curators make use of the rhetorical possibilities digital spaces afford. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History provides public digital access to its exhibit “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution,” a collection of letters along with telegrams, objects, artworks, and photos from and focusing on the confinement of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Some describe life before or during the camps, but are often occasional letters, such as birthday or holiday wishes, and letters to friends and family. Others are evidence of the toll such a damaging government action took on individuals, such as college rejection letters based solely on Japanese ancestry. Troves of documents and materials are also curated by the Japanese American National Museum ( JANM) in Los Angeles. Of the many moving letters in the JANM collections are the letters between San Diego children’s librarian Clara Breed and the Japanese American children she’d served before they were imprisoned at the camps. In the glimpses these letters provide, present-​d ay readers are invited into a very human intimacy with those children, and by extension, the adults they grew up to be. Fusa Tsumagari’s letter to Breed dated Sept. 27, 1943 reads, Some feel … the strong urge to get out—​to do things—​anything to get out of here. Others, the more aged perhaps, feel strongly that they have no desire to get out … I guess this place could be called a second Shangri La—​if you like this type of living. (“Clara Breed Collection”) Many of the letters thank Breed for the things she sent, wish her well on holidays, apologize for not writing more frequently, and describe the small daily moments of camp life. Across the collection, we see each writer in their distinctly individual voice, speaking to a friend. Humanizing individual people and inviting identification with them are vital for telling the story of major historical events that otherwise tend to be rendered impersonally. Abstract descriptions of the Japanese American internment camps and the lack of evidence to warrant them might imply that this was a tragedy. Reading concrete narratives in people’s actual voices, and seeing their handwriting in high-​resolution digital images—​especially from children—​presents the camps less like a tragedy and more like a crime.

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  153 Open Letters

Open letters are essays, nominally addressed to one person or group, but published in public, situating that public as an invited eavesdropper, not addressed directly. Typically more Baconian than Montaignian, open letters tend to have persuasive goals about public issues, and yet the letter form also emphasizes the ethos of the writer and the communities to which they belong. Likely the most famous American example is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It opens with King’s current situation on Apr. 16, 1963: held in jail for civil disobedience after defying local anti-​demonstration laws, and having just read in a newspaper (contraband in the jail) an open letter addressed to him titled “A Call for Unity,” written by eight white clergy who criticized King’s methods and sense of urgency as divisive and destructive to both peace and progress. Those white clergy—​from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish denominations—​urged only the use of the courts, not direct action, to redress the grievances of America’s ongoing apartheid. King’s letter was his rebuttal, addressed to them as “My dear fellow clergymen” but published widely in several national publications throughout 1963, and then in King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait (King 52). The letter maintains King’s distinctive cadences and phrasings familiar from his oratory. Since American readers from then until now were and remain so familiar with the sounds of his speeches, it’s nearly impossible to read the letter without hearing it in his voice. Both because his voice is so recognizable and his reputation preceded him so strongly, there is already a strong ethos at work, even if King’s letter works very little in his own life-​w riting narrative. In “The Law-​Abiding Citizen as Ideobody,” Dana Comi builds her concept of the “ideobody” from Michael McGee’s “ideograph,” which describes an abstract symbol that has become imbued with an entire ideology. That symbol can be something like a flag, a cross, or a word like “freedom” or “democracy.” Naturally, due to the abstract qualities and the highly contextual nature of their rhetorical functions, the meanings can be slippery, varied, and contradictory. A speaker might say a word like “freedom,” and two audience members might hear very different meanings, yet both be satisfied that the speaker is aligned with them. Comi uses “ideobody” to describe a hypothetical, abstract human being that functions in the same way. In her example, “law abiding citizen” is an ideobody used by anti-​g un control campaigns to claim lived experiences they don’t actually have. While real students and faculty from the University of Kansas speak from their lived experiences to earnestly ask that their school remain a gun-​free space, three men without any relevant experience (a state senator, a National Rifle Association [NRA] representative, and an NRA-​h ired lobbyist) repeatedly use “the law abiding citizen” as a way to steal the rhetorical power of other people’s lives and character while acting like advocates for them. “The law

154  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches abiding citizen” has no race or gender or any of the complications that come with a physical body. They only have citizenship and obedience. Such an abstraction is easy for anyone to identify with, especially when the inventors of this hypothetical silhouette of a person are themselves so far removed from this community as to be unable to speak from within it. While the pro-​g un-​regulation insiders told true stories of their own lives, the anti-​regulation argument used an ideobody to give the hypothetical more rhetorical force than the real (Comi). Applying the concept of the ideobody to King’s letter, we can see King using a version of this technique, but as an insider, and therefore more honestly. He uses “Negro” and “American Negro” to speak as a representative of a community that had lifted him to leadership. King writes, Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. (King 57) King individualizes “the American Negro” as a singular symbol to contain a massive and complex identity group. And while it, like all synecdoche, is an oversimplification, this technique, like all synecdoche, creates a clear and focused character, a currency easily traded to an audience otherwise unwilling or unable to approach the issues from any Black perspective. Earlier in the letter, King takes a detailed approach to sketching out an ideobody for his white audience to empathize with, identify with, and therefore be transformed by through briefly, vicariously, rhetorically occupying that perspective. Shifting from the collective first person (“We know through painful experience …”) to the second person in the famous periodic sentence of this famous letter, he establishes a litany of abuses and inequalities common to Black Americans for generations: when you have seen … vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim … hate-​fi lled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters … the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society … when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—​then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (King 54) He sketches specific experiences, but does so in the crystalline abstraction of the ideobody, not saying the countless names of those who lived these experiences, and so establishes the pervasiveness of them while giving the white

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  155 audience an accessible way to imagine outside their own privilege and access—​ inequalities that had enabled them to see America’s ongoing racial atrocities as preferable to the changes necessary for a just and equitable society. This may not be life writing in the scenic narrative sense, but it creates in one category of audience a simulated feeling of living a life other than their own, and judging by the letter’s vaunted status, it is powerfully effective. The Personal-​Political in Literary Open Letters

Emily J. Lordi distinguishes between those more Baconian open letters (or Lutheran, if you locate the origins of the form, as Lordi does, with Martin Luther’s 1520 “Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate”) and the “letter-​essay as a personal-​political form,” with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time launching a strong trend in that direction, especially among writers of color (Lordi). The first of the two epistles in Fire, “My Dungeon Shook,” is addressed to Baldwin’s nephew and namesake (also James) and was first published in the magazine The Progressive in 1962, a month before King’s letter. The Progressive had cultivated a largely white readership, and so, as Lordi says, the rhetorical shift of the nominal audience onto the Black child rather than the white readership kept that readership on the outside of the Black “us,” otherizing white readers even as it gave them rare access to the kind of intimacy Baldwin displays toward his nephew in the letter. Written for the occasion of the 100th anniversary of emancipation in America, it uses the irony of that exigence against persistent American apartheid: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon” (Baldwin, Fire 10). In the loving and protective advice Baldwin offers James, he challenges progressive white readers to stop excusing themselves as innocent or ignorant of white supremacy and their responsibility to change the social, political, and economic systems built on it. He writes to James: You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. (Baldwin, Fire 8–​9) In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” he writes: a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those

156  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of white anguish is rooted in the profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror … Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. (Baldwin, Fire 95) Lordi notes that later in Baldwin’s career, he seems to hold even less hope for changes in whiteness, and turns further toward Black self-​preservation, toward loving one another as a matter of survival. Ta-​Nehisi Coates patterned Between the World and Me, his own book-​length open letter to his son, as a direct descendant of Baldwin’s epistles. Kelly Carney writes, In the guise of sharing personal wisdom with a younger man, they pass on communal wisdom to another community … they seek to educate their white readers, giving them the opportunity to listen in on the literary equivalent of “the Talk” black parents are accustomed to having with their children, especially their sons. (Carney 450) Coates writes of “these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, deceitfully, tragically to believe they are white,” that “if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths” (Coates 7). Lamenting, as Baldwin did, how whiteness has only ever defined itself as exclusionary, and therefore whiteness is inherently built on white supremacy—​regardless of what anyone deemed nonwhite might be doing or saying or achieving (notice even the ubiquity of the term “nonwhite”)—​Coates writes, “The power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, white people would cease to exist for want of reasons” (Coates 42). It’s rhetorically tricky for a minority group to address a dominant group without centering and catering to or even pandering to that dominance. Lordi sees such open letters as an effective way around that problem. She writes, “For black writers in particular, working in an embattled political moment, the epistolary form offers a way to address the effects of racial oppression without centering those who perpetuate and benefit from it” (Lordi 445). We could easily have located Laymon’s Heavy here, rather than in memoir, since it is written in the second person, addressed to his mother. Labeled and marketed as a memoir, it does take the form of an epistle while doing the work of memory, recounting growing up with his mother and grandmother and putting his own emerging sense of self in context of their lives. This illustrates that diaries, epistles, and speeches are forms—​styles, shapes, and techniques—​rather than genres or subgenres. In his essay collection How

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  157 to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013), Laymon renders some essays in epistolary forms, but including one essay that is itself a collection of missives exchanged among Laymon and others, titled “Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon.” In it, each man has written his own separate letter to one or more of the others, each one shading in his own separate character and situation and choices, even as they all reach toward one another across their separate and their shared traumas and trauma responses. Laymon writes to Darnell: We black men have suffocated our partners and ourselves for a long, long time. And I’d like it to stop. I want to work on loving you and Mychal and Kai and Marlon, and I want all of you to work on loving me … There is no proof that most of this nation has ever really wanted us to live with dignity and equal access to healthy choices, so we have to take better care of ourselves. We have to change. I am regretful and ready to love. (Laymon, How to 78) Lordi writes, “These writers’ demanding expressions of in-​g roup love—​what Baldwin might have called their acts of mutual witnessing—​help them to name and claim themselves” (Lordi 440). Speeches Embodied and Disembodied Symbols

Speeches are meant to be performed, and so could fall into the category of aural narrative here. But the tendency of speeches to be transcribed and quoted as written forms, along with their occasional, audience-​specific nature, led us to classify them here, rather than in the “Aural Life Writing” chapter. Public oratory and letter forms have been used in all of America’s political, social, and civil rights advocacy efforts. Whether obliquely or explicitly, speeches have an expectation that they should be designed primarily to persuade. While typically vague or even evasive when it comes to personal narrative—​often offering just enough exposition to signal an argument or ideology, raise a subtle or not-​so-​subtle implication, or activate a stereotype—​public speeches are largely performances of ethos that fit into and draw meaning from the speaker’s larger persona. Everything we hear a person say in a speech has something to do with the person we understand them to be, and that persona aligns with and further develops one or another metanarrative of American politics and identity. In national politics, a candidate’s humble birth has long been a rhetorical asset, whether or not it was true. From Abraham Lincoln’s log cabins and split-​ rail fences to Republicans from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush co-​opting the cowboy as their sigil to contemporary candidates scouring their family trees

158  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches for any coal miners and factory workers they can draft honest and hardworking connotations from, many candidates style themselves as identifiable icons of working-​class America. In Andrew Leslie’s analysis of the biographical film about Bill Clinton, The Man from Hope, produced for the 1992 Democratic Convention, he writes, In the thematic plot, the first moment of crisis—​standing up to the alcoholic stepfather—​m irrors the tonality of the campaign in which the youthful Clinton was hammering the older George H. W. Bush: It reprised the conflict of generations and stood as an iconic representation of principled youth opposing an erring if kindly elder. (Leslie 78–​79) Later, in Clinton’s first inaugural address, he told no stories of his life, but carried forward his campaign’s thesis of generational change, defining not just “American renewal” but also the “courage to reinvent America” for the better (especially amid crisis) as a defining American characteristic, invoking the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights movement, cunningly leaving it implicit that he was defining this moment—​h is ascension to the presidency—​a s a moment of reinvention like those others. So even if he wasn’t doing life writing in this speech, he didn’t have to. It was a soliloquy from a character people already knew. Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech on Mar. 18, 2008 addressed race in America and in his ongoing presidential campaign. It was also a response to criticisms of comments made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who pastored at Obama’s Chicago church and volunteered in his campaign. Obama strategically listed autobiographical details to establish his ethos at a central point in a narrative about race in America—​a narrative that did not punish America for its sins of racism but praised it for the hope and possibility he held his own life up to represent. He said: “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas … I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible” (Obama). He also quoted from his first book Dreams of My Father, in which he describes his experiences in that church, situating himself as someone struggling spiritually and practically for a better life in a better world, and using the church and Rev. Wright in particular deftly pivoted into the broader history of legalized discrimination in America and its ongoing consequences, validating anger in Black communities, showing an understanding of white resentment, then (perhaps falsely equivocating the two) pointing to “economic policies that favor the few over the many” as the “real culprits of the middle class squeeze” (Obama). His campaign slogan “Yes, we can,” symbolized hope for the collective, diverse, grassroots action-​begetting-​change he called for in this speech and many others.

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  159 Subsequently, Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” trafficked in the opposite message: undoing change, reversing progress, isolating and capitalizing on white resentment, and fetishizing some idealized past that never existed, but soothing to some in its promise that, regardless of your abilities or how publicly you demonstrate your deficiencies, if you build a sense of self from some higher position on an arbitrary racial hierarchy, you can always feel superior to somebody. Like the rest of the campaign and presidency, it did so obliquely, with plausible deniability, constantly dog-​whistling white supremacy, rather than calling it by name. Tellingly, much of Trump’s rhetoric presented disembodied senses of identity. He made many vague allusions and avoided concrete details. Trafficking in abstraction easily blurs the line between propaganda and reality, and so beliefs themselves—​not the narratives or the data that provide evidence for them—​pass around through cultural replication. When such an abstraction becomes viral, it can become destructive. In a speech during a Washington, D.C., rally to encourage the failed coup by a faction of the Republican Party on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” (Naylor). His legal defense claimed this was metaphorical, but the facts that he knew many in the crowd were armed, that he had invited them there, that he then immediately directed the mob to the Capitol building where a joint session of congress was certifying Trump’s election loss, and that Trump encouraged them and did not move to intervene in any way for 187 minutes when the mob attacked the Capitol suggest the fight he had in mind was literal. His quick switch of pronouns is interesting here. First, he used “we,” to define a shared group identity as built around a value of fighting to claim and maintain this right-​w ing minority’s cultural and political dominance over other groups. Then, he switched to the collective second person “you” to instruct them to fight in this particular moment or else lose that self-​defining sense of dominance—​a ll but calling it white supremacy, whose abstract mythology maintains that anything less than total white dominance is injustice, effrontery, evidence of their long beleaguered status of their rights of supremacy being denied while simultaneously denying the rights of others. Actually beleaguered populations of Americans might use parallel rhetorical techniques, but those are never far away from concrete examples. Like slogans, gestures can evolve virally through cultural replication. The slogan “Hands up, don’t shoot” arose in response to the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and within the context of many other police killings of unarmed Black Americans. Leslie notes that the “hands up” gesture, even without the slogan, also became a culturally replicated piece of rhetoric symbolizing the larger protests and events that caused them. He writes: While not an argument, it visually frames a motif, a storyline that becomes the basis for making arguments about justice, authority, and resistance. It is

160  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches part of a story, abstracted and unelaborated, but clear and powerful nonetheless. It too offers “good reasons” [a la Walter Fisher] for action. (Leslie 79) Black Lives Matter protests, which reached a crescendo during the summer of 2020, regularly emphasized victims’ names. Some protest signs only featured names like George Floyd (then the most recent and vivid case that triggered a nationwide wave of protests), Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin, and so many others. The names alone were enough because each story had been so prominently told and contextualized within the narrative of police brutality against Black Americans. Similarly, the “hands up” gesture was enough to evoke the entire mass of concrete evidence that gave rise to it. Because it is an abstraction from a recent concrete event, and a reference to a longstanding crisis thoroughly articulated throughout public discourse, such a gesture of protest symbolizes specific stories actively being told and readily at hand. “Make America Great Again,” on the other hand, is an abstraction with no concrete, nonfictional referent, only a vague sense of nostalgic myth, a fear of white dominance being anything less than total. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt defined the role of propaganda in totalitarian movements, positing that shared narratives connect the self to the society and work to constitute a body politic. She argued that such rhetorical abstractions can function to separate people from reality, and ultimately from themselves in an existential loneliness, creating people who cannot negotiate reality themselves, whom a totalitarian movement can then welcome and give new purpose and definition by supplying some shared, organizing narrative that, among other things, privileges loyalty to the totalitarian authority despite any empirical evidence counter to that narrative. The difference between Trump’s abstractions and those of King and Black Lives Matter is the extent to which the abstraction is connected to a concrete referent. An abstraction can symbolize reality, or it can be a sleigh-​of-​hand, substituting a fiction for reality. And so, a mob can attack democracy while believing it is defending democracy. In Franklin Roosevelt’s Dec. 8, 1941 speech to a joint session of congress (and by extension the American public) following Japan’s coordinated attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and numerous other sites throughout the South Pacific the day before, he emphasized the “premeditated … unprovoked and dastardly … character” of the attacks. He implied that the attacks arose from a matter of “character,” rather than anything more concrete and strategic economically, politically, or militarily. In contrast, he characterized America as “righteous,” acting only in self-​defense. He did not ask congress to declare war, but to recognize that “a state of war [already] existed” (Roosevelt). He did not mention the ongoing war in Europe or Japan’s allies there. In defining the attacks as a matter of “dastardly” and deceptive character, Roosevelt established

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  161 a logic that would extend those judgments against the Japanese government and military to Japanese Americans, and it is the entire (and unfounded) assumption on which Executive Order 9066—​removing Japanese Americans to internment camps—​was based. Roosevelt struggled with how to appeal to mainland Americans’ nationalism and isolationism following World War I, since the places that were attacked were culturally seen as foreign, even though many were US territories. In Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire (2019), he observes that Roosevelt described the Pearl Harbor attack (tellingly, this is the name by which Americans now identify the entire event) as an attack on “the American island of Oahu,” while denying Guam and the Philippines the adjective “American,” though they were all US territories at the time. Immerwahr suggests it’s likely that, since Hawaii was considerably closer and whiter that the Philippines, it was easier to make the case for self-​defense using Hawaii to an American public that falsely but firmly assumed its body politic only comprised mainland white people. A demagogue panders to their audience’s prejudices using the sort of abstractions and distortions Arendt warned against. Often, they deploy collective pronouns to compose a group identity and invite their listeners to adopt it—​excluding specific groups from that identity and even from humanity. But, again, without much narrative foundation of specific history or lived experience, which would limit the storytelling possibilities to things with a basis in empirical reality. This is why it is so important for such a propagandist to either ignore concrete, evidentiary history or outright fictionalize it to suit the myth. Speeches of Social Reform

For social reformers working to lead society in the opposite direction from authoritarianism, fascism, and oligarchy, a persona rooted in lived experience (invented ethos rooted in situated ethos) matters a great deal. Born Isabella Van Wagner in New York State in approximately 1797, Sojourner Truth, as she renamed herself in 1843, was a former slave, a sexual assault victim, and a woman, all of which led resistant audiences to doubt her testimonies and placed such emphasis for her on needing to be believed that she chose Truth as her last name. Neil A. Patten writes, Truth’s legacy lies in her words, yet only a very limited number of her extemporaneous speeches were transcribed by witnesses. This dearth of artifacts has contributed to the underestimation of Truth’s position as one of the most unrelenting of black social reformers. (Patten 2) Nell Irvin Painter, who authored a full-​length biography of Truth subtitled “A Life, A Symbol,” writes:

162  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches Truth created a persona that filled a need in American political culture … The image of the mature Sojourner Truth, former slave and emblematic black feminist abolitionist, works metonymically as the black woman in American history … Truth is appreciated as straight talking, authentic, unsentimental. She appears to be natural and spontaneous, and in the best tradition of famous Americans, she symbolizes a message worth noting. Truth’s persona demands that women who had been enslaved and whose children had been sold be included in the categories of “woman” and “the Negro.” (Painter 464) Of her speeches that did get transcribed, Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 is the most famous and the most quoted: And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—​when I could get it—​and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman … If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? (Truth) Painter distinguishes between the “metonymic Sojourner Truth” and the biographical one. As a symbol, Truth would seem to have acquired her knowledge in a figurative enslavement, which occurred in a no-​t ime and a no-​place located in an abstraction of the antebellum South, as opposed to the Hudson River valley of New York, where Isabella was actually enslaved. (Painter 464) What some deemed as the “rude eloquence” that characterized Truth’s style and persona fit with this idea of the emblematic Truth as archetypal slave without the need of more specific context (Patten 2). Painter sees that Truth’s enduring fame is a result of the shrewdly created and marketed persona of “the charismatic woman who had been a slave,” which, as Truth said, was “her selling the shadow to support her substance” (Painter 470). Beyond the physical spaces where people could see and hear Truth for themselves, others had a large hand in shaping that symbolic persona further. Versions of Truth’s persona were described by contemporary abolitionists and women’s suffragists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Dana Gage, each of whom

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  163 characterized her differently. “[W]‌h ile Stowe drew Truth as a quaint, minstrel-​ like, nineteenth century Negro, Gage made her into a tough-​m inded, feminist emblem by stressing Truth’s strength and the clash of conventions of race and gender” (Painter 479). It was Gage who transcribed and published Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. As different scribes recorded different versions of the same speeches, it may well be others’ uses of Truth, more than her own verifiable words and actions, that ultimately constitute the ethos we have of her today. As Painter says, Truth, like many historical figures, is defined by words she may not have spoken. Like other invented greats, Truth is consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said. It is no accident that other people writing well after the fact made up what we see as most meaningful about each of those greats. (Painter 480–​481) Much is said about how representation matters, professionally, culturally, and politically, not only so that marginalized Americans can see people from their own identity groups in positions of respect, power, and responsibility, but also to challenge the myths and stereotypes deployed against them. This was Harvey Milk’s argument in “The Hope Speech.” It had become his stump speech, given on many occasions, and so several versions of it still circulate as recordings and transcripts. Possibly the most iconic was the one in recognition of California Gay Freedom Day, which he gave on Jun. 25, 1978 on the steps of Sand Francisco City Hall. “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you …” he opened, jokingly alluding to a malicious myth that many fearful Americans carried about gay men, saying the time has come when the gay community must not be judged for our criminals and our myths. Like every other group, we must be judged by our leaders and by those who are themselves gay, those who are visible. (Milk) He argued that it was the invisibility of living closeted that kept gay people from being human in the public imagination, without family or friends or history or the important positions gay people already held throughout American life. Even non-​g ay officials who were “friends” of the gay community were insufficient, he argued, because they did not carry the lived experience, and so could not adequately represent those who did, especially against those hostile to them. Milk spoke about coming out publicly as gay in just such hostility and loneliness:

164  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches I will never forget what it was like coming out and having nobody to look up toward. I remember the lack of hope … I can’t forget the looks on faces of people who have lost hope … I use the word “I” because I am proud. I stand here tonight in front of my gay sisters, brothers and friends, because I’m proud of you. I think it’s time that we have many legislators who are gay and proud of that fact and do not have to remain in the closet. (Milk) Milk understood the responsibility of being an embodied symbol of that hope. He also understood the risks, just as every gay person in America did, constantly reading about or hearing about or personally experiencing anti-​g ay violence and murder throughout the nation. Later in the speech, he described an anti-​g ay murder in San Francisco three days before: that night I walked among the sad and the frustrated at City Hall in San Francisco, and later that night, as they lit candles on Castro Street and stood in silence, reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope. These were strong people whose faces I knew from the shop, the streets, meetings, and people who I never saw before but I knew. They were strong, but even they needed hope. (Milk) In that same City Hall, Milk was shot and killed alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone by former city Supervisor Dan White on Nov. 27, 1978, just five months after he gave the above speech. Milk, like King and so many others, became a civil rights martyr. Their status as leaders, as insider members of oppressed groups, as individuals who worked daily in activism and public policy, and as people who attained embodied symbolic value for their respective communities leads us to call their murders assassinations. Their killers weren’t only trying to kill these individuals, but to kill the body politic—​the shared narrative—​they represented, that they were a product of, that they carried in their literal bodies. As embodied symbols—​and as public speakers—​they function as characters in that shared narrative, their lived examples offering to their audiences purposeful things to do and “good reasons”—​communal reasons—​to do them. Indigenous American Oratory

Through centuries of European settler colonialism, then Indigenous removal and resistance in the nineteenth century, the written and oral entreaties Indigenous American tribes made to one another, to their own members, and to the US settlers and government document Indigenous life through the atrocities of

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  165 these times. Often today, the canon of Indigenous American oratory through the early twentieth century demonstrates how determined oppressors will ultimately be unswayed by the earnest eloquence of the oppressed. Yet Euro-​ American praise of Indigenous rhetoric has run parallel to this protracted genocide for its entire history. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams dated Jun. 12, 1812, wrote I knew much the great Outassetè the warrior and orator of the Cherokees … his sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered. ( Jefferson 4) Jefferson wrote admiringly of Indigenous American oratory and cited this eloquence as evidence of their “natural genius,” locating them just beneath white people in his own racist hierarchy, but with potential to advance in what he assumed was a linear progress of civilization, routinely speaking of and to them paternalistically, as if they were children in need of a proper upbringing from “savagery” to European-​style “civilization.” In addition to their own oral customs, some tribes also mastered the style and forms of European rhetoric to demonstrate their equal capacities to participate in white discourse while still advocating to preserve their own cultures. Claudia B. Haake writes, “Seneca and Cherokee authors drew on the ‘civilized’ skill of writing to defend some elements of their lives that would have been considered ‘uncivilized’ by their correspondents within the federal government.” (Haake 45). The Cherokee could not have assimilated more thoroughly, building their own governance, adopting Christianity and the English language, and otherwise going to great length to change in the ways Euro-​A merican hegemony had insisted upon. But after Europeans discovered gold on Cherokee lands in lower Appalachia in 1828, treaties were swiftly nullified and some of the most “Americanized” Indigenous peoples of the era (five “civilized” tribes, also including the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw) were relocated to reservations farther west between 1830 and 1850, a journey that killed many, known as “The Trail of Tears.” While rhetorical skill elicited such paternalistic admiration in Jefferson, it did not move the American government to recognize equal humanity. As Indigenous American Removal progressed, there were many speeches from many tribal leaders—​peace speeches, war speeches, surrender speeches. Thomas Guthrie argues that, rather than seeming like a contradiction, Euro-​A merican praise of Indigenous American oratory was part of the larger metanarrative white Americans carried, which characterized Indigenous peoples as “noble savages” set on an arc of tragic but inevitable and justified defeat. And so, Indigenous American speakers were rhetorically framed by the European settlers such

166  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches that the meanings of whatever they would say were largely predetermined, no matter what they actually said. Guthrie describes the story white Americans would have carried as one of the tragic but inevitable fall of the continent’s Indigenous peoples, and that not only their practical actions, but the “primitive eloquence” of their pleas, the rhetorical challenges, the lamentations, the surrenders, the assimilations, the relocations, and the exterminations were all in the script. As Guthrie says, “content was subordinated to context” (Guthrie 524–​526). In this context, Jefferson’s comment about being impressed by Outassetè’s speech despite “not understanding a word he uttered” reveals its more dangerous implications. Guthrie notes the descriptions observers wrote of figures like Hin-​m ah-​too-​ yah-​lat-​kekt, popularly known as Chief Joseph, as virile, dignified, manly, and powerful, particularly at the time of his surrender in 1877. The language across many different white authors, describing this moment and quoting him saying “I shall fight no more forever,” echoes the staged, romantic portrait photographs of Edward S. Curtis, exoticizing the subject at the expense of their humanity. Guthrie writes, “Apprehending the Indian as a spectacle rather than a speaker, by gazing rather than listening, effectively silences him … The interpretation of Indian speech precedes the speech itself ” (Guthrie 526). He observes that it is after such a surrender or defeat that more pitiable descriptions dominate, but it is in the exact moment of surrender or defeat that such an Indigenous American figure is rendered by white American writers as existing at the height—​indeed, the purpose—​of their existence: “Surrender represents the climax of self hood, and after surrender the Indian, no longer a warrior, ceases to be an Indian altogether” (Guthrie 528). By mythologizing such ceremonial moments as Chief Joseph’s surrender—​ scripting Indigenous Americans as nobly speaking their own elegies regardless of what they may have actually said—​Guthrie says white Americans look away from the actual civilization-​level damage and the individual suffering they brought to the continent’s Indigenous peoples: Assimilation, imposed by whites but naturalized as inevitable and just, became the burden of the Indian and exonerated whites from the guilt of genocidal campaigns … The idea of Indians’ not only fighting, but fighting for cultural survival, proved doubly irresistible for whites when combined with the dramatic irony of the Indians’ inevitable defeat. (Guthrie 529–​530) The Euro-​A merican script dictated that Indians were supposed to fight in self-​defense, and then they were supposed to lose. The romantic dignity white people used to describe moments of surrender and defeat sound a lot like the romance of a hunter admiring the virility of the trophy animal he’s killed. No matter what happened or which words were said, this was the metanarrative.

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  167 White retellings of surrenders like Chief Joseph’s were acts of rhetorical taxidermy. Euro-​A mericans’ reception of Indigenous oratory was also a huge gaslighting campaign. By aestheticizing speeches that were actually designed to be political instruments, indeed, classifying them as art rather than as legal arguments, Guthrie contends, white political listeners could avoid taking Indigenous claims seriously. What was a logical claim to sovereignty was dismissed through white admiration of those arguments as art. He writes, “few Euro-​A mericans recognized that Nimiipuu spiritual beliefs about the relationship between humans and land informed a real political understanding of territory. Instead, they spurned what Indians had to say in negotiations about their territorial rights as figurative and irrelevant” (Guthrie 536). Noting Rousseau and other’s assumptions about metaphor and concrete language being more primitive and abstractions more civilized, Guthrie sees much of the praise of Indigenous oratory focusing on its “naturalness,” its economy, its concreteness, and the ways in which the use of metaphor could convey emotion (Guthrie 521–​524). Considering the work of George Orwell and Benjamin Lee Whorf, abstraction is not an indication of higher order thinking (or civilization) as many Euro-​A mericans assumed from the Enlightenment forward. Orwell was critical and suspicious of anyone who used abstract language to cover a harsh reality. The risk of overabstraction is not only propaganda, but also self-​ delusion. The more abstract you are, the less likely you are to fully realize what you’re doing, which is a valuable critique of settler-​European ideas that equated higher order civilization with abstract language. By these equations, the more “civilized” you are, the more abstract your language, and the less likely you are to realize, let alone admit, the true nature of your actions. It’s debatable the degree to which Indigenous American political speeches have been heard and taken seriously by white America over the centuries, but Indigenous communities still exist throughout the US and still use language, narrative, and rhetoric as tools of activism, of social and environmental justice. Much more recently, Sioux tribal members and allies from across the nation held encamped protests in 2016–​2017 to challenge the expansion of the Dakota Access [oil] Pipeline (DAPL) through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. There were many speeches throughout the protests, both from tribal members and from visiting allies. Some were shown and still circulate in videos online, like the widely shared one from Bishop Michael Curry in September 2016. Digital platforms proved powerful and accessible rhetorical tools to rally and maintain support, to assert territorial sovereignty and cultural identity, and to present a variety of speech situations that each contribute in ways that the more singular “headline act” speech cannot. But there are also, on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s website, videos of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chair Janet Alkire and Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance Chair Doug Crow Ghost speaking at a small conference table in

168  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches Washington, D.C., to the National Resource Defense Council (Dakota Water Wars). Seldom-​seen moments like this bring viewers to the intimacy—​and at times frustrating tedium—​of the meeting table, showing that not all political activism involves the also-​necessary spectacle of mass public gatherings. The nonprofit waterprotectorscommunity.org hosts a series of recorded oral history interviews with activists involved throughout the DAPL standoff. By including smaller segments from a collection of lesser-​k nown individuals, the single stories coalesce into something much more communal, which matches the arguments about water protection that were a major part of the rationale for DAPL resistance. Attorney and activist Tara Houska Zhaabowekwe has a TED Talk in which she talks about the Standing Rock DAPL protests in contexts of the larger, very longstanding struggle for Indigenous peoples to be seen and taken seriously. She says: We face this constant barrage of unteaching the accepted narrative. 87 percent of references in textbooks, children’s textbooks, to Indigenous Americans are pre-​1900s. Only half of the US states mention more than a single tribe, and just four states mention the boarding-​school era, the era that was responsible for my grandmother and her brothers and sisters having their language and culture beaten out of them. When you aren’t viewed as real people, it’s a lot easier to run over your rights. (Houska) She describes the systemic and institutionalized forms of the same assumptions that underpinned white thought and actions about Indigenous peoples throughout US history. She speaks of people fighting for cultural survival and practical things allies can do, like asking elected representatives to fulfill treaty obligations. She builds from her insider/​ambassador role to tell life stories, not just cynically to a political purpose, but to recast an otherwise cynical understanding of politics as made up of lives like the ones these stories show—​lives most voting Americans never hear of. Oral Histories and Crowdsourcing

Exposure to other lives is a powerful political thing. It is a practice of democracy. Representation in story may not directly equate to political representation, but it can help convince those who are counted that everyone should be counted. Many digital oral history projects invite members of the audience to contribute, in addition to any solicited artists, telling their own stories about whatever the organizing principle may be. It is a very emergent and democratic manifestation of life writing. Viral hashtag campaigns like #MeToo comprised many written social media posts, but people also chose to contribute videos of themselves telling their experiences with sexual harassment, assault, and abuse.

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  169 In social media, algorithms do the curating. In smaller crowdsourcing projects, there may be an editor or panel of people selecting and arranging the stories. The American Writers Museum in Chicago’s My America exhibit curates a collection of first-​ person life stories focused on immigrant and refugee experiences in the US, including a physical installation and a virtual exhibit publicly available at americanwritersmuseum.org. It features short videos of established writers telling their stories as members of these identities and communities, speaking directly to the camera in a style similar to the interviews done in a documentary film. But without a director’s questions, overarching narrative, or contextualizing information, the exhibit is more like oral histories recorded in video, organized thematically around sub-​topics like “Language,” “Othering,” “Community,” “Duality,” “Object Stories,” and “What is ‘American?” These are the topics you’d expect from a focus on these identities. Yet, since the contributors are accomplished writers working across all genres, they also speak about their writing craft and process, which are informed by their immigrant identities and liminal positions within American society. In their writing and in speech-​stories like these, they claim their own experience and their rightful membership within the nation that hosted those experiences. Sometimes life stories spoken verbally are gathered for more focused portraits of events, as with survivors of violence like mass shootings, genocides, the 9/​11 attacks, or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Each one could be used to lament, to celebrate, to vilify, or to otherwise persuade an audience to use that history toward a particular purpose. Other times, such life stories are used for much more pointed purposes. In televised congressional hearings, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford narrated her sexual abuse by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Anita Hill narrated her sexual harassment by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War hosted a three-​d ay event where more than 100 veterans testified about their role in war crimes committed by the US and its allies during the war, calling the morality of both US tactics and the war itself publicly into question. Called “the Winter Soldier Investigation,” it was filmed and released as a documentary the following year. The film’s transcript, which is mostly made up of those stories, was then read into the congressional record by Senator Mark Hatfield. TED Talks

Though they typically have a more pedagogical or inspirational purpose, TED Talks often use life writing as part of their standard formula. It is a carefully branded and marketed version of a public lecture, but it has a significant influence in anthologizing speakers and storytellers in accessible ways. Endless lectures from all sorts of people on all sorts of topic abound across the internet, of course, but TED has become influential enough in the current cultural

170  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches moment that its talks are the common baseline other public, general interest video-​lectures are measured against. Just as in the days of public concert-​ style lectures, artists, researchers, explorers, and others from some profession or niche experience tell stories as evidence from which their ideas arise, and do so for a lay audience. That’s how a personal essay works. Sometimes it’s just an anecdote to kick off a research narrative (“I saw X, and that got me thinking … Y?”). Other times, the storytelling is a more major component of the talk. The poet Chris Smith’s TED Talk “How to raise a Black Son in America” tells a story of playing with water guns in a hotel parking lot at night with his white friends. In context of so many police shootings, even at the time of the talk in 2015, the audience can already see where this is headed when his father comes out and drags him home. He tells 12-​year-​old Smith that he can’t do what his white friends can do. That this happened is less the focus than on the tension Smith sees between a father wanting to keep his son safe from other people’s implicit racial biases that might lead him to be killed and wanting his son to have full citizenship just like his white friends. However, he struggles with addressing this problem (or maybe implies that we all do) because if that is the only story that defines Black sons, it limits life to only that. He says: we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren’t meant for the backside of a bullet, but for flying kites and jumping rope … We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands in class, and not just to signal surrender, and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we aren’t worthy of this world … I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn’t mistaken for anything other than a toy. (Smith) Taiye Selasi’s TED Talk “Don’t ask me where I’m from; ask me where I’m a local” uses her own experience living in multiple countries to complicate the notion of focusing on nationality when defining individual people. She argues that she does not have a relationship with any given nation as a whole, but that she has experience in specific locations within them. Because nationality alone seems to her a poor representation of human experience, she does not call herself “multinational,” but “multilocal” (Selasi). Calling for us to shift our focus more to the localities “where real life occurs,” she argues that the language of nationality can activate stereotypes, while the language of locality allows for a recognition of distinctly individual humanity. She examines how she’s been variously introduced as being from America, Ghana, or Britain and doesn’t recognize herself in those descriptions as she does in Brookline, New York, London, or Accra. She offers a writing exercise, asking listeners to list three categories of things that shape their daily and weekly experiences: Relationships, Rituals, and Restrictions. Relationships, in this

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  171 model, are things she calls home. Home is with the people—​both the intimate and the loosely connected—​whose presence is a regular feature of life. Rituals include everything from formal cultural ceremonies to the daily rituals like making coffee and include the specific localities where they occur. Restrictions describe what prevents a person from being in a certain place or living as they would otherwise: racism, homophobia, economic and political circumstances—​ things that limit one’s life within a particular locality. Selasi calls for the language of locality because the more detailed and individualized a character is, the more an audience can identify and empathize with them. The abstract general language of nationality trades in stereotypes and absolutes, abstracting (and therefore reducing) American identity to “The American” rather than acknowledging the vast complexity of identities and experiences that constitute it. Speeches offer their own affordances of audiovisual performativity in addition to the actual language used in the composition. Selasi speaking with an American accent, for example, as well as her body posture, hand gestures, skin color, wardrobe, and more are all also rhetorical features in addition to the words themselves. Speeches are a performance art. Christine Sun Kim’s TED Talk “The Enchanting Music of Sign Language” is given entirely in American Sign Language with captions and a verbal interpreter. That alone reminds a non-​ASL-​comprehending audience member that, at least at the moment, they live with the disability of not knowing ASL. Presumably abled viewers are located in the culturally disadvantaged position of needing noticeable accommodations in order to understand the talk—​and they are readily provided. As she describes experiences of being Deaf in a very hearing-​normative culture and environment of sounds, she also takes time to teach the audience a few ASL signs and explains some of ASL’s grammatical conventions (e.g. movement is analogous to sound), serving as a cultural guide for an outsider audience, and collapsing the distance between them. It is an invitation to empathy and identification, rather than an assertion that the abled audience must remain forever foreign among the Deaf. Kim, a Deaf sound artist who mostly uses drawing, video, and her own performance, describes her journey into using art to talk about how sound is experienced in society, and how her outsider status forced her to consider sound and sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does … I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn’t a part of my life … As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it’s as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them. (Kim) Allowing the audience to participate in her own changes in how she thought of deafness and sound, Kim makes it okay for the audience to change likewise and reimagine their relationship to sound, deafness, and Deaf people. With her

172  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches mini-​lesson in ASL, and her positioning of herself as a gracious cultural ambassador from Deaf people to a hearing audience, she turns her personal stories into an explicit act of diplomacy. Conclusion Whether gentle or forceful, abstract or concrete, urging us toward something or away from something else, speeches tend to be a fairly polemic category, even the ones that traffic in life writing. Speeches may be more explicit in doing this than other forms of life writing, but all forms of life writing are not just acts of description, but also acts of self and communal creation. It is the power of the individual to claim their own citizenship in the body politic, to contribute to the definition of the body politic, and to thereby move the body politic to action. Works Cited Adams, Abigail. “Abigail Adams’ Letters of March 31 and May 7, 1776.” Abigail Adams’ Letters of March 31 & May 7, 1776, Aug. 2017, p. 1. EBSCOhost. https://​sea ​rch-​ ebscoh​o st- ​com.ezp​r oxy ​s uf.f lo.org/ ​login.aspx?dir​e ct=​t rue&db=​a9h&AN=​21212​ 214&site=​ehost-​l ive Anderson, Jourdon. “To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.” The Freedmen’s Book, edited by Lydia Maria Child. Ticknor and Fields, Boston 1865, retrieved from Slavery & Abolition in the U.S.: Selected Publications of the 1800s, Dickinson College Archives. http://​deila.dickin​son.edu/​slav​erya​ndab​ olit​ion/​t itle/​0162.html Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York, Vintage International, 1993. Brown, Sally and Clare L. Taylor. Plath [married name Hughes], Sylvia. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 1 Sept. 2017. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ ref:odnb/​37855 Carney, Kelly Walter. “Brother Outsider: James Baldwin, Ta-​Nehisi Coates, and Exile Literature.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 448–​57. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​ sta​ble/​26557​0 05 “Clara Breed Collection.” Japanese American National Museum. https://​janm.emus​ eum.com/​g ro​ups/​clara-​breed-​col ​lect ​ion/​resu ​lts Coates, Ta-​Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York, Spiegel & Grau/​R andom House, 2015. Comi, Dana. “The Law-​ Abiding Citizen as Ideobody.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 8, no. 2, 16 Jul. 2020. www.pres​entt​ense​jour ​nal.org/​vol​u me-​ 8/​the-​law-​abid​i ng-​citi​zen-​a s-​ideob​ody-​2/​ Crane, Elaine Forman. “Political Dialogue and the Spring of Abigail’s Discontent.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, 1999, pp. 745–​74. JSTOR. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​2674​234 “Dakota Water Wars Chapter 7: Delegation to Washington” 11 Aug. 2022. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. www.stand​i ngr​ock.org/​2022/​08/​11/​5329/​ Enniss, Stephen. “Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Myth of Textual Betrayal.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 101, no. 1, 2007, pp. 63–​71. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​24293​969

Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches  173 Franklin, Anthony David. “ ‘Of him who has carried it on the tented field’: William P. Woodlin’s Diary as Representation of Shifting Racial Statuses in Civil War Era America.” Diary as Literature: Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America, edited by Angela R. Hooks. Wilmington, Vernon Art and Science Inc., 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://​ebook​cent​r al.proqu​e st.com/​l ib/​suff​olk/​det​a il.act ​ion?docID=​ 5986​944 Greathouse, Corey D. “Using Personal Diaries as a Site for Reconstructing African American History.” Diary as Literature: Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America, edited by Angela R. Hooks, Wilmington, Vernon Art and Science Inc., 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​l ib/​suff​olk/​det​a il.act​ ion?docID=​5986​944 Guthrie, Thomas H. “Good Words: Chief Joseph and the Production of Indian Speech(es), Texts, and Subjects.” Ethnohistory, vol. 54, no. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 509–​ 46. EBSCOhost. https://​doi-​org.ezp​roxy​suf.flo.org/​10.1215/​0 0141​801-​2007- ​0 05 Haake, Claudia B. “Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy: Arguments against Removal in Cherokee and Seneca Letters to the Federal Government.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 31–​51. JSTOR. https://​doi. org/​10.5749/​natiin​d ist​udj.4.2.0031 Houska, Tara. “The Standing Rock Resistance and Our Fight for Indigenous Rights.” TEDWomen, 2017. www.ted.com/​t alks/​t ara_​houska_​the_​standing_​rock_​resistance_ ​a nd_​our_ ​figh​t _ ​fo​r_ ​i n​d ige​nous ​_ ​r ig​hts/​t ra​n scr ​ipt?langu​age=​en Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams. -​06-​12, 1812. Manuscript/​M ixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress 28 Jul. 2022. www.loc.gov/​item/​ mtjbi​b021​130/​ Kim, Christine Sun. “The Enchanting Music of Sign Language.” ted.com, 2015. www. ted.com/​t alks/​christine_ ​sun_ ​k im_ ​t he_ ​enchan​t ing ​_ ​mus​ic_ ​o​f _ ​s i​g n_ ​l ​a ngu ​a ge/​t ra​ nscr ​ipt?langu​age=​en King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” TCS Education System –​ Pacific Oaks College, JSTOR. https://​jstor.org/​sta​ble/​commun ​ity.31958​050 Laymon, Kiese. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Chicago, Bolden/​ Agate, 2013. Leslie, Andrew. “How Stories Argue: The Deep Roots of Storytelling in Political Rhetoric.” Storytelling, Self, Society, vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, pp. 66–​84. JSTOR. https://​ doi.org/​10.13110/​stors​elfs​oci.11.1.0066 Lordi, Emily J. “Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-​ Nehisi Coates and His Peers.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 434–​47. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​26557​0 04 Manguso, Sarah. Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2015. Michaelsen, Scott. “Narrative and Class in a Culture of Consumption: The Significance of Stories in Sarah Kemble …” College Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, June 1994, p. 33. EBSCOhost. https://​sea​rch-​ebscoh​ost-​com.ezp​roxy​suf.flo.org/​login.aspx?dir​ect=​ true&db=​a9h&AN=​950​3102​977&site=​ehost-​l ive Milk, Harvey. “Transcript: Hear Harvey Milk’s The Hope Speech.” MFA Boston. www. mfa.org/​exhi​biti​ons/​a ma ​l ia-​pica/​t ra​n scr ​ipt-​har ​vey-​m ilks-​the-​hope-​spe​ech Norton, Mary Beth. “Dear Abby.” The New York Times Book Review, 4 Nov. 2007, p. 28(L). Gale Literature Resource Center. link.gale.com/​apps/​doc/​A170652618/​ LitRC?u=​m lin_ ​b_ ​suffuniv&sid=​bookmark-​LitRC&xid=​037219ef

174  Diaries, Epistles, and Speeches Obama, Barack. “Transcript: Barack Obama’s Speech on Race.” NPR, 18 Mar. 2008. www.npr.org/​templa​tes/​story/​story.php?stor ​yId=​88478​467 O’Donovan, Caroline. “Diaries, the Original Social Media: How Our Obsession with Documenting (and sharing) Our Own Lives is Nothing New.” NiemanLab, 9 May 2013. www.nieman​lab.org/​2013/​05/​d iar​ies-​the-​origi​nal-​soc​ial-​media-​how-​our-​ obsess​ion-​w ith-​docu​ment​i ng-​a nd-​shar​i ng-​our-​own-​l ives-​is-​noth​i ng-​new/​ Ozick, Cynthia. “Smoke and Fire.” The Yale Review, vol. 89, no. 4, Oct. 2001, pp. 99–​ 102. https://​doi-​org.ezp​roxy​suf.flo.org/​10.1111/​0 044- ​0124.00557 Painter, Nell Irvin. “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known.” The Journal of American History, vol. 81, no. 2, 1994, pp. 461–​92. JSTOR. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​2081​168 “Paper Notebooks Market Size to Grow by USD 16.55 Billion.” PRNewswire. 4 July 2022. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/paper-notebooks-market-sizeto-grow-by-usd-16 -55-billion-by-application-and-geography-forecast-andanalysis-2021-2025-301579990.html Patten, Neil A. “The Nineteenth Century Black Woman As Social Reformer: The ‘New’ Speeches of Sojourner Truth.” Negro History Bulletin, vol. 49, no. 1, 1986, pp. 2–​5. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​4 4176​646 Podnieks, Elizabeth, et al. Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin, edited by Elizabeth Podnieks. Montreal, McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://​ebook​cent ​ral. proqu​est.com/​l ib/​suff​olk/​det​a il.act​ion?docID=​3330​951 Roosevelt, Franklin D. Speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York Transcript. 1941. Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/​item/​a fcca ​l000​483/​ Saint-​Aubin, Arthur F. “ ‘A Pool of Rrazor Blades and Sperm’: A Phantasy of White, Heterosexual Masculinity in Kurt Cobain’s Journals.” European Journal of American Culture, vol. 32, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 5–​23. EBSCOhost. https://​doi-​org.ezp​roxy​suf. flo.org/​10.1386/​ejac.32.1.5_​1 Selasi, Taiye. “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m from, Ask Me Where I’m a Local.” ted.com, 2014. Accessed 15 Aug. 2022. www.ted.com/​t alks/​t aiye_ ​selasi_​don_​t _ ​a sk_​where_​ i_​m​_​f ro​m _​a s​k _​wh​ere_​i _​m _​a _​lo​cal/​t ra​n scr​ipt?langu​age=​en Smith, Michael Denzel. “The Truth about ‘The Arc of the Moral Universe.” HuffPost, 18 Jan. 2018. www.huffp​ost.com/​entry/​opin ​ion-​smith-​obama-​k ing ​_ ​n _ ​5​a 590​3e0e​ 4b04​f 3c5​5a25​2a4 Stern, Julia. “To Relish and to Spew: Disgust as Cultural Critique in the Journal of Madam Knight.” Legacy, vol. 14, no. 1, 1997, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1-​12. Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I A Woman,” retrieved from “Sojourner Truth.” nps.gov. www. nps.gov/​wori/​learn/​h is​t ory​c ult​u re/​sojour ​ner-​t ruth.htm#:~:text=​At%20the%201​ 851%20Wo​men’s%20Rig​hts,and%20af​ter%20the%20Ci​v il%20War Whitehead, Karsonya Wise. Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​l ib/​suff​olk/​det​a il.act ​ion?docID=​ 2054​833 Wood, Jessica L. “Pained Expression: Metaphors of Sickness and Signs of ‘authenticity’ in Kurt Cobain’s ‘Journals.’ ” Popular Music, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, pp. 331–​49. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​23359​907

6 Aural Narratives Podcasts and Story Slams

While many genres of life writing hook their audiences with the dramatization of real events and the intimacy of first-​person narration and personal perspective, aural genres may elicit some of the deepest engagement and empathy from their audiences. This chapter is primarily concerned with contemporary forms of American aural storytelling whose popularity is at least partly owed to digital technology. Research into the effects of the human voice on empathic response is also compelling and reaches back through American history. The sound of a voice—​particularly when experienced through the earbuds, headphones, tablets, and smartphones that create what media specialist Mia Lindgren calls a “personalized listening space”—​taps something primal within us that reaches for connection (Lindgren 24). These genres have flourished in an age of technological advancement and streaming services and have given millions of Americans an intimate glimpse into other people’s lives and struggles. This American Life and the Beginning of American Podcasts On Nov. 17, 1995, Chicago public radio (WBEZ) launched a new weekly storytelling program on a shoestring budget that would go on to national syndication, becoming the blueprint for a new genre that has distinguished itself from broadcast radio through its episodic delivery and asynchronous consumption. Originally called Your Radio Playhouse, the show changed its name to This American Life in 1996, and its host, Ira Glass—​a veteran National Public Radio reporter—​would come to define American podcast aesthetics of sound, narration, and didacticism. “One great thing about starting a new show,” Glass says at the start of TAL’s inaugural episode, “is utter anonymity. Nobody knows what to expect from you … [the show] is stretching in front of us with a perfect future yet to be fulfilled” (“New Beginnings”). This characterization of a show in its infancy positions Glass as its hopeful parent, feeling his way through the first episode with a charming clumsiness that humanized the radio journalist into an iconic

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-7

176  Aural Narratives host whose nerdiness and distinct vocal cadence produced a personal brand and audience loyalty akin to Johnny Carson or Jon Stewart. The format was largely present in its first episodes. Weekly shows are broadly themed and usually break down into segments or “acts” that offer insight into the theme through individual stories told in the first-​person by Glass’s guests, or in-​studio interviews with him. Glass often interjects into the dramatic present of the narratives, stopping the tape in order to comment on the experiences being shared, or to ask rhetorical and existential questions that deepen the inquiries and insights raised by the episode’s theme. The inaugural episode, “New Beginnings,” is a nod to the show’s first broadcast and starts out in an appropriately tentative manner. The prologue features Glass interviewing Joe Franklin, the legendary television talk show host whose illustrious 43-​year career inspires Glass to ask him about the secrets of longevity. “The voice on radio especially is everything,” Franklin tells Glass. “The main ingredient is sincerity, and once you’ve learned to fake that, then you’ve got it made” (“New Beginnings”). To cultivate sincerity, Franklin emphasizes eye contact between Glass and the people he interviews, despite having a listening (as opposed to viewing) audience, suggesting that despite Franklin’s joke about faking, genuine connection must be transmitted through Glass’s voice. In this opening segment, Glass refers to himself as an “emcee” rather than a host, which describes him as a curator or remixer of stories, artfully arranging them into an episode. But Glass’s own story is woven in, as it will be throughout This American Life’s 25 years on air. Following a narrative about religious rebirth in Jerusalem with Wired editor Kevin Kelly, Act Two of “New Beginnings” opens with Glass calling his mother Shirley, a therapist in Baltimore, to ask her advice on making his new show successful. Shirley Glass, who initially sounds annoyed by her son’s call, softens at the request. She cuts to the heart of the show’s promise of national representation: “Who is your target audience?” Shirley cautions her son against creating something too “artsy” that only an elitist audience will appreciate (“New Beginnings”). Glass’s mother says that the show will be more successful if it honors the experiences of average American listeners. Glass takes his mother’s advice to heart. The third segment of “New Beginnings” is primarily narrated by Chicago-​based filmmaker and performance artist Lawrence Steger, who tells the story of a road trip he took immediately after being diagnosed as HIV-​positive (Steger died from AIDS-​related complications in 1999). Steger refers to himself in the third person as a man named “Luke” and slips into the persona of a filmmaker who follows Luke through his diagnosis and immediate aftermath. But Steger doesn’t just tell Luke’s story; he narrates as director, too, describing and incorporating through prerecorded sound the auditory scene that Luke experiences—​ there’s the ambient noise of the clinic, punctuated by the instructions of a director to the actors and technicians he imagines are bringing the story to life:

Aural Narratives  177 Title. Road. Treatment. It’s shot entirely on video, mostly handheld. Shaky, out of focus, bad color. Overblown color actually. Sort of the way colors are separated on an old television console, yet still has all the outlines of the images repeated. The outlines of the images, the silhouettes, repeated over and over, ad nauseam, and fading into each other. (“New Beginnings”) While this sounds exactly like the kind of “artsy” approach Shirley Glass cautioned against, Steger’s narrative is made more accessible by the context of the AIDS epidemic that gripped the country at the time. This is the kairotic nature of This American Life—​its interest in evergreen human experience is tempered by its timely lenses. Steger’s segment is more narratively complex, but the final act of “New Beginnings” is straightforward storytelling. Plainly narrated by Ed Ryder, a man wrongly imprisoned for murder who served over 20 years in Graterford prison in Pennsylvania, the “new beginning” in question is Ryder’s release and the fulfillment of his dream to become a professional musician. “Inmates are the worst, most critical people in the world,” Ryder says of playing concerts for the incarcerated, which is how he honed his talents. He explains how many inmates used to be musicians because, “After all, musicians, they don’t make no money, so I guess the first place you find them at is in prison.” Ryder, speaking naturally, undercuts assumptions one might make about the wisdom and humor to be found locked up in the American penal system. The episode concludes with an emotional lo-​fi recording of Ryder singing “God Bless the Child,” which Glass resurrects in a future TAL episode, “Lockdown” (“New Beginnings”). Previous stories often get resurrected in later episodes. This repurposing does important rhetorical work, for changing the lens (in part by changing the episode’s theme) reveals new facets of a story’s significance. Ryder’s story can be understood as a new beginning when he is released from prison, but it also describes a profoundly flawed criminal justice system, which makes it appropriate for the “Lockdown” episode, as well. This American Life began as a public radio broadcast but is now also produced as a podcast and was briefly a Showtime television series. While most episodes feature multiple separate narratives and include both famous and ordinary American voices, some are bottled into self-​contained experiences, many of which veer closer to journalism. A poignant example is the 2013 two-​part episode about Harper High School in Chicago, which, at the time of recording, had been coping with gang violence. In this story, as in other TAL episodes, Glass’s commentary provides the overarching frame, but unlike its regular themed episodes, the Harper High School miniseries relies on three school-​ embedded WBEZ reporters who each contribute segments that follow particular students, school administrators, counselors, and parents who have been touched by gun violence (“Harper High School”). Like Steger, the embedded

178  Aural Narratives reporters create soundscapes by recording within the school, and like Glass, they often summarize their interviewees’ responses, occasionally offering their own insights, such as when reporter Linda Lutton, interviewing students who have survived being shot at, says, A lot of these students say they know kids who are only alive because the shooters have such bad aim. That could be another reason why long clips are popular with kids. It’s a good accessory to have when you can’t shoot. (“Harper High School”) The two-​part exposé garnered critical acclaim for its searing, detailed portrait of gang dynamics in Chicago and their effects on residents who happen to live in their territories, and earned TAL its fifth Peabody Award. Listeners donated more than $250,000 to the school, and First Lady Michelle Obama visited Harper to speak with its students after listening to the episodes. The widespread public response demonstrates the galvanizing power of audio storytelling, where the sound of human voices can activate a sense of civic responsibility. The Role of the Host In a 2016 study in The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, Siobhan McHugh questions five broadcast and audio storytelling professionals across the United States, Europe, and Australia in order to parse cultural differences in podcasting as an emerging genre distinct from older forms of radio storytelling, or “radio features,” which are popular in Western Europe (McHugh 66). She traces podcasting history from 2004, emphasizing how technological innovation has made the production of podcasts accessible to both “hobbyist” practitioners and “investigative journalists or narrative storytellers who create well researched and carefully crafted programmes” that she and her correspondents define as “documentary features” (66). These technological advances, which include podcasting software, asynchronous listening models, and earbud/​headphone consumption, have greatly increased the popularity of storytelling podcasts. In the US, podcasts tend to centralize the producer/​host as “the heart of the programme to personalize the narrative.” Though This American Life (and the many podcasts it has inspired) relies on others’ stories for cinematic entertainment, it is Glass’s role of “densely narrated” and moralizing stewardship that distinguishes American podcasts from their global counterparts (69). Some of McHugh’s correspondents—​notably, Alan Hall, founder of the UK-​ based Falling Tree Productions—​ lament TAL’s outsized influence on podcasts produced outside the US Hall believes the show’s “hand-​ holding host-​d riven linear narrative” brand sees itself as an ambassador for the “prosaic/​ everyday,” while his preferred European style focuses on the “poetic/​

Aural Narratives  179 musical” (72). Claudia Taranto, an executive producer in Australia whose radio accomplishments include a near-​d aily documentary program, Earshot, is less alarmed but recognizes that Australian producers have also been trying to duplicate TAL’s model. She acknowledges that she, too, often prefers the “simplicity and intimacy” of TAL’s style, but not without reservation. “At its best it can be moving and entertaining, involving a relaxed, familiar way of talking to the audience,” Taranto says. “At its worst it’s bossy, manipulative of the interviewees and indulgent” (73). Glass’s voice and its effect on listeners have fascinated critics, who detect its parentage in other American podcasts, such as Invisibilia, Serial, and S-​Town. Punctuated by pauses, stammers, uhs, and ums, Glass’s vocal patterns assume a deep uncertainty, which Glass himself describes on Alec Baldwin’s radio program, Here’s the Thing, as a purposeful, syntactical response to the paternalistic hosts and newscasters he grew up listening to. Glass’s style aims to sound authentic—​the voice of someone who is honestly grappling with their subject, turning listeners into witnesses of meaning as it is made. But author and critic Teddy Wayne believes Glass’s affect does not adequately “fake” sincerity, as Joe Franklin advised him in 1995. Wayne describes Glass’s trademark speaking pattern as the “NPR voice,” and says that its proliferation on podcasts, TED talks, and story slams tends to dramatize its emotions, cuing the listener not to its “spontaneous speech,” but to that speech being “highly-​rehearsed”: people trying to sell something—​whether it’s a pair of jeans or a presidential candidate—​k now that consumers (and voters) are ever skeptical of faux sincerity. To subvert our suspicions, then, these salespeople reveal the ostensibly “genuine” cracks in their facades. How could I be deceiving you, the catch in the voice, the exposed seam in a sweater or the actor cracking up during an outtake asks, when I’m vulnerably baring my … flaws? (Wayne) Wayne’s skepticism of “NPR voice” and whether or not cultivated sincerity manipulates interviewees and listeners has been taken up more heavily in response to the 2014 TAL spinoff, Serial. McHugh notes that the episodic true crime podcast that investigates the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-​boyfriend, Adnan Syed, coincided with the launch of Apple’s new podcast app, making it easier than ever to tune in on iOS devices (McHugh 65). In the show’s first four weeks, downloads topped 1 million, which grew to 90 million by October 2015 (66). Produced and narrated by TAL alumnus Sarah Koenig, who describes herself in Serial’s first episode, “The Alibi,” as “not a detective or a private investigator. I’m not even a crime reporter,” Serial follows Koenig’s search for the truth as she pokes holes in the state of Maryland’s case against Syed. What follows is a riveting narrative about Lee’s murder and

180  Aural Narratives Syed’s conviction that relies on twists and turns of new information, keeping the audience in a protracted state of suspense. But Amanda Hess, writing for Slate, says that Koenig had previously reported in The Baltimore Sun on Syed’s defense attorney, who had been discredited and disbarred for not delivering on paid client services, and this is why Syed’s childhood friend and attorney Rabia Chaudry contacted Koenig about Syed’s case. Hess says that “by downplaying her credentials, Koenig framed herself as just-​like-​us, heightening the appeal for all the armchair detectives who would be following the case along with her” (Hess). In “The Alibi,” Koenig depicts her interest in Syed’s case as an unlikely, but all-​ consuming obsession. She claims that the case “wasn’t halfway across the world, or even next door, it came right to my lap” (“The Alibi”). The first episode mixes high and low recording quality, the latter particularly when Koenig gets an unexpected phone call from a woman claiming to be Syed’s potential alibi, and Koenig is forced to record the conversation on her phone. The first episode also plays up the cultural differences between Lee’s Korean and Syed’s Pakistani families, who forbade them from dating. The pathos might have come off as exploitative, painting a short-​lived high school romance as a Shakespearean tragedy that culminates in Lee’s strangulation, except that the state prosecution had done the very same thing in Syed’s trial in order to make Syed’s actions seem like a crime of passion. “For the last year, I’ve spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school on one day in 1999,” Koenig says, distilling what would become a sprawling 12-​episode inquiry into a single question that could clear Syed’s name. But neither Syed nor Koenig is able to answer that question. After dozens of interviews with witnesses and forensic and legal experts, after going through the evidence and court paperwork, and after hours of pre-​paid phone calls with Syed in prison, Koenig only arrives at more questions. She questions the credibility of the prosecution’s star witness, Jay Wilds, who claims to have helped Syed bury Lee’s body. She questions the accuracy of the cell phone records used to corroborate Wilds’s story. More than anything, though, she questions the nature of memory itself. In the final episode, “What We Know,” Koenig, speaking again to Syed on the phone, returns to the central question of her 15-​month inquiry. “I still want to know what you were doing that afternoon,” she says, almost pleading with him. But Syed can’t give her the details she wants in order to exonerate him in her mind. He just doesn’t remember. “So you don’t really have—​if you don’t mind me asking—​you don’t really have no ending?” Syed tentatively asks. Koenig doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, she cuts the recording in order to speak directly to listeners about her opinion on Syed’s probable guilt or innocence. “Several times, I have landed on a decision, I’ve made up my mind and stayed there with relief,” Koenig says. “And then, inevitably, I learn something I didn’t know before and I’m upended” (“What We Know”). In an effort to reach a definitive conclusion,

Aural Narratives  181 the final episode revisits key evidence against Syed and, with discoveries made by the Virginia Law School’s Innocence Project, introduces one final alternative scenario—​a previously unidentified suspect with a long and violent criminal history, who had been temporarily released at the time of Lee’s death—​to cast doubt on Syed’s guilt. But another Serial producer, Dana Chivvis, reminds Koenig that Syed’s innocence hinges on Syed having a run of luck so bad it accidentally convicted him (“What We Know”). Ultimately, Koenig’s uncertainty remains. “Bereft of more facts, better facts, even the soberest most likely scenario holds no more water than the most harebrained. In the equation of Adnan’s case, all speculation is equally speculative,” she says (“What We Know”). And Koenig does speculate. She approaches the case with the exploratory sensibilities of an essayist, trying on different possibilities for what things could mean. She ruminates beyond the paltry facts of Syed’s conviction to imagine what else could have happened to Lee on that day in 1999. She posits theories on why and how Lee’s ex-​boyfriend may have been set up to take the blame. She documents the turns of her own thinking, and these become the real story, the dramatic thrust of the show, and the basis for trust between Koenig, Syed, and Serial’s millions of captivated listeners. Amanda Hess wonders why Koenig didn’t “[advance] to tougher questions as her sources warmed up” to her. Hess points to an example: In Episode 2, “The Breakup,” Syed is revealed to have flip-​flopped to police over whether or not he asked Lee for a ride home shortly before she was murdered. The detail matters—​it could place the two teens together at the time of Lee’s strangulation. But while Koenig acknowledges how this flip-​flopping might undercut Syed’s credibility, and wonders what sort of “red flag” it might be, she doesn’t interrogate Syed about it. Hess notes the frequency with which Koenig backs away both from opportunities to press Syed in her questioning, and from details that, on their face, seem to shout Syed’s guilt, such as the break-​up note he received from Lee shortly before her disappearance, on which someone—​was it Syed?—​ had written the words, I’m going to kill. Hess wonders why Koenig doesn’t follow up on something so glaring. “Because it seems too perfect?” Hess asks, speculating herself. “Or because asking the question might be rude? Or because the exchange didn’t make for good radio?” (Hess). Whether or not Koenig’s subjective narration erodes journalistic ethics may be a question of genre. Where the Harper High School mini-​series on TAL largely obscured its reporters’ responses, and so might be closer to traditional journalism, Serial is told in the first-​person—​not by Syed as Koenig’s guest, but by Koenig herself. This makes Serial a work of literary journalism, which is factual but entertains with its scenic dramatization and the reporter becoming a character whose own life is somehow changed by the experience of reporting. Mia Lindgren locates a nexus between the personal and the journalistic in Serial’s success. She praises Koenig for “[fostering] a greater understanding of journalistic processes, and [encouraging] a growing literacy around the making

182  Aural Narratives of radio and podcasts.” But she also notes the criticism Koenig has endured for personalizing Syed’s story with her own emotions, which some believe were included only to make Serial more interesting (Lindgren 28). Despite Koenig’s soft questioning of Syed and other witnesses, Serial’s independent examination of the case incited widespread public response, which may have put pressure on the state to revisit the case, and almost certainly led to HBO picking up where Serial left off with its own four-​part miniseries, The Case Against Adnan Syed, which expanded Serial’s reporting to include a more detailed profile of Lee and her family, and followed Syed’s initial appeals process. In September 2022, a Baltimore judge vacated Syad’s conviction “in the interests of justice and fairness,” finding that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence, and prosecutors dropped the charges in October 2022 (Levinson). S-​Town and the Ethics of Telling Others’ Stories Questions of authorial license deepened upon the March 2017 release of another TAL spinoff. S-​Town, the seven-​part saga about a brilliant and dangerously depressed recluse living in west-​central Alabama, raises issues about a host’s narrative jurisdiction and their responsibility in maintaining others’ privacy. All 7 hour-​long episodes were released at once, giving listeners the complete tale of producer and reporter Brian Reed’s deep dive into the culture of Woodstock, Alabama—​a town of approximately 1,500 people—​fi ltered through the perspective of local eccentric John B. McLemore. McLemore, 48, is an antique clock repairman who has spent his entire life in Woodstock, which he disdainfully refers to as “Shittown.” He lives on sprawling family lands and cares for his ailing mother, a dozen rescue dogs, and the lavish grounds that include a hedge maze McLemore planned and cultivated himself. Despite his ancestry in Woodstock, McLemore despises the town for its right-​w ing politics, racism, homophobia, and religious zealotry. He originally contacted Reed—​another TAL veteran—​in 2012 to entice him to investigate the rumor of a murder allegedly committed by the son of a wealthy lumber baron in the community. After a year of intermittent correspondence, Reed travels to Woodstock to meet McLemore, and to see what he can find out about the murder McLemore is convinced law enforcement has covered up (S-​Town Ch. 1). The first two episodes center on Reed’s initial trip to Woodstock, where he interviews local witnesses claiming to have knowledge of the supposed murder, and meets McLemore’s small circle of friends. Among these are Jake and Tyler Goodson, a pair of brothers in their early 20s who regularly help McLemore with his many construction projects, along with a motley crew of hard-​d rinking, racial-​slurring men who hang out in the back room of Tyler’s tattoo parlor where McLemore is treated as a beloved, misunderstood, and occasionally infuriating genius.

Aural Narratives  183 At the tattoo parlor, Reed tries to steer conversation away from race by focusing on the men’s mutual acquaintance with McLemore, who frequents the parlor mostly to lecture its regulars in the makeshift bar constructed behind a false wall meant to deceive Black customers from knowing the full size of the shop. (Reed reveals that his wife, who is Black, asked him to make his social media accounts private ahead of his first trip to Woodstock, advice Reed says he’s glad he heeded.) The regulars tell Reed that McLemore disparages their life choices and calls them failures, but also has generous motivations for his visits. Bubba, co-​owner of the shop, who has tattooed McLemore’s entire chest despite the latter’s recorded rants against tattoos, speculates that McLemore “sacrificed his skin” so that he could pay Bubba and Tyler enough money to keep the shop’s bills paid. This revelation gives Reed a glimpse into the way McLemore shows affection and concern for his community even as he criticizes nearly everything about it with, in Reed’s words, “virtuosic negativity” (S-​Town Ch. 2). Though Reed is just as fascinated—​and sometimes worried—​by McLemore’s erratic, animated behavior and startling intelligence as everyone else, he initially sticks to the job of investigating the alleged murder. Reed’s problem is that he can’t find any evidence of it. The internet turns up nothing, and local newspaper archives make no mention of the crime. At the state level, Reed runs into roadblocks in Alabama’s hospital and death records, and even though McLemore’s friends insist that Reed could question the lumber baron’s son directly, Reed is troubled by the lack of official information with which to approach witnesses. Like Koenig, Reed walks us through his journalistic decisions as they respond to the local situation, simultaneously educating the listener on Woodstock’s way of life and the frustrations of reporting in such a place. Halfway through the second episode, Reed drops significant foreshadowing: months later, he would find out that no murder had taken place but tells the listener that “before this is over, someone will end up dead.” That someone is McLemore himself, who dies by suicide at the end of the second episode. Because S-​Town was released in its entirety, the suspense of this is quickly diffused, and the listener can observe how Reed set up the reveal for maximum impact. Importantly, he narrates in the present tense, which gives the first two episodes a fabricated immediacy—​the events described happened in 2014–​2015, while the podcast was released in 2017—​meaning he narrates it in the historical present, which precludes the essayistic reflective voice and throws the listener off the scent of the podcast’s real direction. Reed even overlays his recreated studio responses to scenes recorded in Woodstock so that the scenes, recorded some time ago, contain Reed’s running internal monologue as if happening in real time. It’s only when Reed foreshadows McLemore’s death that the listener is reminded that Reed already knows where the story is going. One detail planted early is potassium cyanide. In the first episode, Reed spends time with Tyler Goodson in McLemore’s clock shop, where McLemore gets drunk and insists on making Reed a gift. He places a dime into a bucket of

184  Aural Narratives potassium cyanide he’s mixed himself, and through a dangerous process called gold cyanidation, he electroplates the dime with gold. “I may be dead and gone one day,” McLemore says to Reed, “but you’ll have a souvenir from Shittown, Alabama.” Ostensibly, the scene exists to further characterize McLemore—​ his shop full of dangerous chemicals, his tendency to flit manically between subjects, and his ironically tattooed chest, which he shows Reed for the first time during this scene. But the scene is also a setup: McLemore carries out his suicide in the next episode by drinking potassium cyanide. At the end of Episode 2, Reed reveals the truth about the supposed murder—​ it was a fight in nearby Tuscaloosa County, well documented by their police, and while the lumber baron’s son was involved and several people went to the hospital with serious injuries, nobody died. Reed calls McLemore to tell him the news, assuming he will be pleased that the rumors of violence and corruption were only rumors. By now, McLemore has been sending Reed near-​d aily emails about climate change—​a major obsession for McLemore—​ along with other dismal statistics, such as the number of sex offenders per capita in Bibb County. When Reed calls with the news, McLemore says he’s spent the day thinking about climate change. “When John says he’s been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours, what I think he means is that he’s been mulling over climate change for the past 10 hours. I don’t think he’s exaggerating,” Reed says in voiceover. But in hindsight, Reed comes to suspect that McLemore’s lackluster response to the news about the murder goes deeper. The detail McLemore latches onto is how witnesses to the fight hid in the woods once the police were called. “Hiding in the woods in Bibb County is like having your afternoon tea in London,” McLemore says. “It’s a clusterfuck of sorrow, isn’t it?” Reed is surprised by McLemore’s cynicism, but later (most likely after McLemore’s death) he realizes that what bothers McLemore most is that so many people in Woodstock believed the murder had taken place, believed that it had been covered up, believed that justice had not been pursued, and nobody had done anything about it. Reed understands McLemore’s response is a microcosm of how he feels about a planet on the verge of social and environmental collapse. “The shitty misfortunes John fixates on, they’re not a bunch of disparate things,” Reed reflects in the studio. “His Shittown is part of Bibb County, which is part of Alabama, which is part of the United States, which is part of Earth, which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about.” McLemore’s ability to connect these things impresses Reed, and makes him see McLemore’s generosities—​the adopted dogs, the tattoos that pay Tyler and Bubba’s bills—​as a “crusade against the one of the most powerful, insidious forces we face—​resignation, the numb acceptance that we can’t change things.” It’s clear how much Reed has come to admire McLemore, despite concerns about his new friend’s well-​ being. Reed, too, dons the shaky, cracking mannerisms of “NPR voice” most often in these poetic ruminations, but more

Aural Narratives  185 than Glass’s or Koenig’s, Reed’s almost pubescent-​sounding speech conveys genuine bewilderment and sorrow, especially in the real-​t ime recording of the phone call he received from Jake Goodson’s wife, Skyler, who first tells Reed of McLemore’s suicide. During this emotional call, Reed wonders aloud to Skyler what he should do, if anything, questioning his recent place in McLemore’s life. Skyler reassures him, “If you wasn’t anything to this, I wouldn’t have called.” It’s possible Reed interpreted Skyler’s words as permission to take the podcast in the direction it goes next. Criticism of S-​Town—​and the ethical and legal debates that followed—​does not generally impeach Reed’s sincerity; it largely focuses on his decision to continue production after McLemore died. Reed returns to Alabama with his recording equipment for the funeral services, and this is where the story begins to turn toward, or perhaps clarify its true interest in, McLemore as a subject. In the aftermath of his death, Reed reflects: a whole other story unfurled in front of me piece by piece … I could see John handing it to the next visitor he coaxed down to Bibb County as their bedtime reading, saying, “read this, it’ll help you understand this place I’ve lived nearly every one of my days. It’ll help you understand me.” (S-​Town Ch. 3) This speculation of what McLemore might do with the events following his death, and the secrets they uncovered, offers a vague and slightly romantic justification to listeners—​and maybe to Reed himself—​for ensuring that story gets told, and for assigning himself the job of telling it in McLemore’s stead. In this interpretation, McLemore might have used Reed for his own narrative purposes. The next five episodes treat McLemore’s death, and the grief and in-​ fighting it catalyzes for many of S-​Town’s characters, as the next mystery to be solved. Though Reed admits McLemore had talked to him and others in Woodstock about suicide, the timing, manner, and reasons for his death confound Reed nonetheless, as does the fate of McLemore’s unconventional assets, which include more than a hundred acres of land, valuable antiques, and gold rumored to be hidden somewhere on the property. Reed chronicles the power struggle between Tyler Goodson and McLemore’s next-​of-​k in—​cousins from Florida who aim to get power of attorney over McLemore’s mother and become executors of his estate. More controversially, Reed also investigates McLemore’s personal history: his sexuality as a queer man living mostly closeted in the rural South, his history of mental illness, and his dangerous practice of fire gilding that exposed him to the mercury that may have poisoned his body and mind. The penultimate episode, arguably the show’s most poignant and intrusive, is spent almost exclusively in a motel room-​t urned-​recording studio with a 60-​ year-​old man named Olin Long, whom McLemore met in 2003 on a phone line

186  Aural Narratives for gay men, and whom Reed interviews for 11 hours over the course of two days. While McLemore and Long’s relationship did not become romantic, their deep, complicated fellowship gives Long a unique perspective on McLemore’s depression and alienation in Woodstock. He paints a touching, highly detailed portrait of their first 15 months talking on the phone, and the tumultuous but loving in-​person friendship that followed. But what Long shares about McLemore, including intimate anecdotes about McLemore’s often frightening or heartbreaking, but always clandestine sexual encounters with men in Bibb County, and how McLemore’s mother refused to engage when her son came out to her, is precisely what critics of S-​Town point to as Reed’s exploitation of a dead man’s pain for entertainment. At Vox, Aja Romano notes that while S-​Town is aesthetically remarkable and has “an investigation premise that initially seems like a journalistic jaunt into an unsolved murder, [it] is not a true crime podcast.” She praises the epic scale, from the individual struggles of its small-​town characters to the global calamity gathering above them like a wall cloud, but says the show ultimately focuses these examinations through the lens of “one man’s mental health” and questions Reed’s speculation that McLemore would have signed off on using his life this way (Romano). At The Guardian, Gay Alcorn calls the podcast “morally indefensible.” She acknowledges that Reed doesn’t share the morbid details of McLemore’s life in a “cheap, tabloid way” but believes the podcast deviates from the journalistic premise that the real story being told is Reed’s. But Reed doesn’t let us in, not really. Had he decided there was no story before McLemore’s suicide? When did he decide to tell McLemore’s instead and why? All those hours of tapes he had of McLemore talking, sometimes raving—​was there no issue in using them and then digging further to broadcast the most personal and sordid details of a man’s life? (Alcorn) Alcorn and others raise familiar concerns about life writing as voyeuristic when it involves lives outside the writer’s own. Not only can those whose stories entwine with the writer’s feel exposed or used for the writer’s own gain, but they can also face legal consequences. Tyler Goodson faced charges of trespassing and theft for admitting to Reed on air that he had illegally gone to McLemore’s property and taken two of his vehicles and some tools, which Goodson and others quoted in the podcast believed McLemore vocally supported, but without a will in place to corroborate these wishes. Upon listening to S-​Town, the prosecution sought to double Goodson’s charges, using the recordings against him. “Sometimes I regret ever speaking into that microphone,” he said (Sidahmed). McLemore’s estate also took legal action. In 2018, it sued the creators of S-​Town, claiming that Reed profited off McLemore’s death, and alleging that Reed never secured McLemore’s permission to divulge such personal details

Aural Narratives  187 about his life for marketing purposes. But S-​Town’s own legal team contended that the show’s content is covered by the First Amendment and that “as a work of public interest journalism, it was exempt from the Alabama Right of Publicity Act” (Sidahmed). The lawsuit was settled in May 2020 with the estate administrator, who filed the suit, concluding “that Serial Productions, Mr. Reed, and the other creators of S-​Town acted responsibly and appropriately in their reporting on John B. McLemore” (Maddaus). Other critics feel the larger rhetorical effects of the podcast outweigh its painful disclosures. Siobhan McHugh compares Reed’s journalistic instincts and vivid evocations of place to those of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote. McHugh defends Reed’s choice to air what some consider McLemore’s dirty laundry by pointing to McLemore’s voice in the podcast, which Reed recorded at length with McLemore’s full knowledge. “We hear first-​hand the magnificent rants about climate change, chicanery and ignorance that McLemore delivers with rococo Southern musicality and a stand-​up’s timing,” McHugh writes. She argues that the podcast’s artistic merit elevates its journalistic premise to evoke intense listener empathy “driven by sound, voice and the unalloyed intimacy of listening, in real time.” She also claims Reed has appropriately involved himself in the story, per the conventions of literary journalism, pointing to his recorded reaction when Skyler Goodson calls with the news of McLemore’s suicide, and the many times Reed mulls over his unlikely friendship with McLemore. McHugh directly refutes Alcorn’s charge that McLemore never gave Reed permission to turn his life into a story, using McLemore’s recorded candor as evidence that he “reeled Reed into his life because Reed was the ideal person to bear witness … an outsider with no prior relationship with S-​Town.” She quotes Reed from the first episode: “It felt as if, by sheer force of will, John was opening this portal between us and calling out through it, calling from his world” (S-​Town Ch. 1). This leads McHugh, who notes that the podcast does “tread on dangerous ground,” to absolve Reed on the grounds that the podcast’s dramatic turn toward McLemore as a character was Reed’s way of honoring him by telling his truth (McHugh). At The New Yorker, Sarah Larson agrees that S-​Town achieves something worth its risks. She says substantive, long-​form journalism requires an ability to go down inquisitive roads that “might prove fruitless” in order to arrive at the emotional experience within the circumstances outlined in McLemore’s first email to Reed in 2012. She recalls Reed’s careful and respectful recording, which includes informing his interviewees of the “implications of telling him sensitive information” and summarizing the most personal moments from McLemore’s funeral. “In the end,” she says, “we empathize with almost every character, and find commonalities between them and ourselves” (Larson, Sarah, “S-​Town”). At times, the listener gets the impression that McLemore—​perhaps especially when he acts coyly or obliquely—​is the one leading Reed by the nose, even

188  Aural Narratives using him to expose Shittown and force it to change. His fervent need to get Reed to understand the place and its effects on people like McLemore and Tyler Goodson (not to mention the Black communities in west Alabama, which, due to Woodstock’s longstanding default segregation, Reed never encounters) can read almost like this was McLemore’s intention all along. Perhaps he lured Reed by dangling the story of a murder but kept him there with the larger story of one of America’s stereotyped and marginalized rural places. To not tell the story, Reed might have thought, would have been to keep hiding in the woods. Representation in Public Radio While This American Life, Serial, and S-​Town have each discussed, to various extents, the issues of race and ethnicity integral to their stories, they also have white hosts who frame these stories for listeners and, in Koenig and Reed’s cases at least, are narrators more than hosts. This lack of racial diversity extends to National Public Radio’s listening audiences, which, in a 2012 study conducted by NPR’s own Audience, Insight and Research Department, was found to be 87% white (Schumacher-​Matos). NPR’s then-​ombudsman Edward Schumacher-​Matos responded to public criticisms made by Joel Dreyfuss—​a writer at the African-​A merican news site The Root, who challenged NPR to diversify its staff and programming, echoing years of criticism against public radio’s lack of representation—​by claiming that NPR’s audiences track more along educational lines than racial ones. “NPR appeals overwhelmingly to college-​ educated Americans,” Schumacher-​M atos wrote in a defensive rebuttal that fails to consider issues of access to college education for African-​A mericans and other minority groups. He also underscored the diversity of NPR’s staff and questioned whether a “staff that more closely mirrors the total demographic weight of each ethnic and minority group” would better represent the diversity of American experiences, suggesting that the demographics of its journalists and hosts do not hinder their ability to provide diverse representation in the stories they curate (Schumacher-​M atos). Other critics agree with Dreyfuss that public radio’s history of enlisting white reporters and hosts to lead their most popular programs undermines its premise of being a voice for all Americans, for the hosts hold power over whose stories get told and how they are told. But another hit NPR podcast has exemplified the democratizing potential of aural storytelling. Launched in 2010 after its host—​a former community activist whose background was in nonprofits, not radio—​won a public media competition that awarded him $10K in start-​up funding, Glynn Washington’s Snap Judgment offers listeners a different storytelling model, as well as a platform for underrepresented voices and artists. Though Washington credits TAL as inspiration, and the stories featured on Snap Judgment are also curated by theme, the podcast focuses on stories that turn in unexpected directions that hinge on their narrators locating a moment

Aural Narratives  189 after which nothing would be the same. This stems from Washington’s own upbringing in the Worldwide Church of God cult in rural Michigan, from which he escaped in his late teens. Washington says his experiences in the apocalyptic cult (which was also racist despite Washington’s Black family being devout followers) showed him the power of storytelling to move people, a lesson he took into his nonprofit work (Snap Judgment Ep. 320). “When you have no money to advance a policy,” he said, “sometimes the only currency you have is storytelling” (Locker). Snap Judgment, which airs on WNYC and also on Apple Podcasts and Radiotopia, distinguishes itself by including international stories as well as American ones. Episode 1016, “The Boy on the Beach,” features Tima Kurdi narrating how her nephew, 3-​year-​old Alan Kurdi, drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to escape the Syrian civil war, and through an infamous photograph of his body washed ashore came to represent what refugees risk for safety and freedom. The podcast’s demographic diversity has earned a loyal audience significantly more diverse than its fellow NPR heavy-​h itters (Oppenheimer). Washington shares his own story along the way, sometimes in bits and flashes, and sometimes in complete segments, such as in Episode 320, “Losing My Religion,” where Washington tells the closing story of how his family once took in teenaged Washington’s distressed, white girlfriend only to have their extremist church banish them for mixing races in their home (Snap Judgment, Ep. 320). Washington’s voice, a deep baritone with a distinctive cadence, does not stammer like Glass’s or crack like Reed’s. It will, however, pause for long, deliberate moments. At first, this makes Washington seem more certain of himself than his NPR contemporaries. But he says he’s not interested in giving listeners the kind of didactic conclusions that Alan Hall and Claudia Taranto criticize about TAL-​style shows. “I want you to feel like you’ve had an emotional ride or roller-​coaster and that you’ve gone somewhere, but I am not going to tell you what it means,” Washington says to Jon Burke in the Little Village, a publication in Iowa City, in an interview ahead of a Snap Judgment LIVE event there. The general public radio storytelling model: a little exposition, a little story, a little exposition, a little story, and then someone comes and puts a public radio bow on it. The reason I don’t want to tell you is because, at the end of the story, there is a gap. Our brain tries to fill in that gap with meaning. As soon as I tell you what a story means, your brain shuts off. If I don’t tell you, that story will stick in your brain like a worm, and that’s when our story becomes your story. (Burke, Jon) Washington appears to point out the tendency of other NPR hosts to offer interpretation and interject their guests’ narration with their own commentary. While Washington’s voice is less halting and seems more confident, his long

190  Aural Narratives pauses and lack of exposition in and around Snap Judgment’s stories may signal that he is more comfortable inviting his listeners to accept what the essayist Leslie Jamison calls the “messy threads of grief and incomprehension” that strong personal narrative allows to “remain ragged” ( Jamison, “How to”). But Snap Judgment does augment its narratives. Instead of relying on commentary to contextualize stories, Washington uses music. Just as film soundtracks direct audience interpretations by paring music with particular scenic moments, podcasts modulate mood and message with music and ambient sound behind and around the narration. This podcast describes itself as “stories with a beat,” and Washington tells The Guardian that he sees the original soundscapes that scaffold each episode as “a bed to the story, that really brings out whatever the story is trying to evoke” (Locker). Snap Judgment creates what Washington calls a “cinema of sound,” echoing Alan Hall’s descriptions of the European radio features he prefers. Hip-​hop regularly influences Snap Judgment’s sound composition, but many other musical styles are represented through producer Pat Mesiti-​ M iller, a sound artist based in Oakland, CA, who engineers Snap Judgment’s “second narration” as Washington calls it (Burke, Jon). Some critics liken the podcast’s soundscapes to those on Radiolab, which uses sound—​sometimes cacophonously—​to render its scientific (as opposed to narrative) inquiries (Oppenheimer). The result is often unexpected, cutting against the clichés prerecorded music might suggest. For example, “Losing My Religion” may borrow its episode title from the R.E.M. song, but the episode features “hundreds of separate sound clips, from a suitcase zipper to a police siren to a girl’s nighttime prayers,” and the only time the eponymous song is heard is as a cover by the Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domingo (Oppenheimer). Washington is all too aware that the phenomenon of “earbud nation,” as he calls it, means developing a sonic universe separate from daily life that listeners can enter. “If you’re listening in the car, the kids are hollering, you’re doing three different things at once,” Washington says. “Once you put your earbuds in, you’re in my world now” (Locker). Washington has expanded Snap Judgment’s reach with two other storytelling projects. The first, Spooked, is a spin-​off of its parent podcast, except with a focus on true stories about the supernatural, tapping into the exorcisms and other religious-​mystic ceremonies Washington witnessed in the Worldwide Church of God. It currently has two seasons available through WNYC studios. His 2017 miniseries, Heaven’s Gate, also draws on Washington’s personal experiences, only this time he spends the show’s 10 episodes detailing the history of the Heaven’s Gate cult, in which 39 people committed mass suicide in 1997. Washington has even launched a live touring version: Snap Judgment LIVE. Washington largely agrees that NPR is “too white, too cosmopolitan and too old” but praises public radio for the assumptions it makes about its listeners’ brainpower (Burke). He tells Burke that “what I liked was that I never felt like

Aural Narratives  191 I was spoken down to or like my intelligence was taken for granted” and goes on to describe the “tremendous impact” of This American Life and Ira Glass, who supported Snap Judgment by promoting it on TAL. But he is sick of answering questions about diversity: When you tell me you can’t find storytellers of color, I just want to slap you upside the head. There are 130 languages being spoken within five blocks of where we are right now. If you can’t find a story within all that food, clash of cultures, beautiful people and ugly people and people coming and going—​i f you can’t find a story there then maybe it’s not the environment getting in the way, maybe you need to look at yourself. (Burke, Jon) Writing for the New York Amsterdam News, a historically Black newspaper, Jhodie-​A nn Williams, who attended a Snap Judgment LIVE show, wrote in 2016 that Washington’s popularity and diverse listenership proves that to reach more than just the 50-​year-​old white males of America, you have to bring in people with actual melanin—​not just whites who think they can report on things affecting ethnic neighborhoods because they studied it in college or they’re Democrats. (Williams) She suggests that the good intentions of white hosts and their well-​researched facts do not alone qualify them to tell the stories of marginalized groups—​a rebuttal of Schumacher-​Matos’s assertion that the demographics of the messenger don’t matter to the story. One excellent example of the power inherent in telling one’s own group story is Ear Hustle, a podcast produced in and by inmates at San Quentin state prison in California in conjunction with Public Radio Exchange’s Radiotopia (a web platform for podcasts). Ear Hustle, whose title references prison slang for eavesdropping, was launched in 2017 by visual artist Nigel Poor, who ran photography classes at the prison, and Earlonne Woods, an inmate serving 31 years to life for attempted second-​degree robbery. Covering topics from solitary confinement to unusual prison pets (think: spiders and beetles) to the challenges of finding romance after release, the podcast features stories told by inmates who produce their show in the prison’s media lab. This perhaps makes Ear Hustle less sonically sophisticated than Snap Judgment (it does produce seasonal episodes entirely devoted to music written by San Quentin inmates, however, and The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson praised the sound design of producer/​inmate, Antwan Williams), but the podcast has received millions of downloads owing to its success in depicting the complex experience of incarceration, especially for minorities (Larson, Sarah, “Ear”).

192  Aural Narratives The first episode, “Cellies,” sets the colloquial tone while featuring stories about cellmate relationships. It opens not with Poor speaking, or even Woods, but with Ron Self, a US Marine serving 25 years to life for attempted murder, who describes his terrifying cellmate in the maximum security prison he entered before San Quentin. “He would scream. He threatened to kill me. I would sleep with my back to the wall and one eye open, if you could call what I did sleeping,” Self says (Ear Hustle Ep. 1). But Self ’s story turns out to be the most frightening and stereotypical of the episode; the other stories in “Cellies” center around the kinds of domestic issues that crop up in nearly every kind of co-​habitation: disparities in hygiene, noise complaints, smoking. A pair of brothers, Eddie and Emile DeWeaver, both incarcerated at San Quentin, opt to bunk up only to find out they are incompatible roommates (Eddie protests Emile’s watching TV soap operas on the Sabbath by refusing to shower or wear deodorant), while cellies Sha Wallace-​Stepter and Donte Smith are caught on tape having giggle fits akin to a pair of stoned teenagers. Woods also interviews his own former cellmate, Cleo Cloeman, who was released from San Quentin shortly before the episode aired. Cloeman reminisces about their time together as “one of the best times in my incarceration,” and Woods, who describes Cloeman as a “great thinker,” says he doesn’t know how he’ll get along after Cloeman’s release. “To find a brother of your caliber, man, it’s going to be hard,” Woods says (Ear Hustle, Ep. 1). Between the inmates’ stories, Woods and Poor periodically discuss the topic of the hour between themselves, with Poor mostly deferring to Woods’s authority on prison life. In “Cellies,” Woods explains to Poor how big San Quentin’s cells are (4 × 9 feet), the meager furniture included, and the ever-​ shifting etiquette between cellmates in order to keep the peace. Sometimes these exchanges reveal Poor’s naiveté. When Woods describes the challenges of finding a new cellie after Cloeman’s release, Poor compares the process to dating only to have Woods shut down her analogy. “It’s not like dating, Nigel,” Woods says in a good-​natured, but matter-​of-​fact way, using Poor’s first name like a corrective parent. Despite his initial resistance and willingness to gently call out Poor’s clumsy language, Woods then helps Poor build the analogy, joking about “popping the question” to an inmate Woods is considering as a new cellmate. Sarah Larson comments on this exchange: In my world, and I assume in [Poor’s], people often compare unromantic, potentially awkward social situations—​job interviews, say—​to dating. In prison, the analogy is less cute. But I like the show more for including that moment; somehow, it emphasizes the eager good will of all involved. (Larson, Sarah, “Ear”)

Aural Narratives  193 Larson suggests that Poor’s unfamiliarity works as part of an earnest effort to learn from the inmates with whom she’s collaborating, replacing, or complicating stereotypical narratives of prison life with truer, more nuanced ones. In November 2018, California governor Jerry Brown commuted Woods’s sentence. Since his release, Woods has been hired by PRX as a full-​time producer of the podcast and still tells his own story that now includes his transition to life outside (Ear Hustle). Further Listening The proliferation of new podcasts continues as audio technologies advance. Both listening to and creating podcasts have become more accessible, giving voice to communities whose stories have been under-​told. It would be impossible to list all of the podcasts that deliver powerful narratives about American experiences and identities, but we can name a few final examples. Making Gay History accesses producer Eric Marcus’s archive of “rare interviews” that intimately acquaint the listener with prominent figures who have led the LGBTQ rights movement. Also reckoning with US history as it intersects with one’s personal history is Closer Than They Appear, where host Carvell Washington confronts his own family legacies while talking with “Americans grappling with the state of the union” in order to analyze the ways our past comes to bear on the present. David Isay’s nonprofit organization StoryCorps, launched as an audio booth at New York’s Grand Central Station in 2003, describes its extensive archive of personal, unmediated conversations between loved ones as a vital form of American oral history. Anyone may reserve time in one of StoryCorps’ permanent audio booths (now in Atlanta and Chicago), and many of the more than 75,000 recorded conversations are in their searchable archive. NPR has featured clips from StoryCorps’ archives on several of its programs, and storytellers can opt to have their recordings added to the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. In the International Journal of Listening, Susan Mancino praises StoryCorps’ mission to “produce an outlet for those whose names and perspectives are not posted as headlines on news media, but instead who quietly and diligently contribute to the landscape of American life” (Mancino 159). Mancino notes the strength of interviews that contextualize personal experience within moments of collective memory. In her analysis of busboy Juan Romero’s story of shaking Robert F. Kennedy’s hand at the moment of his assassination, and the public’s response to the infamous photo of Romero bowed over Kennedy’s dying body, Mancino says that listening to the tale of a watershed moment of American history cast through the lens of an ordinary person’s day at work lent her fresh perspective on the notorious event (159). StoryCorps won a 2006 Peabody award and the 2015

194  Aural Narratives TED Prize, which helped fund the development of a mobile app that allows users to record and submit conversations through their smartphones at StoryCorps.me. Live Storytelling In 1997, another storytelling phenomenon began in a few dark bars across New York City. Amid the digital revolution, story slams—​like poetry slams whose contemporary forms began in the 1980s and owe their lineage to live improvisational events in the era of Beat literature—​served as an analog refuge for those with a growing sense of isolation as the internet and other digital technologies began mediating most of our connections. One of those people was the novelist George Dawes Green. Green, author of The Caveman’s Valentine and The Juror, grew up on St. Simon’s, a barrier island in the southeast corner of Georgia, where he spent memorable (and inebriated) nights talking on his friend’s porch. “We were all on the porch, and the screens were destroyed,” Green tells Newsweek’s Stav Ziv in 2015. “Moths would come flocking in and around the porch light. As we got drunker, the stories would flow” (Ziv). When Green moved to Brooklyn as an adult, he missed the sense of community he’d had at St. Simon’s. On Jun. 6, 1997, he invited friends to his home for a night of storytelling. Though the evening did not go as planned—​Green tells Ziv it was “a disaster” of poor storytelling technique and etiquette—​h is friends applauded the idea, and Green decided to refine and take it public. Setting up in bars, Green imposed time limits on the storytellers and used a live musician to politely let them know when their time was up (Ziv). These early events would evolve into the iconic Moth story slam. Now held in cities across the US and in select cities overseas, The Moth has become synonymous with storytelling. Like the winged insects that gathered around the porch light of Green’s southern upbringing, audiences gather in dark bars, auditoriums, and theaters to be illuminated by intimate stories told live without notes or props. With outposts in Ithaca, New York; in Boston, Massachusetts; in Madison, Wisconsin; in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; in Los Angeles, California; in East Lansing, Michigan; in Jersey City, New Jersey; in Mesa, Arizona, The Moth’s presence has migrated to 25 states nationally where local storytellers can join thousands who have stood on its stages. Among those thousands—​mostly at The Moth’s Mainstage events—​are some recognizable names. Writers such as Andrew Solomon, Malcolm Gladwell, and Annie Proulx have performed alongside comedians Margaret Cho and Mike Birbiglia, actors Molly Ringwald and Ethan Hawke, and activists Al Sharpton and Daniel Choi. But far more numerous in The Moth’s archives of over 25,000 stories are the names of ordinary people who have participated in Green’s experiment. Green remains firm on what makes a memorable story, no matter the teller. In the foreword to The Moth’s 2013 anthology, 50 True Stories, Green

Aural Narratives  195 says that “the key to personal storytelling is owning up to one’s foolishness” (Burns xx). Malcolm Gladwell’s story “Her Way” recalls the time Gladwell so embarrassed his college friend at his wedding reception that he never spoke to Gladwell again. In “Notes on an Exorcism,” Andrew Solomon takes the audience to Senegal, where he once asked a local tribe to cure him of his depression through a complicated ritual involving drumming, spitting, and cradling a soon-​to-​be slaughtered ram in bed. Describing journalist George Plimpton’s first performance at The Moth, Green says that Plimpton reveled in naming his many athletic failures. “We loved best the moments in his stories where his impostures would be revealed—​when all pretension would be unmasked” (Burns xx). This unmasking appeals to The Moth’s fans. The digital revolution of the late 90s and early aughts led to social media, whose platforms now allow users to curate their lives in public-​facing narratives without the need for a print publisher, a production studio, or a stage. While it may seem we Americans “overshare” online, most of us actually hold back, presenting edited, flattering, or innocuous versions of our lives, and use both metaphorical and literal filters to hide personal flaws and failures and dissatisfactions. There are, of course, rebellions to this Photoshopping of life, but undeniably, digital technologies have allowed us to edit ourselves—​to create proxy selves that mediate our social connections. Green’s assertion that successful storytelling hinges on the teller’s vulnerability flies in the face of our daily attempts to crop out the worst of ourselves and enhance the best. “The strange thing about Moth stories is that none of the tricks we use to make ourselves loved or respected by others work in the ways you would imagine they ought to,” writes Neil Gaiman in his introduction to All These Wonders, the 2017 anthology of Moth stories. “The tales of how clever we were, how wise, how we won, they mostly fail. The practised jokes and the witty one liners all crash and burn up on a Moth stage” (Popova). Gaiman also emphasizes technique—​a n unmasking may be happening, but it is a performance with intention and structure. There is a craft of live storytelling, but it can’t come at the price of honesty, which is often achieved with spontaneous vulnerability; a carefully groomed and rigid persona, Gaiman suggests, will hurt the chances of a genuine connection, which is what The Moth most values. Story slams and other first-​person nonfictional stage performances share territory with standup comedy, where vulnerable storytelling has become central, even among the fictions and hyperboles. Like with poetry, though, we don’t have the same expectations of empirical truth from standup comics that we do from those who present their stories as true-​to-​life. A separate craft analysis would find significant co-​creation across generations among monologue comedians, stage and sideshow entertainers, and true-​story tellers.

196  Aural Narratives Conclusion Though we’ve covered some dominant categories of aural life-​storytelling, the genre spills across all media and forms. If we consider video interviews, then many documentary films would qualify, especially those dominated by talking, with no other filmmaking techniques in play. Errol Morris’s First Person, for example, which ran only two seasons from 2000 to 2001, interviewed people from various interesting professions in what amounts to oral history in dialogue. Subjects told their stories to the “Interrotron,” which was a camera over which Morris’s face was projected. The effect was that, as they spoke to Morris’s image, they made eye contact with him, which means they looked into the camera, simulating eye contact with the audience. The act of bearing witness is palpable at any storytelling event, whether it’s a one-​person show, an open-​m ic, or a curated collection of artists found in story slams. Storytellers bend toward their listeners’ responses—​their wincing faces, guttural utterances, bursts of laughter, and stunned silences all help co-​create the story being told. Works Cited Alcorn, Gay. “S-​ Town Never Justifies Its Voyeurism, and That Makes It Morally Indefensible.” The Guardian, 21 Apr. 2017. www.theg ​uard ​ian.com/​commen​t isf ​ree/​ 2017/​apr/​22/​s-​town-​never-​justif​i es-​its-​voyeur ​ism-​a nd-​t hat-​m akes-​it-​mora ​l ly-​i ndef​ ensi​ble Burke, Jon. “ ‘Snap Judgment’ Host Glynn Washington Talks Growing Up in a Cult, Ira Glass and the Dark Side of Storytelling.” Little Village, 16 Oct. 2018. https://​l ittl​evil​ lage​m ag.com/​snap-​judgm​ent-​g lynn-​was​h ing ​ton/​ Burns, Catherine. The Moth. New York, Hachette Books, 2013. Ear Hustle. “Episode 1: “Cellies” from Radiotopia.” 14 Jun. 2017. www.earh​ustl​esq. com/​episo​des/​2017/​6/​14/​cell​ies “Harper High School Part 1 and 2: Episode 487–​488.” This American Life, 15 Feb. 2013. www.thisa​meri​canl ​i fe.org/​a rch ​ive?keyw​ord=​har ​per%20h ​igh%20sch​ool&year=​2013 Hess, Amanda. “Serial Might Have Been Better If Sarah Koenig Had Been Less Likable.” Slate, 19 Dec. 2014. https://​slate.com/​cult​u re/​2014/​12/​sarah-​koe​n ig-​s-​voice-​the-​ser​ ial-​host-​pla​yed-​the-​crowd-​pleas​i ng-​good-​cop.html Jamison, Leslie. “How to Write a Personal Essay.” Publishers Weekly, 28 Mar. 2014. www.publi​sher​s wee​k ly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​i ndus​t ry-​news/​t ip-​sheet/​a rti​cle/​61591-​ how-​to-​w rite-​a-​perso​nal-​essay.html Larson, Sarah. “ ‘Ear Hustle’ Listens to Prisoners.” The New Yorker, 16 Aug. 2017. www. newyor​ker.com/​c ult ​u re/​p odc​a st- ​d ept/​e ar-​hus​t le-​t he-​p odc​a st-​m ade-​i ns​ide- ​s an-​ quen​t in Larson, Sarah. “ ‘S-​Town’ Investigates the Human Mystery.” The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017. www.newyor​ker.com/​cult ​u re/​sarah-​lar​son/​s-​town-​i nves​t iga​tes-​the-​human-​ myst​ery

Aural Narratives  197 Levinson, Michael. “Judge Vacates Murder Conviction of Adman Syed of ‘Serial.’ ” The New York Times, 11 Oct. 2022. www.nyti​mes.com/​2022/​09/​19/​us/​adnan-​syed-​mur​ der-​con​v ict ​ion-​ove​r tur ​ned.html Lindgren, Mia. “Personal Narrative Journalism and Podcasting.” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 14, 2016, pp. 23–​41. DOI: 10.1386/​r jao.14.1.23_​1 Locker, Melissa. “Snap Judgment: The Podcast that Dives Deep for Instant Gratefication.” The Guardian, 30 Jul. 2015. www.theg ​uard ​ian.com/​cult ​u re/​2015/​jul/​30/​snap-​judgm​ ent-​podc​a st-​npr-​g lynn-​was​h ing ​ton Maddaus, Gene. “ ‘S-​Town’ Podcast Producers Settle Lawsuit with Subject’s Estate.” Variety, 18 May 2020. https://​vari​ety.com/​2020/​biz/​news/​s-​town-​podc​a st-​produc​ ers-​set​t le-​laws​u it-​w ith-​subje​cts-​est​ate-​123​4610​011/​ Mancino, Susan. “Listening as Action: The Ordinary People and Places of StoryCorps.” International Journal of Listening, vol. 33, no. 3, 2019, pp. 158–​62. DOI: 10.1080/​ 10904018.2019.1633331 McHugh, Siobhán. “How Podcasting Is Changing the Audio Storytelling Genre.” The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016. DOI: 10.1386/​r jao.14.165_​1 “New Beginnings: Episode 1.” This American Life, 17 Nov. 1995. www.thisa​meri​canl​ ife.org/​1/​new-​beg ​i nni​ngs Oppenheimer, Mark. “NPR’s Great Black Hope.” The Atlantic, Jul./​Aug. 2013. www. thea​t lan​t ic.com/​m agaz​i ne/​a rch ​ive/​2013/​07/​nprs-​g reat-​black-​hope/​309​394/​ Popova, Maria. “How to Tell a True Tale.” The Marginalian, n.d. www.the​m arg​i nal​ian. org/​2017/​04/​17/​neil-​g ai ​m an-​the-​moth-​prese​nts-​a ll-​these-​wond​ers/​ Romano, Aja. “S-​Town Is a Stunning Podcast. It Probably Shouldn’t Have Been Made.” Vox, 1 Apr. 2017. www.vox.com/​cult​u re/​2017/​3/​30/​15084​224/​s-​town-​rev​iew-​ contro​vers​ial-​podc​a st-​priv​acy Schumacher-​Matos, Edward. “Black, Latino, Asian and White: Diversity at NPR.” NPR, 10 Apr. 2012. www.npr.org/​secti​ons/​publi​cedi​tor/​2012/​04/​10/​150367​888/​ black-​lat​i no-​a sian-​a nd-​white-​d ivers​ity-​at-​npr Sidahmed, Mazin. “S-​Town Subject Faces Trial.” The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2017. www. theg​uard​ian.com/​cult​u re/​2017/​oct/​14/​s-​town-​podc​a st-​t rial-​t yler-​good​son Snap Judgment. “Episode 320 “Losing My Religion.”” 4 Oct. 2013. https://​snapj​udgm​ ent.org/​story/​snap-​320-​los​i ng-​my-​relig ​ion/​ S-​Town. “From Serial and This American Life.” 2017. https://​stown​podc​a st.org/​chap​ter/​1 Wayne, Teddy. “ ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves.” The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2015. www.nyti​mes.com/​2015/​10/​25/​f ash​ion/​npr-​voice-​has-​t aken-​over-​the-​ airwa​ves.html Williams, Jhodie-​A nn. “Glynn Washington Adding Diversity to Radio One Story At a Time.” Amsterdam News, 26 Feb. 2016. https://​a mster​d amn​ews.com/​news/​2016/​02/​ 26/​g lynn-​was​h ing ​ton-​add ​i ng- ​d ivers​ity-​radio-​one-​story/​ ““What We Know.” Serial Season 1, Episode 12.” https://​serial​podc​a st.org/​sea ​son-​one/​ 12/​what-​we-​k now Ziv, Stav. “Have We Got a Story for You.” Newsweek, 30 Jun. 2015. www.newsw​eek. com/​moth-​story​tell​i ng-​t urns-​eight​een-​348​4 43

7 Life Writing Online

In June 2018, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study received an S.T. Lee Innovation Grant to create a comprehensive database tracking the “digital footprint” made by the #MeToo movement. #MeToo began in 2006 with activist and founder Tarana Burke and went viral on social media in 2017 (Schlesinger). Burke’s original campaign was a grassroots effort supporting women of color who had experienced sexual harassment or assault; Burke herself, a Black woman from the Bronx, was a young victim of sexual violence who was subsequently turned away from a local rape crisis center for not having a police referral (Amnesty International). Over ten years after Burke first coined the phrase and launched the movement, actress Alyssa Milano unwittingly borrowed Burke’s language. (Milano was informed of Burke’s activism and publicly gave Burke credit.) On Oct. 15, 2017, in response to the bombshell exposure of film producer Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator with victims in the hundreds, Milano took to Twitter asking women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to respond to her tweet with “me too” (@Alyssa_​M ilano). One week later, the hashtag had been shared on Twitter over 1.7 million times (Park). The Schlesinger database currently contains more than 32 million tweets from the US alone from Oct. 15, 2017 to Mar. 31, 2020, as well as archived websites with posts relevant to the movement (Schlesinger). #MeToo is not the only hashtag that compiles experiences of sexual violence and discrimination (there is also #yesallwomen), but the sheer volume of narratives the hashtag collected—​and continues to collect—​represents the experiences of millions of women and can be studied as a contemporary example of collective, multi-​ voiced storytelling online. The history of life writing online is short, but the speed of the internet’s evolution means that individual Americans went from keeping online diaries at sites such as LiveJournal and Blogger in the mid-​to-​late nineties, to maintaining complex, multimedia social profiles on MySpace and Facebook in the early

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341434-8

Life Writing Online  199 aughts. By 2017, when #MeToo changed the national conversation on sexual violence and #BlackLivesMatter had kept systemic racism and police brutality against Black Americans in the national consciousness since 2013, millions of people were participating in collective storytelling on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Today, social media may be the most common place where personal narrative is practiced. While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once had dreams of unifying the self online (Kirkpatrick 199), users instead fluently move among platforms whose audiences and profile configurations guide their content and organization of life experience into career narratives (LinkedIn), photo narratives (Instagram), daily highlights (Snapchat), personal archives (Facebook), and many other kinds of narrative that may all be “true” but are no less unified than the selves we employ at work, at home, with friends, and in the proverbial town squares of politics, culture, and ideas. Managing multiple selves online undermines Zuckerberg’s hope of identity optimization and consistency; instead, digital media reveals a fluidity of self hood shaped by the constraints and affordances of each digital space. Sharing digital spaces with millions of other users has also allowed researchers, politicians, artists, and others to aggregate individual experience into broader narratives. The use of hashtags, comment threads, groups, and more has brought strangers together in conversation about shared experiences. Publications and advocacy/​activist organizations produce writing of their own and host interactive conversations through their own story-​g athering projects and comment threads on posts they share. What emerges can vary widely depending on the culture each group has cultivated—​communities can be civil and supportive, intellectually and creatively energized, or violent and toxic. As with all shared public spaces, depending on who is in them and who is managing them, each can potentially evolve into anything from a salon to a saloon. While a single experience of police brutality, workplace harassment, or microaggression may not convince the unaffected that patterns of discrimination exist, hundreds, thousands, or millions of experiences can now be bundled into representative narratives that demand legitimacy, acknowledgement, and in many cases, justice. Stories dismissed as individual “bad apple” examples can be demonstrated as systemic through the volume of stories and the patterns they form. Webgenres and Blogging The early internet posed limitations for anyone who did not know how to write the code needed to create their own websites. The earliest bloggers were fluent in a language most of the world couldn’t yet speak. There weren’t many of them at first. By 1995, some early coders had begun keeping online diaries, which they coded themselves in HTML. Most of these operated like physical diaries

200  Life Writing Online with daily chronicles and meditations. Most recent entries appeared first, above older entries. These sites, which would grow into platforms such as LiveJournal, were differentiated from “weblogs.” Weblogs, a term from 1997, operated more like aggregators of the internet, combing the web for the most interesting content, presented with minimal commentary, again in reverse chronological order (Siles 786–​7). These two types of sites would eventually overlap and explode into a new world of publishing forms and opportunities. New, accessible software enabled non-​programmers to create websites and add to the early blogosphere. Blogger, created in 1999, took many of the stylistic tenets of early weblogs—​moving in reverse chronological order, including searchable archives, and listing similar sites in a “blogroll”—​and standardized them for users maintaining personal websites offering a variety of content (Siles 792). LiveJournal, also created in 1999 by 19-​year-​old Brad Fitzpatrick (Press), hit its peak popularity in the early aughts when it boasted more than 2.5 million active accounts (Dewey). Other platforms such as WordPress (which, according the platform’s online guide, now accounts for more than 41% of all websites) soon followed, providing users with attractive templates for professional-​ looking blogs, online diaries, and websites. In 1999, researchers Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell counted about 50 blogs in the entire blogosphere; by 2007, a digital tracker estimated that number had ballooned to ~70 million (Mohammed, Farah). The classification of blogs has led to three large but distinct categories. Personal journals/​d iaries comprise the largest category, followed by filter blogs—​which are most similar to the earliest blogs—​and knowledge blogs, which are often created within organizations or professional communities to share specialized information and ideas (Herring, et al.). There is, of course, plenty of overlap, but we are primarily interested in personal logs—​diary, journal, log, and blog will be used interchangeably—​since these offer the richest insights about life writing online. Researchers quibble over whether blogs are emergent genres from online ecosystems, or if they simply remake and remix established analog genres for digital spaces (Herring, et. al.). Likely, it’s both, with established genres and forms expanding and adapting into new digital habitats. Over the last century or so in America, physical diaries have come to be associated with privacy—​w riting not meant to be shared. But online diaries are created in public to begin with, meant to be read in their own time by readers sharing a contemporary moment with the author. Such shared cultural and historical circumstances help drive diarists’ stylization and rhetorical awareness as they learn from their regular readers what sort of posts generate the most interest and engagement and shape their subsequent writing accordingly. In 2005, around the height of LiveJournal’s prevalence, Kurt Lindemann theorized that the rhetorical situation created by such software made online diaries more like public performances, akin to authors reading from their work or telling stories orally and responding to audience responses. He builds on

Life Writing Online  201 existing scholarship by Rebecca Steinitz, who places diaries at “the intersection between the individual and the outside world” (Steinitz 47), by considering how they prompt various kinds of overt reader participation. For Lindemann, an online diary functions as “a tool that stimulates the (re)creation of memories” in their readers, and “through its communicative competence, establishes an interpretive frame that invites and invokes a direct response from an audience,” which today take the form of comments, likes, and shares on other sites or personal profiles (Lindemann 357). A successful online diary provokes ongoing interaction between its author and readers. Lindemann differentiates oral storytellers from online diarists through their means of soliciting and responding to audience feedback. Oral storytellers take their cues from the physical feedback of their audiences in real time—​their sighs, their laughs, their furrowed brows—​and adjust their performances on the spot. Online diarists receive their audience feedback asynchronously; it’s only after posting that feedback enters the picture and instructs the diarist on how to maximize their performance. That feedback usually comes quickly, however. In addition to literary artistry—​the ability to render one’s own life in scenic and figurative prose that invites the reader to consider their own life in return—​ Lindemann found that a certain tech-​savviness contributed to the success of highly rated pages on LiveJournal; the judicious use of icons, tags, photos, and other images helps drive connection and conversation between diarists and their readers. The skillful use of multimedia elicits participation from readers in the form of posted responses, and it is through this participation that users come to understand the cultural norms of LiveJournal.com. Readers can participate by commenting on any entry with their own text and pictures, lending credence to [LiveJournal’s claim] that LiveJournal is “not just an online journal; it’s an interactive community.” (355, 363) Data analytics common to many blogging platforms let authors see which posts generated the most page views, which keywords readers used to find their blogs, and a whole landscape of other data that guides bloggers in their content creation. Today’s serious bloggers are mindful of their communities, both on-​and offline, and often directly reference them in posts, further stabilizing and interacting with their readership. Blogging communities have in turn helped define topical spheres of blogging such as “mommy blogs,” which focus on personal experiences of motherhood, “beauty blogs” that combine personal narrative with beauty advice and product recommendations, and “food blogs” that share beloved recipes through their authors’ personal histories. Heather Kirn Lanier—​author of two memoirs, Teaching in the Terrordome (2012) and Raising a Rare Girl (2020)—​started her widely read blog, Star in Her

202  Life Writing Online Eye, in July 2012 using WordPress. Adding to a growing roster of mommy blogs by authors such as Janelle Hanchett of Renegade Mothering and Joanna Goddard of Cup of Jo, as well as disability blogs maintained by activists such as Bill Peace and Stephen Kuusisto, Lanier’s blog chronicles life with her eldest daughter, Fiona, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder called Wolf-​ Hirschhorn syndrome. In one of her earliest entries, Lanier tells Fiona’s birth story—​the “cloud of concern that hung over the room” when Fiona was born at 4 pounds and 12 ounces; the first navigations of an ableist medical system; the first paradigm-​shifting insights of parenting a child with disabilities. After a scene about meeting with a “cherubic” geneticist who explained the orchestration of muscle movements involved in the act of swallowing, Lanier writes: I … thought what a feat it was to swallow, and admired all the people I saw walking on the street today who were chatting on the phone and looking at the clouds and worrying about their finances, all while swallowing, automatically, any fluid in their mouths. And rather than bemoan that my daughter might not be able to swallow, I reveled in the amazement that was swallowing, and humanity’s overwhelming adeptness at it! We were geniuses out there! All of us! Swallowing! (Lanier, “Revelation”) Star in Her Eye uses many of the community-​building tactics that Lindemann and others outline. Lanier regularly includes candid photos of her family to foster connection with her readers, who come from several different groups: readers familiar with Lanier’s other published writing meld with those she’s met through Wolf-​H irschhorn Facebook groups, disability advocates, and other parents. Lanier also uses hyperlinks—​another common practice in all online writing akin to source citation in academic writing—​to point readers to other blogs, literature, news articles, and medical studies that extend the conversation and resources. In a post about Fiona’s entry into an inclusive kindergarten classroom, Lanier helpfully links to her daughter’s speech app, a National Public Radio piece on Texas’s special education failures, and Amy Silverman’s memoir about raising a child with Down syndrome. The post garnered more than 30 substantive comments—​comments that go beyond affirmation of Lanier’s writing and experiences and largely focus on the commenters’ experiences. One commenter wrote a lengthy and touching narrative about her child’s IEP (Individualized Education Program). Another shared memories of her own schooling in which kids with Down syndrome were taught in separate classrooms. Lanier even responded to a commenter who reported struggling with her son’s education by giving the commenter her email address. Lindemann writes: By skillfully representing his or her experiences in a way that invites reader participation, the diary becomes an object detached from the author yet

Life Writing Online  203 remains a reminder of the author’s bodily experience, both in the writing of the diary and in the experiences the diary recounts … The function of the diary as a tool that stimulates the (re)creation of memories illustrates the way diaries invoke and implicate an audience. (Lindemann 356–​357) Though Lanier’s blog has a specific focus that differentiates it from a daily diary and is literary (as opposed to stream-​of-​consciousness) in its deliberate narrative and lyric construction, she has cultivated genuine support for her family, developing relationships that transcend her blog into other spaces. Her scenic depictions of life parenting Fiona evoke her readers’ lived experiences, which get reframed by Lanier’s insights, prompting readers to have insights of their own. The comments section becomes a continuation of the original text—​ visitors sustain their engagement when they read past the main text where other stories are told in response, often in solidarity, widening the discourse. While Lindemann’s interest in blogging as a performance draws on some conventions of live storytelling, he is clear that online interaction is not the same as face-​to-​face interaction due to the way technology both “enables and constrains a consideration of the relationship between body and text … skillful performances of online journaling will not treat the online interaction as if it were a face-​to-​face conversation” (359). Genres of life writing enabled by technology develop their own conventions and expectations. Lanier’s blog employs many of these conventions (hyperlinks, photos, comment threads, etc.) and uses a more reflective, essayistic persona that doesn’t feel spontaneous like conversational speech; rather, it is composed with the vivid and analytical prose of the personal essay. Other blogs challenge Lindemann’s view that performance on personal blogs cannot rely on conventions of live performance. Even without enabling comment threads on her posts, humorist Samantha Irby (Meaty, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, and Wow, No Thank You) has built an almost rabid following through her “lifestyle” blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, originally active from 2009 to 2018 on Blogger and now a newsletter on Substack. According to Rima Parikh, who interviewed Irby for The Nation in 2020, Irby’s online persona “can be described as equal parts confessional and raunchy, vulnerable and raw. Her work spans defecation disasters and the travails of dating and grief ” (Parikh). A Black, queer writer of size who grew up in poverty in the greater Chicago area and lost both of her parents when she was young, Irby packages her misfit status into a blog that uses her life experiences to offer “advice” to readers who are less interested in becoming the best versions of themselves than in accepting themselves warts and all, and finding laughter in the everyday absurdity of being human. Irby, a regular on the live storytelling and improv scene in Chicago, describes her blogging style not as literary but as stream-​of-​consciousness and sees less disparity between her in-​person and blogging performances. She says, “I do a lot

204  Life Writing Online of staring at the screen and talking it out to myself … I’m always thinking about how this would sound if an audience had to listen and react to it” (Parikh). But while her blog may feel like Irby just “puke[d]‌this all out and then shuffle[d] it around,” she admits that she always has the ending in mind when she begins writing anything, suggesting that her stream-​of-​consciousness style is deliberately crafted. She only seems like a relatable mess (Irby). In an early entry from her blog, Bitches Gotta Eat!, she writes: i am totally embracing this turning thirty thing. maybe it’s because i still have a year and a half to go, but i’d like to think it’s because i’m anxious to be older and wiser. no one ever tells you a goddamned thing about your twenties. and while i understand that that’s what these years are for, blindly stumbling around your life hoping not to bump into any emotional traumas that are too sharp, i’m over it. (Irby 6/​11/​09 no longer live) Irreverent and grammatically playful, Irby, in her blogging persona, eschews capitalization, which gives her prose a text message-​like feel—​spontaneous, unfiltered, and unpretentious. Irby jokes about “totally embracing” her 30s while still 28 years old, winking to the reader that she knows the joke is premature. Irby also uses expletives with abandon, as well as bolded type, often in bright colors (not reproduced here) in order to highlight soundbyte-​able moments, giving the blog the speechified feel she’s going for; these bolded lines emphasize where Irby is going for laughs, simulating a live performance that might sound off-​the-​cuff but is actually composed right down to its vocal inflections. Bitches Gotta Eat!, along with Irby’s three essay collections (which are stylistically different from the blog, but riff on Irby’s blog persona), often paints Irby as lazy and professionally stunted. She writes about wearing pajamas in public, criticizes the contents of her refrigerator, and pokes fun at her job in an animal hospital, yet the real-​life Irby is a three-​book author who has racked up TV writing credits on shows like Hulu’s Shrill and the HBO reboot of Sex and the City. These accomplishments suggest that Irby is not at all lazy or professionally adrift. But her blogging persona, which focuses on stumbles and struggles to grow up and find happiness, often only acknowledges Irby’s professional successes on a slant, aberrations in an otherwise arrested development. This, too, is part of Irby’s craft. She writes: I feel like what I’ve tried to do in my writing is just to be like, Okay, I’m a person who can make you laugh and I can share this story and I’m not a person sitting above on some perch talking down to you … I don’t ever want anyone to be afraid to talk to me or to not think I’m a regular person. (Neilson)

Life Writing Online  205 Webcomic Allie Brosh also leaned into perceived immaturity on her graphic blog Hyperbole and a Half. Launched in 2009, it grew into an internet sensation—​ by 2011, it boasted 3–​7 million unique visitors per month to its iconic narrative form combining text with images Brosh creates with the rudimentary illustration program Paintbrush. Brosh, who describes herself on the blog’s FAQ as a “horrible, mischievous child who lived in the backwoods of North Idaho,” often tells stories from her childhood that, in the spirit of the blog’s name, become dramatized and exaggerated so that they take on the vivid blend of fact and imagination inherent to the way children experience and remember events. Lindemann’s research focuses on images and icons as the substitutes for “bodily presence” on blogs, and we can see Brosh’s illustrations in much the same way because the images she creates are not static but, like a flip book, create sequences of action (even when the “action” is merely a character plotting or reacting internally) and feel especially embodied to the reader, evoking the physicality of a temper tantrum or sneaking around for another fistful of forbidden cake (Lindemann 355). While Brosh’s illustrations may appear simple, they are painstakingly crafted. On the blog’s FAQ, where Brosh performs a fake interview with herself from the point of view of a critical fan, she explains the intentionality of her artwork: “I do that on purpose because shitty drawings are funny. I do work very hard on making my drawings exactly the way they are. Sometimes I revise one drawing over ten different times. It’s a very precise crudeness.” At the height of her blog’s popularity, Brosh’s illustrations were often turned into memes that became just as famous on their own. In October 2011, after an abrupt months-​long hiatus that sent fans scouring the internet for the beloved blogger, Brosh reappeared with her most pivotal post. “Adventures in Depression” offered readers a deeply personal explanation for Brosh’s absence: a depressive episode led to Brosh’s sudden withdrawal from public life. The post, which has been analyzed and praised by educators, psychologists, and other experts for its realistic rendering of a long-​m isunderstood mental illness, marked a departure from Brosh’s light-​ hearted, often childhood-​centered posts. This evolution would prove permanent. While her later work also includes childhood themes, her most resonant posts are those that masterfully blend the comedy and tragedy of young adulthood. “Adventures in Depression” acknowledges that Brosh’s depression had no discernible origin. “Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed,” it begins, “but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason” (Brosh “Adventures”). Brosh explores the shame spiral that resulted from having “no reason” for her depression, representing these cycles of self-​abuse using split panels to show the effects of her self-​berating thoughts—​ on one side, the interior Brosh yells and commands, while, on the other, the physical Brosh sinks further into a corner, terrified and crying. We see Brosh

206  Life Writing Online descend from shame to numb apathy as she isolates herself from the outside world, the pupils of her eyes dilated from too much time indoors: Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul. I couldn’t even muster up the enthusiasm to hate myself anymore. (Brosh, “Adventures”) The threat of late fees at the video store finally sends Brosh out of her house. The final panels depict her—​ g ray sweatshirt swallowing her pink dress—​angrily pedaling her bike to return her movies and rent Jumanji. Except when she arrives, Jumanji isn’t available. The disappointment bounces off our depression-​steeled narrator, who feels in this moment “a tiny rebellion” begin. This hardened version of Brosh rents the horror movies she usually finds too scary, buys as much candy as she pleases, and pedals furiously home in her new “fear-​proof exoskeleton” (Brosh). Despite the viral response it would be another 18 months before Brosh posted again. “I am somebody who is naturally extremely reclusive and introverted,” Brosh said. “It took people paying attention to me for me to realize how uncomfortable that can be for me,” (Schwedel). Prior to posting “Adventures in Depression,” she had announced on her blog that Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, would be releasing her first book of graphic narratives. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened was released in October 2013. Some fans thought her hiatus after “Adventures in Depression” was due to Brosh finishing her book; others worried that another sudden disappearance meant Brosh was still struggling. In May 2013, five months before her book release, Brosh posted “Depression Part Two.” This installment is darker than the first. “Depression Part Two” is not without Brosh’s recognizable humor—​a sequence of illustrations shows Brosh trying to act normal but having little control over her facial expressions—​ but is also clearer in its critique of societal responses to depression. Brosh rejects the view that she can opt out of depression through willpower. It points out the dangers of toxic positivity in funnier panels about the “advice” Brosh received (e.g. do yoga at sunrise) and suggests that what she needed most was for people to simply understand that depression cannot be wrangled and defeated like a bad mood. She confides that it was therapy and medication that eventually led her out of danger. But it was Brosh’s depiction of suicidal ideation—​and how she dragged herself away from the cliff’s edge—​that garnered the most intense response from readers and mental health professionals:

Life Writing Online  207 When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and … I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I’d be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived … I found out that I’d have to turn around and walk back the other way. (Brosh, “Depression”) In Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Sweetha Saji include Brosh’s work in their study of how graphic narratives use visual rhetoric to represent personal experiences of mental illness. The authors particularly note the split panels in which Brosh’s “avatar” (the character of herself she has created in Paintbrush) that depict her internal struggle, with one side of her identity expressing the internalized “patronizing influence of society, which dismisses any delegitimized behaviours” and the other side reacting to those pressures: The dichotomy created between the depressed and those who fail to understand the experience of depression is amplified in the illustration. Not only does such a representation draw attention to the different realities that are external to Brosh’s experience of depression, but it also embodies multiple versions of her private self. (Venkatesan 42) Brosh uses her artwork to depict the way social forces speak to us in our own voices, exacting their influence through own absorption of medicalized norms. They also praise Brosh’s intentionally “simple” art for conveying with clarity an elusive and subjective experience of depression (42). This, they argue, challenges broad pathologizing by the medical establishment and returns power to Brosh as narrator of her own story (45). Brosh said that blogs have shown us how to “talk about lives in smaller pieces.” She sees them as a precursor to the way we now use platforms like Twitter and Instagram, which encourage users to micro-​narrate their lives in fragments and snapshots, and even as a democratizer of fame and popularity. “Maybe blogs helped give a platform to people who wanted to say things, but didn’t have anywhere to say them?” Brosh says. “It always felt like you had to get somebody to notice you before you could say things. But blogging was the opposite. You’d say things, and that’s how people would decide whether they wanted to keep reading” (McNeal). After “Depression Part Two” and the release of her first book, Brosh once again disappeared from the internet, silencing her social media accounts and

208  Life Writing Online letting six years pass before once again updating her blog. During that time, however, she continued to work in the style perfected on Hyperbole and a Half, and in 2020—​in the midst of a pandemic that isolated millions around the world—​she released her second book, Solutions and Other Problems. Her loyal fans hadn’t forgotten her; the book became an instant bestseller—​a gift, it seemed, given at the perfect time. In 2014, at the 10th annual BlogHer conference, technology researcher and blogging heavyweight danah boyd delivered remarks on blogging, which she’d been doing since 1997. At the age of 19, boyd was one of the early bloggers who coded her own site in HTML, starting with posts about the Buddhism independent study she was taking at Brown University. In her address, boyd describes many of her early entries as deeply personal explorations of rape and abuse but says that as her blog grew more popular and her academic focus veered toward technology research, her strategy changed. “I became part of the nascent blogging world, kinda by accident,” she says. As her blog’s readership grew, boyd began to recognize the power of her own voice as a responsibility—​this ethical sense drove her to keep advertisements and monetizing features off her blog, and to keep it a space for her voice only. “I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be public,” boyd says. “I’ve learned how to encode what I’m saying, layer my messages to reveal different things to different people. I’ve learned how to appear to be open and still keep some things to myself ” (boyd, “Am I”). While she acknowledges that blogging was indeed once touted for having democratizing potential, as Brosh posited, boyd says she always understood that “some voices were more visible than others” (boyd). Though the digital world was once wild terrain, boyd claims it is now mainstream, reinforcing the same imbalances of power and representation we once hoped the internet would break down. “As more and more people have embraced social media and blogging, normative societal values have dominated our cultural frames about these tools,” she says. “It’s no longer about imagined communities, new mechanisms of enlightenment, or resisting institutional power. Technology is situated within a context of capitalism, traditional politics, and geoglobal power struggles” (boyd). The political forces and ideologies that once colonized much of the physical world now colonize the digital world, and even those who use blogging to disrupt and critique those systems and ideologies must play from within them, at least initially. If nothing else, you probably need a WordPress account. Blogging Communities and Controversies As users formed communities through chat rooms, blogs, social media, and sites like Reddit, some bloggers started publishing on larger platforms offering whole communities of readers and other writers. These sites—​some that run content submitted by any of its users and others that solicit work from regular

Life Writing Online  209 contributors or employ writers on staff—​today account for a sizable portion of life writing and personal narrative by professional and non-​professional writers alike. Some sites have commingled of the two, stirring up controversy over who gets compensated for their labor. The Huffington Post (Renamed HuffPost in 2017) launched in 2005, co-​ founded by Greek American writer Arianna Huffington and former America Online executive Kenneth Lerer. The site positioned itself as a left-​leaning news aggregator that also published original content, including personal essays, by Huffington’s “rolodex of A-​list celebrities and high-​powered friends” and later, “a much larger stable of bloggers from across the political and cultural spectrum” (Sarno). For example, Barack Obama used The Huffington Post’s blogging platform to reach voters as a presidential candidate in 2008. Traditionally, outside the few who contracted with major book publishers and glossy magazines, serious literary writers published their work in small but competitive literary journals in exchange for contributor copies, yearly subscriptions, and the occasional small stipend; the majority of journals operate on shoestring budgets run by unpaid editors and staff. But literary journals have much smaller readerships compared to popular websites like HuffPost and Salon (the latter hosted Open Salon, which syndicated posts from its own cache of bloggers until shuttering in 2015), which generate revenue through advertising and high-​dollar acquisition (HuffPost has been acquired by AOL, Verizon, and in 2020, BuzzFeed.). By the early 2010s, some professional writers and editors had begun to criticize a business model that pays writers in “exposure” rather than tangible income, as well as the increasingly normalized practice of writing for free that cut longtime freelance writers off from high-​t raffic venues unwilling to pay for work. In 2015, Wil Wheaton, an actor and celebrity blogger, turned down an invitation to write for HuffPost, calling the site out on his blog for having the means to pay contributors but refusing to do so (Nair). Other writers began refusing, as well. At Vox, a news and culture site that does pay writers, freelancer Yasmin Nair criticized HuffPost and similar sites: “the commitment to ending inequality and ensuring equitable wages for work became dissociated from the world of publishing and writing, where writers are seen more as hobbyists or as people who write because they can afford to” (Nair). While some bloggers have outside careers or wealth that enables them to write as a hobby, many popular bloggers—​such Jenny Lawson at The Bloggess, whose candid narratives about mental illness have been recognized by the Nielsen ratings, and Janelle Hanchett at Renegade Mothering, whose irreverent escapades of parenting as a recovering addict led to her debut memoir I’m Just Happy to Be Here—​t ake a labor-​intensive, professionalized approach to their blogs, using them to help launch paid writing opportunities or sell merchandise, as Allie Brosh has done with her meme-​able illustrations, to support themselves and their art.

210  Life Writing Online But by the time, HuffPost closed its blogging platform in 2018, citing an unwieldy number of contributors north of 100,000 with diminishing returns in quality (Spangler), another platform was already connecting thousands of bloggers with its growing readership. In 2012, Blogger and Twitter co-​ founder Evan Williams unveiled Medium. Though Williams helped invent the microblog with Twitter’s 140-​character limited posts, he intended Medium as a platform for longform work. Anyone can create an account and post to the site, which considers itself a digital publisher that “supports nuance, complexity, and vital storytelling without giving in to the incentive of advertising” (Medium, “About”). The site currently boasts over 100 million readers who sift through its bottomless content, which, like HuffPost, comes from a mix of well-​k nown and unknown names (Medium). As Matt Richtel notes, however, “longform” is relative: While most essays on Medium far exceed Twitter’s character limit, others have “tens of thousands fewer than something you’d find in, say, The New Yorker.” Speaking with Richtel in 2013, Williams admitted he still clung to the idealism of the internet’s early days, praising its democratizing potential. But he had grown doubtful about the good it was doing for public discourse. His hope was that Medium, through algorithms that drive traffic to the most popular posts, would act as a filter for quality, much like the first bloggers who manually seined the web for interesting sites (Ritchel). This hope, however, rests on the assumption that popularity and quality go together—​an indisputably false claim in our modern age of filter bubbles and competing realities. However, unlike at HuffPost, Medium’s bloggers—​ whatever their fame, talent, or prior experience—​do have some channels to get paid. Some essays and articles written by big profile writers like Susan Orlean and Matt Yglesias are solicited for pay by Medium’s editorial team (Newton). But once an unsolicited blogger has accumulated 100 followers on Medium and has published at least one piece on the platform, they can join the Medium Partner Program, which allows bloggers to place their own work behind a paywall for Medium members only (memberships cost $5 per month). Medium measures the engagement of its readers by how long they spend reading a piece and issues payments to writers based on these calculations. Medium’s writers can also earn money through referrals; for every reader that a Medium blogger converts to membership, the blogger will earn half of that new member’s fee, with recurring payments as long as the new reader’s membership is active (Medium, “Getting Started”). Most contributing bloggers earn modestly from the site, but more popular and prolific bloggers report earnings in the thousands per year. The Nieman Journalism Lab, which has done several analyses of Medium’s publishing practices through the years, has mixed feelings about the murky distinction between a platform and a publisher. While Medium does provide a blogging platform for individual users, it has also housed several digital publications, many of which were once independent before their absorption

Life Writing Online  211 by Medium (Owen). Feminist publications like The Hairpin and Femsplain, as well as The Awl, The Black List, and Electric Literature have all published personal narrative that responds to the zeitgeist in a blog-​l ike way (with titles like“ FOMO Burned Me Out” and “‘The Leftovers’ is Teaching Me Who I Want to Be After Covid”). When these sites were published by Medium, their content arguably reached larger audiences. In its platform-​for-​publishers capacity, Medium mostly lived up to its name as a conduit between established publications and new readers. Some of these publications eventually decoupled themselves from Medium once it became clear that Williams’s business model would remain in flux. Others had their partnerships with Medium abruptly terminated among the site’s many financial pivots. Some of these publications, like The Awl and The Hairpin, shut down completely by 2018. Editors and writers working at these indie publications have not been shy in their critiques of Medium, especially as Evan Williams has continued his crusade to build a better internet through trial and error—​a chaotic approach enabled by Williams’s personal wealth, which has cushioned Medium’s inability to turn a profit without ads (Owen). Nieman Lab and other critics also admit that the site has published some excellent longform journalism, science, and technology articles, and life writing. In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, the late writer, TV personality, and chef Anthony Bourdain published a brief, blunt personal response on Medium to accusations made against Mario Batali, ending on a somber note about the memoir that propelled Bourdain himself to fame: “To the extent which my work in Kitchen Confidential celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently is something I think about daily, with real remorse,” he wrote (Bourdain). In 2021, Emma Lovewell, a popular Peloton fitness instructor and lifestyle blogger, explored her half-​Chinese identity in a personal essay written in response to rising violence against Asians during the COVID-​19 pandemic. “I grew up in a mostly white neighborhood with a minority mother,” Lovewell disclosed. “As a kid, I remember feeling like an outsider on occasion. Not all the time, but I’d feel it especially around lunch time when my classmates would ask questions about the unfamiliar Chinese food I brought to school” (Lovewell). Some readers still show loyalty to certain bloggers who fill particular and consistent niches, but many move between sites, often reading only singular posts shared on social media. Medium would eventually concede that one-​off posts that go big on social media drove more paid memberships than Medium’s algorithms (Newton). Medium bills itself as a platform for sometime-​bloggers who aren’t necessarily interested in maintaining a blog themselves. Because of this freedom to write long and infrequently, its less famous bloggers have produced some enduring works of personal narrative and literary journalism. In 2015, Zak Stone, a Los Angeles-​based freelance writer, chronicled his devastating AirBnB experience when a rope swing at a Texas rental property

212  Life Writing Online pulled down the heavy limb of a dead tree, killing his father. Published on Matter, one of Medium’s in-​house publications, Stone writes intimately about his prior experiences with AirBnB, the company’s safety policies, the “sharing economy” that popularized private-​space rentals and led to entirely new categories of liability, and his father’s last days in the hospital before succumbing to his injuries. Interspersed with Stone’s reportage and narrative are candid photos of Stone’s father alongside photos of AirBnB advertisements that paint idyllic pictures of guests staying at their “homes away from home.” These give the piece a bloggier feel. The photos of Stone’s father remind the reader, amid his meticulous research, that a real, deeply personal loss precipitated the essay. Stone writes: Back at my aunt’s house in Austin, we silently ate pumpkin pie and lit the Hanukkah candles, joylessly going through the motions of tradition. As I sat watching the flames flicker, that day’s violent movie streaming in my mind (as it’d continue to do so, nearly non-​stop, for months), the realization that we had booked a second night at the cabin suddenly jarred me. Had the company been told about the accident? What was there to even say? I logged on to AirBnB’s website and looked up the customer service number. “There was an accident, and we’ll need a refund.” (Stone) Stone renders this moment scenically, embodying, as Lindemann might say, the usually mundane experience of calling customer service by describing, rather than quoting, what he said to the unlucky representative who took the call. That he cannot remember his exact words—​he simply knows they were angry and vaguely threatening to the company’s image—​indicates the shock Stone was still experiencing as his family “silently ate pumpkin pie” in front of their Hanukkah candles. A timely subject—​A irBnB and the sharing economy—​ intersects the timeless in Stone’s grief. Other memorable posts include Geraldine DeRuiter’s syndicated essay about making the cinnamon roll recipe that Mario Batali bizarrely included in his 2017 sexual misconduct apology letter. In Medium’s “top highlight”—​an excerpt Medium uses as a blurb—​DeRuiter savvily combines the #MeToo context of Batali’s apology with her decision to make her dough from scratch: I make my own, because I’m a woman, and for us there are no fucking shortcuts. We spend 25 years working our asses off to be the most qualified Presidential candidate in U.S. history and we get beaten out by a sexual deviant who likely needs to call the front desk for help when he’s trying to order pornos in his hotel room. (DeRuiter)

Life Writing Online  213 Drawing a parallel between herself and other ambitious women whose qualifications get nullified by those of mediocre, predatory men—​ H illary Clinton had lost the electoral college vote (but not the popular vote, by far) to Donald Trump for the presidency two years before—​DeRuiter is commenting not only on her baking skills but also on the milieu that demands she be more impressive than the Batalis of the world if she hopes to earn even a modicum of the respect he squandered. Throughout, she includes photos of her baking process with quippy commentary. “Here I am punching down the dough,” she writes, “because, according to Twitter, I hate men” (DeRuiter). Toggling between baking and anecdotes of the online trolling she’s experienced as a feminist, DeRuiter’s persona turns ever darker as she struggles with both Batali’s recipe and the misogyny that has colored her life. In the end, she admits she doesn’t even enjoy the cinnamon rolls. “I hate them, but I keep eating them,” she says. “Like I’m somehow destroying Batali’s shitty sexist horcrux in every bite” (DeRuiter). Her sneaky reference to Harry Potter in the mention of a “horcrux” meets the moment of women revealing, en masse, that men’s bad behavior toward them cannot be destroyed in a culture where a Mario Batali can apologize so shamelessly that he plugs his own brand while doing it. The timely retort is tempered by DeRuiter’s more evergreen passages about domestic life, how women are taught to want less for themselves, and their histories of making homes for men from scratch. It is interesting to compare Bourdain’s short, social media-​like post in which he addresses the allegations against Batali and others in order to clarify his own position and, in Bourdain’s words, “pick a side,” with DeRuiter’s longer essay in which she literally fights with Batali through his underwhelming recipe. In his “2-​m inute read,” Bourdain acknowledges that some of his writing may be laced with the same sexism that undergirded Batali’s actions, but he does not grapple with particular claims or scenes from Kitchen Confidential, perhaps because he does not feel he has to; Bourdain was a celebrity in his own right by the time of his Medium post, publicly defending his then-​g irlfriend, Italian actress Asia Argento, in the aftermath of her accusations against Harvey Weinstein. Bourdain doesn’t come off as disingenuous in “On Reacting to Bad News,” the title he chose for the post, but neither does he implicate himself in that reaction beyond the final paragraph, which gestures to his memoir without excavating its misogyny problems. DeRuiter, on the other hand, provides a meatier, more personal reaction, which recognizes Batali as a (rather ordinary) representation of men’s bad behavior toward women. She never loses sight of the fact that Trump—​whose campaign was marred, but not derailed by a recording in which he boasts about sexually assaulting women—​became president after allegations against him had been made. As she kneads the dough, DeRuiter recalls inappropriate remarks she’s received from men in professional contexts. As her husband salivates over the baking

214  Life Writing Online treats, she remembers how actress Michelle Williams was grossly underpaid for her work on the film All the Money in the World (2017) compared to actor Mark Wahlberg. Through almost constant associations as she works the recipe, DeRuiter accomplishes a richer flavor: Mario Batali, Donald Trump, Michelle Williams, and her own experiences all go together. From reading any single post, it is unclear which of these writers—​celebrities like Bourdain or freelancers like DeRuiter—​were paid, or how much. In a memo to company employees in March 2021, Evan Williams said his vision for Medium was an alternative to the “traditional publishing model” he believed did not serve the best interests of writers and editors. But this was prologue to another pivot. With the company still unable to turn the profit it needed to realize its ideals (Its last venture capital funding was in 2016. Since then, Williams has been bankrolling the platform himself.), Williams offered buyouts to around 75 editorial employees. In the wake of this announcement, most expressed frustration at Williams’s chaotic reimagining of Medium through the years, leaving them with few instructions on what to prioritize in their work. Converting readers into paid members? Accumulating shares on social media? Number of unique visitors? In the end, none of their efforts mattered. Medium was “built to celebrate writing only to become famous for its poor treatment of writers” (Newton). The Social Network In 2010, two years after Facebook surpassed MySpace as the most trafficked social media site, Aaron Sorkin’s biopic The Social Network attempted to connect, at least partly fictionally, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal life to his creation of Facebook. This fictionalized Zuckerberg, smarting from an unexpected breakup from then-​g irlfriend Erica Albright, jogs back to his dorm and opens his LiveJournal page. Beer in hand, he types: “Erica Albright’s a bitch.” Later, he hacks into his university’s servers in order to create Facemash, a crude site allowing Harvard users to rank the attractiveness of their female classmates. “This incident, in Sorkin’s mythologizing, provides the emotional underpinnings for the birth of Facebook,” writes Luke O’Brien for Slate. “A spurned geek seeking girls and status launches a photo-​ranking site that morphs into a social-​networking site, giving him the standing online that he never had in the physical world” (O’Brien). It makes for a good story, but others differ: In 2003, when the LiveJournal post was allegedly written, Zuckerberg claims to have been dating his now-​w ife, Priscilla Chan. His original Facemash site featured both women’s and men’s photos (Saraiya). But when it came to his pre-​Facebook days, Zuckerberg’s private life was shrouded enough that Sorkin felt justified in imagining parts of it, filling in possible motivations the way we do now when glimpsing someone’s life through an online profile.

Life Writing Online  215 David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (2011), claims that only about 40% of The Social Network is historically accurate. “A lot of the factual incidents are accurate,” he says, “but many are distorted and the overall impression is false” (Rohrer). Other real-​life Facebook employees who saw fictionalized versions of themselves on-​screen have made similar assessments, though not all have complained about Sorkin’s depiction. On the forum Quora, Facebook co-​ founder Dustin Moskovitz wrote that it made his career launch seem more exciting than it was, which is perhaps an apt metaphor for social media broadly. Like biopic filmmakers, we, too, select, dramatize, edit, and omit pieces of our lives to varying degrees of craft, curation, and truth. Are we offering a mostly factual account? Mostly, most of us, probably. But a complete account? Hardly. Most social media users toggle among platforms that offer different affordances and serve different audiences. These influence the narratives. Most of us understand that LinkedIn profiles should tell a career-​focused version of our experiences, while Instagram profiles privilege life’s visual highlights, much like traditional photo albums in which life is a series of birthdays, holidays, pets, vacations, and performances. When sharing one’s life for an audience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of viewers, is it possible to construct the self authentically and consistently for all of them? Or is this a mass of evidence that the self is constituted in interactions with others, and so there is no such thing as “authenticity” except what emerges within each moment, each individual rhetorical context, each fleeting confluence of ephemeral and durable factors from which the self continually emerges? A Brief History of Social Network Sites In 2008, danah boyd and fellow social media researcher Nicole Ellison compiled a brief history of social network sites (SNSs) and the scholarship surrounding them. Beginning with the late 1990s, the authors explain that many early SNSs included functions commonly found on dating and chat websites, including personal profiles and friends lists. America Online Instant Messenger (AIM) allowed users to create private friends lists, while Classmates.com connected users to other alumni of their high school and college alma maters. SixDegrees. com was the first site to offer both a personal profile and a friends/​followers list, which is still the basis of today’s social media platforms (boyd and Ellison 214). The combination of personalization and opportunity for connection now defines everything from a platform’s interface to its intended audiences to the way its users construct their narratives to fit the rhetorical situation each offers. boyd and Ellison recognize Friendster, launched in 2002, as the first successful SNS in the US. Friendster not only built its interface based on dating sites’ detailed profiles but also included public-​facing friends lists, which changed social media by encouraging users not only to connect with

216  Life Writing Online people they knew, but with “friends-​of-​friends,” assuming people would be more comfortable dating within their own extended social circles. At its height as an SNS, Friendster was one of few platforms to reach more than one million users. As the site grew exponentially in members, it was plagued with both technical problems and social pitfalls (such as when users encountered professional contacts at a time when there was greater separation between one’s work and personal life) (215). The site began to fall out of favor (in its later years, it re-​launched as social gaming site popular in Asia before closing entirely in 2018) but others were ready to step in. While Friendster’s popularity plummeted in the US in the early aughts, the social and professional benefits of connecting with friends-​of-​friends and even strangers began to take hold in mainstream culture. The early-​to-​m id 2000s were a time of SNS proliferation—​sites focused on business and professional connections, such as LinkedIn and Visible Path, rose alongside sites like Dogster, Couchsurfing, and MyChurch, which attempted to network people through common interests and demographics. Even websites originally designed solely for media sharing, such as YouTube and Flickr, began to take on qualities inspired by SNSs (215–​216). In 2003, hoping to capitalize on the most popular features of Friendster, Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe, and Jon Hart launched MySpace.com, which also offered profiles and friends lists, but with heightened personalization. Users could customize their profiles using “copy-​and-​paste” HTML to install funky backgrounds and maintain personal blogs from within their profiles, giving posts instant audiences through their friends lists, which could number in the thousands (217). Indie bands became savvy users of MySpace, creating communities among their fans, who often added “profile songs” that could be changed regularly to reflect a user’s mood or music obsession—​a feature that taught many younger users (teens, too, were allowed on MySpace) to communicate aspects of their lives and political views through proxy media, a trend that continues today. MySpace remained one of the most popular SNSs from 2005 to 2008, when another platform surpassed it. Facebook, created in 2004 by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, was originally only available to people with a harvard.edu email address before gradually opening up to other colleges and eventually the general public. It outpaced MySpace in April 2008 (Press). Writing for Forbes in 2018, Gil Press attributes Facebook’s success to timing: “In Facebook’s case, the market was ready with rising broadband availability and internet participation by an increasingly diverse audience.” He also cites Facebook’s advantage of learning from the mistakes of previous SNSs, such as employing a “controlled growth” business model that allowed Facebook to build its infrastructure alongside its usership, and hiring a public relations team to mediate conversation between Facebook’s leadership and users. Zuckerberg proved amenable to adjusting policies based on user feedback (Press).

Life Writing Online  217 It’s notable that Facebook offers a non-​customizable profile template for its users to populate while allowing users significant control over who can view different parts of their profile. Sites like MySpace and Facebook embrace a variety of communication styles and media in users’ posts. But today’s SNS platforms are diverse and many offer more specialized experiences. In 2006, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and other partners founded Twitter, a microblogging platform that limits users’ posts to 140 characters. The platform also allows users to comment on and “retweet” others’ posts. In 2009, responding to criticism from celebrities and public figures that people were impersonating them, Twitter unveiled its “verified accounts” blue checkmark, indicating that Twitter had confirmed an account to belong to a specific person, further closing the gap between the famous and unknown on social media. But one of its most influential additions to SNS features was tech consultant Chris Messina’s introduction of the hashtag (Black, Erin). To organize posts participating in specific conversations often related to current events, sports, holidays, natural disasters, and breaking news, Twitter employs hashtags that use the pound sign in front of keywords and phrases so as to group tweets by topic, making it easy for users to search a large subsection of responses. Hashtags have been a tool both for readers/​aggregators to gather contributions within the same conversation and for users to crowdsource narrative contributions to a single project. These campaigns can serve to document (such as personal profile or oral history projects like #BlackInTheIvory, through which Black scholars share their experiences in the historically white-​dominated world of higher education), to serve urgent social and political purposes (such as #MeToo and #Black Lives Matter), to define and build a community and claim agency in self-​representation (as people with disabilities have done through hashtags like #DisabledAndCute and #AbledsAreWeird), or to organize a real-​t ime conversation among commentators (such as when professional historians livetweeted their real-​ t ime responses to the congressional hearings held by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol with the hashtag #HATH [historians at the hearings], which was itself an offshoot of #HATM [historians at the movies] through which historians livetweet about the historical accuracy of films as they watch them). Hashtags have migrated to other SNSs—​in particular, Instagram. Founded in 2012 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram is a photo-​and video-​ sharing platform where users can upload visual content and manipulate its aesthetics through filters and editing features. Instagram users also use hashtags to organize posts, which are searchable and grouped by tag as on Twitter. Instagram (and now Facebook) offers geolocation, which connects posts to specific places. Throughout the 2010s, Instagram was one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android devices. In 2016, popularized by Snapchat’s use of temporary photo and video “stories” that disappear after 24 hours, Instagram added a stories feature to its platform, too. In 2012, shortly after its launch, the

218  Life Writing Online company was purchased by Facebook, which has worked to align users’ content across the two platforms. Some SNSs have origins outside the US but went global to include American users. TikTok, launched in 2016 as a platform where users post videos of up to 3 minutes, grew out of a Chinese company named Douyin. TikTok, Douyin’s spinoff site, was created for international use in 2017. While the site is banned in other countries over privacy and decency concerns, TikTok enjoys over 1 billion users worldwide, with 90 million located in the US as of July 2020. The Rhetoric of SNS Interfaces “You have one identity,” said Zuckerberg in Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-​workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. (Kirkpatrick 199) He believed the platform would allow users to present a single, unified self to friends, family, employers, co-​workers, and acquaintances gathered through Facebook’s People You May Know function, and that this transparency and consistency of self was a virtuous aspiration. In studying how social media users construct their identities on social media, analysts say it’s important to examine the interfaces that structure, limit, and encourage certain ranges of choices users can make. Where and how users are enabled organize personal information on an SNS helps shape the digital narratives they maintain. Some users have multiple profiles on the same platform. Most users have profiles on multiple platforms. This has led some researchers to challenge Zuckerberg’s idealistic claim that Facebook would eliminate the need to wear many hats; instead, they say, maintaining multiple profiles online supports an older idea about the self, one championed by sociologist Erving Goffman, that changing audiences has a profound effect on how users shape their identities and stories. According to Goffman, we were predisposed to fracture and multiplicity long before social media. In The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1956), Goffman argues that humans have always been adept at consciously manipulating our image for different audiences (and that these images give off unintentional impressions that shape the responses we receive) (Goffman 2). He also sees most communication as purpose-​d riven: to control the outcomes of our interactions: Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control

Life Writing Online  219 is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression they will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own place. (Goffman 3–​4) An awareness of one’s rhetorical situation and deft utility of available rhetorical functions (on social media, these could include written posts, photos, links, quotes, shares, etc.) helps users control the way others respond to them. Though Goffman’s research predates the internet and social media, focusing on face-​to-​face interactions, his theories are useful to study the conscious construction of the self on SNSs and the unconscious impressions we make regardless of our purpose—​both of which are influenced by the rhetoric of platform interfaces, which are themselves designed with specific audiences in mind. In 2013, new media specialist José van Dijck revisited Zuckerberg’s assertion about a unified self online by examining how the interfaces of Facebook and LinkedIn (one for social connection, the other for professional connection) encourage users to craft and curate their online identities, with interest in how Facebook led the way on creating personal narratives through the introduction of their Timeline interface in 2011. “After 2008, most corporate site owners shifted their focus from running community-​oriented platforms to monetizing connectivity by maximizing lucrative data traffic between people, things and ideas,” writes van Dijck. “Along with this shift came a change in platforms’ architectures; rather than being databases of personal information they become tools for (personal) storytelling and narrative self-​presentation” (van Dijck 200). Prior to 2011, Facebook’s profile interface was the “wall” where a user could post their momentary answer to the question “What are you doing?” and where friends could leave public messages—​not unlike a wall of graffiti that’s been tagged by different people, or a message board in a college dormitory. Users could also decide how they wanted their profiles to operate as collections of self-​selected material. But with the introduction of Timeline, van Dijck argues, Facebook reconfigured the use of the profile to create a searchable and chronological archive. This is public-​facing to the extent that a user allows certain information to be viewed by others, including designations of “friends” or an array of other audiences. But Timeline is also private in its evocations of life events that are not explicitly recorded. Examining it is like looking through an actual scrapbook kept many years ago. An old note passed between high school best friends in chemistry class is an artifact that means little to anyone outside the writer and recipient but calls forth a deeper history only the writer and recipient could likely access by viewing the note. Per Goffman, however, the digital artifacts we select for public consumption may also reveal aspects of our lives we didn’t intend to share.

220  Life Writing Online A timeline moves backward and forward in time and generally offers a specific chronology; in history textbooks, timelines track political dynasties, wars, and the biographies of important figures. On Facebook’s Timeline, the user is the central figure. But unlike history textbooks, these timelines are created not by scholars looking back in time and interpreting what happened, but as they are lived by the users themselves—​their personal stories written as they unfold. Facebook’s new prompt, “What’s on your mind?”, stretches the user’s sense of temporality. Instead of asking what’s happening right now, Facebook now asks us what we’re thinking about, which dilates the timeline. One may be thinking of their grandparents’ house where they spent time in childhood, or their district’s recent Board of Education decision, or their dream of visiting Thailand. Users can backfill their life stories to narrate pre-​Facebook histories—​ the prompt at the bottom of one’s timeline is a place to upload a baby photo. This, van Dijck argues, helps users form an emotional bond with the site as it guides them through a nostalgic experience of remembrance (van Dijck 205). While Timeline organizes a user’s posts chronologically by month and year, it also encourages users to post expansively about themselves, producing much richer narratives … and data. “Platform owners have a vested interest in pushing the need for a uniform online identity to attain maximum transparency, not only because they want to know who their users are, but also because advertisers want users’ ‘truthful’ data,” writes van Dijck, explaining how interfaces solicit data that advertisers can trust. “However, the interest of owners may run counter to users’ need to differentiate between their various online personas.” We don’t like thinking of our carefully composed posts, photos, links, and other communication as market research. van Dijck also points to Goffman’s research but says the “need for a multiple, composite self,” which has always been present, has been magnified as our communication with others primarily migrates to digital spaces. She sees a crucial evolution in the later aughts as SNSs transitioned from sites built around self-​expression to tools of self-​branding that have produced greater savviness in their users, and more profitability for the platforms (van Dijck 200). Facebook’s Timeline allows users to customize their privacy settings and manage their audiences. Some information, such as friends lists and other personal details, may be available only to one’s Facebook friends or followers. Individual posts can have a variety of audiences, open to the general public, accessible by friends only, or available only to curated lists of people. This, van Dijck says, shows a growing consideration of how our online narratives intersect with others’ lives and stories: every post from the past had to be reassessed in terms of current audience and potential effects: if I add a picture of my wedding, will this upset my jealous ex-​spouse displayed in the picture? Should the picture of a rowdy student party really be open to the general public if it affects former roommates?

Life Writing Online  221 Each decision to customize your Timeline implied not only a decision about the (private) reassembling of one’s past life, but also a conscious effort at (public) identity shaping. (van Dijck 205) These questions about what would seem like innocuous posts illustrate how Facebook’s new interface has increased its users’ rhetorical awareness. We now take time to contemplate how a post will be read and perceived by our parents, our colleagues, our babysitters, our friends from high school or college, our coaches, our religious groups. This means developing greater sensitivity with our sharing, but sometimes it means creating deliberate discomfort and tension with others’ narratives, such as when a teenager posts the music video to a song about breaking up. Such posts have an intended, if unstated audience, usually the ex, who is now an unwilling (and perhaps unwitting) character. The sharing of that song adds to the user’s overall life story, marking a change in their relationship status that other friends will likely recognize even if the post mentions nothing about the breakup. And should the original poster see the post pop up in their Facebook Memories five or ten years later (a function that prompts a certain kind and schedule of remembering), they will almost certainly remember why they shared it, calling forth more details of that time, but now interpreted through present lenses (perhaps the user married someone else years after that post or got back together with their ex), creating a multidimensional story over time—​one that is public and another, perhaps richer one that is private; one that recalls its original context and one changed by the context in which it is revisited. Companies with public SMS pages have followed suit, transforming their profiles from information-​ based to story-​ based spaces, capitalizing on the interface’s attempts to make connectivity a shared and mutually beneficial commodity (van Dijck 206). When someone posts about enjoying a meal at a local restaurant, for instance, they may include a photo of their impressive sushi or ambiance and use geolocation to tag the business in the post, which will make the post show up on the business’s page under its Community tab. Thus, employing narrative techniques on social media not only helps companies form connections with potential consumers but also blends seamlessly with unintended product placement. In turn, we tell advertisers more about ourselves—​ where we live, what kind of food we like, even what we wear on a night out—​so they may better sell products that feel at home in our own narratives. But because we construct different narratives across platforms, which emphasize different aspects and experiences of the self, we have begun thinking of the “self ” as a multi-​purpose tool. To illustrate this utilitarian approach to self hood, van Dijck examines how narratives are constructed on the career-​focused platform LinkedIn. “Profiles on LinkedIn are a lot more than CVs posted for potential recruiters,” writes van Dijck. “LinkedIn profiles function as inscriptions of

222  Life Writing Online normative professional behavior: each profile shapes an idealized portrait of one’s professional identity by showing off skills to peers and anonymous evaluators” (van Dijck 208). LinkedIn’s interface reinforces tenets of professional presentation, such as having an up-​to-​d ate curriculum vitae, but goes beyond simply listing education, positions held, and professional accomplishments to demonstrating how one’s experiences, personality traits, and interests make them appealing recruits. LinkedIn users are prompted to complete an “About” section that lives at the top of their profiles. There has been a shift over the past decade from third-​person professional biographies to first-​person descriptions of the self that summarize one’s career trajectory and skillsets while highlighting what social assets they would bring to a potential employer (i.e. leadership, collaboration/​teamwork, project management, all of which former supervisors, co-​ workers, and peers in the field can corroborate via “endorsements”). These biographies often state exciting new directions an applicant hopes to explore, and how their previous professional and personal experiences have prepared them for such leaps. Like other SNSs, LinkedIn turns “weak ties” into suggested connections or “people you may know” (PYMK) in order to help a user “feel he or she is the missing link in a professional network of colleagues, former classmates or professional influencers” (van Dijck 210). Professional experiences—​not only paid positions, but also specific initiatives, projects, and titles—​appear in resumé-​like form beneath the About section, but users may add descriptions, which are also often written in the first person. In rising to the level of a program director, previously held positions might include first-​ person descriptions about managing a tricky budget, spearheading an equity initiative, or developing successful training workshops. With LinkedIn’s addition of a Facebook-​like newsfeed, one can also share news of promotions, photos of ongoing or completed projects, or flattering articles about one’s company, department, or program. Creating professional narratives recasts a career not as a series of employers and positions, but as a timeline of deliberate professional growth. However, when prospective employers are vetting candidates, van Dijck says, they often look across platforms to evaluate how a candidate presents themselves personally on Facebook, assessing the distance between their Facebook and LinkedIn narratives (van Dijck 212). Fostering at least some consistency of self-​ presentation edges closer to Zuckerberg’s goal of the unified self, though with privacy controls, revelation largely remains with the user. While Facebook and LinkedIn represent the spectrum between self-​expression and self-​promotion, other interfaces too create somewhat standardized, as well as customized narratives. On Instagram, users share visual texts—​ photos, videos (called “reels”), memes, and ephemeral “stories”—​that tell a wide variety of personal narratives, both in content and form. What makes Instagram multipurpose as platform—​particularly attractive to artists and public figures—​is that users are permitted to have multiple accounts. One might maintain a general

Life Writing Online  223 account for friends, family, and weaker ties, as well as a focused account for more specialized audiences. During the COVID-​19 pandemic, many women stopped coloring their hair and documented “going gray” journeys on accounts dedicated only to that. Athletes might maintain an IG account about training for an event. Others maintain subject-​specific accounts about fitness, or fashion, or food, whether as a hobbyist or a monetized “influencer.” Some users (especially younger ones) create “finstas” or “fake Instagrams” meant to steer certain audiences toward more private content not intended for general followers. Instagram provides storytelling templates that users can customize, within limits, using filters, photo and video editing, and other features. Photos posted to one’s profile capture individual moments, while photo carousels allow users to tell mini-​narratives about an experience that may be small, such as a baby’s expressions over the course of a play session, or larger, such as a trip to Charleston. Carousels let users create compilations by motif—​dewy flowers along a spring walk, or a week of restaurant visits with captioned mini-​reviews. Together, these create visual archives of life. Profiles may include reels—​short videos usually taken and uploaded from mobile devices that show cinematic slices of life—​a kindergartener’s school performance, a teenager’s makeup application, a goal scored in an intramural soccer game. Users can also “go live,” speaking directly to followers in real time (Facebook also offers live video feeds). One’s followers comment and react, prompting users to respond to within their live session, forming a candid conversation recorded for posterity. After protesters broke into the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez went live for over an hour to describe her experience barricading herself in a colleague’s office. Her followers, eager for first-​hand accounts of what happened, asked hundreds of questions in the accompanying chat. Taking cues from SNS platforms like Snapchat, Instagram embraces social media’s sense of ephemerality. (It should be noted that screenshots and servers hold on to data that has been deleted by individual users or deliberately sunsetted by the sites themselves.) While users across most SNSs can delete individual posts, some are created for temporary consumption. On Instagram, these are called “stories,” which remain visible for only 24 hours, and tend to share micro narratives and decontextualized moments of a user’s day, their immediate response to something in the news, or memes that stand in for their views on a topic of public importance. They also allow for candid interaction in the form of polls and questions that ask followers to interact with the story. When trying to decide on what to wear to wedding, a user might post side-​by-​side photos of two outfits and ask followers which one they like best. Stories can be permanently affixed to profiles as “highlights,” but most stories disappear after their 24 hours are up, although users can access old stories later through their private archive.

224  Life Writing Online Snapchat, founded in 2011, is also widely considered a platform for visual narratives, and while some “snaps” operate similarly to Instagram’s stories, disappearing after a short length of time, private snaps might be available for only a few seconds or minutes. Snapchat works more like instant messaging, privileging private connections over public ones. Public connections underpin platforms like Twitter, which operate like town squares. Trending topics offer digests of the largest conversations on the site and usually revolve around politics, entertainment, sports, and breaking news where updates on ongoing situations, such as a natural disaster or shooting, often come more quickly from users on the ground than from traditional news sources. Mainstream news sources even sometimes refer to such crowdsourced journalism in their own breaking news coverage. Twitter popularized hashtags to organize information about both trending and evergreen topics. The hashtag #mercuryretrograde allows astrology enthusiasts to see how a period of time associated with small misfortunes is playing out among users. The murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020, triggered #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd posts about the grief and fury of the Black community and its allies in the wake of yet another unjustified police killing. At first, Twitter limited posts to 140 characters but later increased that to 280. Users can number their micro-​posts into longer threads, but each must adhere to the character limit, and thus even long threads can be read quickly, like PowerPoint slides. While threads often function to disseminate information—​explanations of vaccines or mask safety during COVID-​19, for example—​t hey can also insert personal narratives into the dialogue of a trending topic. Whole communities such as #BlackTwitter and #AcademicTwitter have arisen on the platform, hosting ongoing conversations within specific communities. Some have created entire personas on the platform. Roxane Gay maintains a frank, personal, and witty account with many followers where she writes about everything from police brutality to cooking adventures with her partner to her favorite movies and TV shows, during which she will sometimes live tweet, reacting in real time. But then there is Melissa Broder, author of the novels The Pisces (2018) and Milk Fed (2021), who has maintained an anonymous Twitter account @sosadtoday since 2012. While readers familiar with Broder’s published work likely know this account belongs to her, her name does not appear on the profile. @sosadtoday casually and concisely explores depression, anxiety, and a kind of Zen-​n ihilism with a humorous bent, always written using lowercase letters, and often falling well short of Twitter’s character limit. Broder’s post on Apr. 7, 2022 reads, “i don’t feel well but i never have,” while her post on Apr. 18, 2022 says, “I’m very busy being upset.” Her account currently has 983K followers. @sosadtoday led to an essay collection, So Sad Today, published in 2016. The collection is not a compilation of Broder’s tweets but

Life Writing Online  225 influenced by her persona and interactions online. In her essay “I Took the internet Addiction Quiz and Won,” she writes, The Internet has given me the dopamine, attention, amplification, connection, and escape I seek. It has also distracted me, disappointed me, paralyzed me, and catalyzed a false sense of self. The Internet has enhanced my taste for isolation. It has increased my solipsism and made me even more incapable of dealing with reality. (Broder 72) Broder acknowledges her complex relationship with the internet and admits that her success as an online personality has come with a cost—​on Twitter, she can experience intimacy with her followers while simultaneously, through anonymity, maintaining a kind of privacy and myopia that sometimes borders on hiding. Personal narrative on Facebook will look different from personal narrative on Instagram or Twitter, even if similar experiences underpin it. As Goffman reminds us, we are adept at reading the literal room—​we know if it’s a board room, a banquet hall, or a bar. We present ourselves and our stories to suit the room and those in it with us. In the fall of 2020, an elementary schoolteacher found a way to let folks communally vent their anxieties and frustrations. Christopher Gollmar, who teaches in New York City where the pandemic struck catastrophically earlier that year, launched the website Just Scream! He provided a phone number for people to call and record themselves screaming as a voicemail (“Just Scream”). He added each scream to his “playlists,” organized on the site by categories such as “LOL,” “Babies,” “Rawr!”, “Hello, 2021!”, and “Hope.” Gollmar even had a category devoted to people singing the “Circle of Life” theme from Disney’s The Lion King. The site collected more than 25,000 screams in four months ( Just Scream!). Some recordings are almost growls, while others skew high-​pitched and terrified. Some scream phrases. Some groan as if in pain. Some nervously giggle before letting it out. Together, we hear a nation under the stress of a multi-​tiered crisis—​the rising death toll of the pandemic, the heightened tensions of the upcoming election, the struggling economy, the ongoing quest for racial equity and justice, and the loneliness of quarantine. “It made me consider whether I had actually screamed before,” writes Ashlie Stevens at Salon.com. “I know I’ve kind of yelped in fear or pain, or loudly exclaimed in delight. A full-​on scream, though?” Stevens eventually called the hotline and let loose (Stevens). Just Scream is only one digital space for primal release. TikTok employs a #screaming hashtag to organize its users’ screams, while Visit Iceland allows visitors to record a scream to be played over a secluded Icelandic vista (Stevens).

226  Life Writing Online These recordings may not be detailed personal narratives, but the anonymous screams do form a collective narrative of emotion. The human voice is a powerful instrument of connection; a person’s scream is intimately and uniquely theirs, a story told by sound. Released together, everyone’s screams are amplified and a unified story emerges. Individuals screamed alone but were comforted that they were screaming together. Conclusion In “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” Evan Selinger cites Bruno Latour’s argument that the combination of a human being and a gun forms a new, third being—​a new subject. The very design of guns, Selinger says, suggests their functionality because “gun design itself embodies behavior-​ shaping values; its material composition indicates the preferred ends to which it ‘should’ be used” (Selinger). The same could be said of any technology from spoons, to hammers, to stand mixers, to SNS interfaces. The modality of social media platforms encourages users to share their lives and experiences in discrete and scripted ways. The design of a tool teaches you how to use it. Every tool is also an act of rhetoric, encoded with the assumptions, values, intentions, and prejudices of the people that designed it. Whole industries of social media influencers have emerged through social media, allowing profit-​generating and increasingly professionalized iterations of these same digital narrative tools. Whether through advertising sold on one’s blog, for-​pay subscription services to user-​generated content as with platforms like Patreon (first launched in 2013) and Substack (2017), spokesperson deals, or as part of larger branding and merchandizing efforts an emerging industry of “content creators” are finding new ways of monetizing their life stories, which of course affects the stories and how they are told. Still, technology is not determinate. The reciprocal nature of use and design, maker and meaning, means whatever synthesis occurs continually emerges dialogically. Personal narrative has long adapted to new technologies of creation and dissemination—​for art, for life, for social progress, for propaganda, and for profit—​and such technologies have given rise to new forms and reimagined ones. Physical photo albums, scrapbooks, diaries, and resumés (which also shape storytelling through their material properties) have all found new iterations online that both reinforce and challenge pre-​ internet narrative traditions by combining forms and offering templates to users that encourage them to become essayists, photographers, videographers, collagists, podcasters, and professional recruiters by presenting the self across contexts and with a constantly growing collection of digital instruments. As new niches emerge in the endless fragmentation of internet culture, new platforms and storytelling approaches will continue to fill them.

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Index

Abandon Me (Febos) 63, 72–3 About a Mountain (D’Agata) 94, 99 “Acquiring Empathy Through Essays” (Bradley) 25 Adams, Abigail 149–50 Adams, John 28, 149–50, 165 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 73 A Drinking Life (Hamill) 59–60, 64 Agee, James 87–9 Alkire, Janet 167 All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Rosengarten) 93–4 All the Agents and Saints (Griest) 80–2, 93 The American Essay in the American Century (Stuckey-French) 10–11 “An Annotated Guide to My OKCupid Profile”(Hansen) 127–8 Anderson, Jourdon 151 Andrews, William L. 29 Angelou, Maya 58, 65–6 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 39 A Promised Land (Obama, Barack) 41 Arendt, Hanna 86, 99, 160–1 Argento, Asia 213 Ariel (Plath) 145 Arnold, Matthew 89, 108 The Art of Memoir (Karr) 25 Art of the Personal Essay (Lopate) 10, 15 Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 3 The Audacity of Hope (Obama, Barack) 41 Austin, Nefertiti 57–8 Autobiography (Franklin) 28–9 Autobiography of a Face (Grealy) 50 The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (Haley) 43 The Awl 211

Babine, Karen 3–4, 18, 22 Baconian essay 9–12, 14, 153, 155 Bacon, Sir Francis 9–10, 12 Baker, Jennifer Jordan 28 Baldwin, James 4, 11–12, 155–7 Balée, Susan 27, 65–6 The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (Gourevitch) 110 Batali, Mario 211–14 Beard, Jo Ann 22 Becoming (Obama, Michelle) 58 Bennett, Nolan 30–3 Between the World and Me (Coates) 156 Biden, Joe 41, 223 Birthday Letters (Hughes) 144–5 Biss, Eula 13, 54, 132–3 Black Edge (Kolhatkar) 102–4 Black, Emily Rapp 50, 55 Black List 211 #BlackLivesMatter 199, 224 Blogger (platform) 200 Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Frangello) 71–2, 129 The Blue Jay’s Dance (Erdrich) 55 Blue Nights (Didion) 54 Bly, Nellie (Elizabeth Cochran) 109 Bock, Charles 95 The Body Papers (Talusan) 49 Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (Febos) 24–5, 72 Bolin, Alice 105–6 Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (hooks) 44 The Book of Delights (Gay) 134 Boully, Jenny 136

Index  231 Bourdain, Anthony 49, 83, 85, 211, 213–14 Bowden, Mark 101–2, 104 boyd, danah 208, 215 Bradford, William 27, 100–1 Bradley, William 25 braided essays 114, 121–32 Breed, Clara 152 Broder, Melissa 224–5 Broome, Brian 63–4 Brosh, Allie 205–9 Buchanan, James 40 Burke, Jon 189–91 Burke, Tarana 198 Burroughs, William S. 59, 61 Butcher, Amy 129 Capote, Truman 4, 80, 89, 101, 107, 187 Carlson, Tucker 99 Carney, Kelly 156 Champagne, Brooke 120–21 Child, Lydia Marie 151 Clinton, Bill 41, 158 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 156 Cobain, Kurt 145–7 Coleman, Tyrese 19 Comi, Dana 153–4 Confessions (Augustine) 22 Cooke, Janet 96–7 Coolidge, Calvin 41 Cooper, Bernard 130 Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (Huber) 50 Coward, John M. 83 Crane, Elaine Forman 150 Crane, Stephen 78–9, 85, 89, 109 Crow Ghost, Doug 167–8 Cusk, Rachel 71 Czerwiec, Heidi 118, 135–6 D’Agata, John 94–6, 99, 115–16 “The Danger of a Single Story” (Adichie) 73 Darkness Visible (Styron) 50 Darkwater (Du Bois) 39 Davis, Angela 42 Davis, Emilie Frances 140–1 DeRuiter, Geraldine 212–14 Diary as Literature: Through the lens of Multiculturalism in America (Hooks) 139 Diary of a Contraband: the Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (Gould) 140

The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Nin) 142 Diaz, Jaquira 48–9 Didion, Joan 4, 53–4, 80, 99, 128, 187 Douglass, Frederick 30–4, 36, 38, 66 Dreams of My Father (Obama, Barack) 41, 158 Dreyfuss, Joel 188 Drinking: A Love Story (Knapp) 60–1 “Drug Facts” (Trembath-Neuberger) 116–17, 126 Du Bois, W. E. B. 38–40 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Du Bois) 39 Ear Hustle 191–3 Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert) 70–1 Einstein, Sarah 117–19, 122, 128 Eiseley, Lauren 65 Eleftheriou, Joanna 116, 118–19 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10, 25, 33–5, 79 The Empathy Exams ( Jamison) 77 Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (Rosenthal) 133–4 Erdrich, Louise 55 “The Essayification of Everything” (Wampole) 20 Evans, Walker 87–8 Facebook 198–9, 202, 214–23, 225 The Fact of a Body (Marzano-Lesnevich) 103–105 Febos, Melissa 13, 24–5, 62–3, 72–3 Fehrman, Craig 40 Fennelly, Beth Ann 129 Fierce Attachments (Gornick) 65 Finders, Keepers: The Story a Man Who Found $1 Million (Bowden) 101–2, 104 Fingal, Jim 95 The Fire Next Time (Baldwin) 155–6 First Person (television series) 196 Fitzpatrick, Brad 200 Fontaine, Tessa 19 Ford, Ashley C. 68–70 found essays 128–9 “The Fourth State of Matter” (Beard) 22 fragmented essay 13, 117–19, 135 Frangello, Gina 71–2, 129 Franklin, Anthony David 140 Franklin, Benjamin 10, 27–9, 38 Franklin, Joe 176, 179

232 Index The Freedmen’s Book (Child) 151 Frey, James 97–8 Friendster 215–16 From Our House (Martin) 67–8 Fusselman, Amy 131–2 Gaiman, Neil 195 Garrison, William Lloyd 30, 33 Gass, William 23–5, 72–3 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 29–30 Gay, Ross 134 Gay, Roxane 45–6, 49, 224 Gilbert, Elizabeth 70–1 Glass, Ira 175–9, 185, 189, 191 Glass, Stephen 97 Goffman, Erving 218–20, 225 Gollmar, Christopher 225 Gornick, Vivian 4, 19, 65, 68 Gould, William B. IV 140 Gourevitch, Philip 109–10 Grant, Ulysses S. 40 Grealy, Lucy 50 Greathouse, Corey D. 140 Green, George Dawes 194–5 Griest, Stephanie Elizondo 80–2, 85, 93–4 Guthrie, Thomas 165–7 Haake, Claudia B. 165 Haley, Alex 43, 49 Hall, Alan 178, 189–90 Hamill, Pete 59–60, 64 Hammon, Britton 29 Hanchett, Janelle 202, 209 Hannah-Jones, Nikole 26 Hansen, Silas 127–8 Hardstark, Georgia 106 Harper’s 11, 23, 97 A Harp In The Stars (Noble) 114, 122, 127–8, 136 Harrison, Kathryn 67–8 Hartstock, John C. 79–80, 84, 88–9, 91 hashtag 168, 198–9, 217, 224–5 Heavy: An American Memoir (Laymon) 26, 46–7, 156 Hemley, Robin 18–19 hermit crab essays 114, 125–7, 133 Hess, Amanda 180–1 Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph) 166–7 Hooks, Angela 139

hooks, bell (Gloria Jean Watkins) 13, 37, 44–5, 68 How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Riis) 79 How to Hide an Empire (Immerwahr) 161 How to Murder Your Life (Marnell) 62 How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays (Coleman) 19–20 Howard, Richard 130 Huber, Sonya 15–16, 50, 134–5 Huffington, Ariana 209 Hughes, Ted 144–5 Humphreys, Lee 148 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Gay) 45–6, 49 Hurston, Zora Neale 100–1, 111 Hyperbole and a Half (Brosh) 205–8 ideobody 153–4 ideograph 153 If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Van Meter) 17–18 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou) 65–6 I’ll Be Gone In The Dark (McNamara) 106–8 Immerwahr, Daniel 161 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself ( Jacobs) 31–2, 36, 151 In Cold Blood (Capote) 95, 101 Instagram 199, 207, 215, 217, 222–5 interiority 17–18, 30, 90–1 Into Thin Air (Krakauer) 98–9 Irby, Samantha 126–8, 203–4 Irving, Washington 10 Isay, David 193 Jackson, Charles 59 Jacobs, Harriet 31–2, 36, 151 Jaffer, Nabeelah 86 Jamison, Leslie 13, 62, 77–9, 81, 87–8, 190 Japanese American National Museum 152 Jefferson, Thomas 28, 149, 165–6 Jimmy’s World (Cook) 96–7 The Journal of Madam Knight (Knight) 141–2 Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (Burroughs) 59 Kakutani, Michiko 23, 41 Kalanithi, Paul 50–1

Index  233 Karr, Mary 25–6, 62 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 40 Khakpour, Porochista 50 Khar, Erin 61–2 Kilgariff, Karen 106 Kim, Christine Sun 171 King, Martin Luther 5, 35, 38, 153–5, 160, 164 Kingston, Maxine Hong 48 Kirkpatrick, David 199, 215, 218 The Kiss (Harrison) 67–8 Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain) 49, 211, 213 Kitchen, Judith 5 Klaus, Karl 13–14 Knapp, Caroline 60–2 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 24 Knight, Sarah Kembel 141–2 Koenig, Sarah 179–83, 185, 188 Kolhatkar, Sheelah 102–4 Kotlowitz, Alex 90, 109 Krakauer, Jon 85, 98–9 Kriegel, Leonard 17 Lamott, Ann 55–6 Lanier, Heather Kirn 55, 201–3 Larson, Jennifer 32 Larson, Sarah 187, 191–3 Lawson, Jenny 209 Laymon, Kiese 26, 46–7, 156–7 Lee, Hae Min 179–82 Leslie, Andrew 158–60 “Let’s Talk About Shredded Romaine Lettuce” (Rawlings) 124–5 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (King) 153–5 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans) 87–9 Levy, E. J. 49 The Liars’ Club (Karr) 26 The Lifespan of a Fact (D’Agata) 95 Lima, Natalie 119–20 Lindemann, Kurt 200–3, 205, 212 Lindgren, Mia 175, 181–2 LinkedIn 199, 215–16, 219, 221–2 Linton, Simi 50 LiveJournal 198, 200–1, 214 London, Jack 78–9, 85 Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Madden) 52–3 Lopate, Philip 10, 12, 15, 128

Lordi, Emily J. 155–7 The Lost Weekend ( Jackson) 59 Lovewell, Emma 211 Lutton, Linda 178 Madden, T Kira 52–3 The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay (Klaus) 13–14 Mailer, Norman 80, 89 Make It Scream, Make It Burn ( Jamison) 83, 87 Mancino, Susan 193 Manguso, Sarah 48, 147–8 Maps to Anywhere (Cooper) 130 Marcus, Eric 193 Marnell, Cat 62 Martin, Lee 67–8 Martin, Wendy 2 Marzano-Lesnevich, Alexandria 103–5 Mather, Cotton 100–1 Malcolm X 38, 43 McCarthy, Mary 65–6 McGee, Michael 153 McHugh, Siobhan 178–9, 187 McLemore, John B. 182–8 McNamara, Michelle 106–8 McNeal, Stephanie 207 McPhee, John 121–2 Medium (platform/publisher) 210–14 Memoirs: Year of Decisions (Truman) 41 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy) 65 Mendelsohn, Daniel 22–3 #MeToo 129, 168, 198–9, 211–12, 217 Men We Reaped (Ward) 51–2 Michaelsen, Scott 141 Milano, Alyssa 198 Milk, Harvey 163–4 Miller, Brenda 115, 125–6 A Million Little Pieces (Frey) 97–8 Montaigne, Michel de 8–9, 11–14, 114 Montaignian essay 9–10, 12, 14, 153 Moore, Dinty W. 96, 129 “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the U.S. Constitution” (Smithsonian) 152 Morris, Errol 110, 196 Mortenson, Greg 98 Mostern, Kenneth 35, 37, 39, 42–3 The Moth 194–5

234 Index Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America (Austin) 57–8 Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of Rebellion (Buchanan) 40 My America (The American Writers Museum) 169 “My Bachelorette Application” (Irby) 126–7 My Body Politic (Linton) 50 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass) 31, 33, 36 My Dearest Friend: Letter son Abigail and John Adams (Hogan and Taylor) 149–50 “My Heart as a Torn Muscle” (Noble) 127–8 Myspace 198, 214, 216–17 My Struggle (Knausgaard) 24 Nair, Yasmin 209 A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Rowlandson) 109 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Douglass) 30–1 New Journalism 80, 89, 97 The New Republic 97 Nezhukumatathil, Amy 131 Nichols, William W. 33–4, 36 Nin, Anaïs 142–4 Noble, Randon Billings 114–18, 121–2, 126–9, 135 Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis (Whitehead) 139–41 Obama, Barack 41, 158, 209 Obama, Michelle 58 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich) 54–5 “Once More to the Lake” (White) 11, 22 On Immunity: An Inoculation (Biss) 13, 132–3 The 1619 Project 26 Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Manguso) 48, 147–8 Operating Instructions (Lamott) 55–6 Ordinary Girls (Diaz) 48–9 Orlean, Susan 84, 210 Orwell, George 11–13, 167 Orwell’s Roses (Solnit) 13

Oswalt, Patton 106 Outassetè 165–6 Ozick, Cynthia 145 Painter, Nell Irvin 161–3 Patten, Neal A. 161–2 Peloton 211 Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Grant) 40 Peters, Torrey 128–9 The Pharmacist’s Mate (Fusselman) 131–2 Philip, Leila 18 Philyaw, Deesha 56 Plath, Sylvia 4, 144–5 Podnieks, Elizabeth 143–4 “Poor Teeth” (Smarsh) 14–15 Poster Child (Black) 50 Powell, Brent 35 Profiles in Courage (Kennedy) 40 Progressive Era 79, 110 Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (Biden) 41 Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (Biden) 41 Punch Me Up to the Gods (Broome) 63–4 Raising a Rare Girl (Lanier) 201–2 Rawlings, Wendy 124–5 Reddy, Nancy 56–7 Reed, Brian 182–9 Renegade Mothering (Hanchett) 202, 209 Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (Treuer) 82–3 Rich, Adrienne 54–5 Richtel, Matt 210 Riis, Jacob 79, 89, 109 Roiland, Josh 84–5, 108 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 152, 160–1 Roosevelt, Theodore 41, 78 Rosengarten, Theodore 93–4 Rosenthal, Any Krouse 133 Rosin, Hanna 97 Rowlandson, Mary 109 Ryder, Ed 177 Saint-Aubin, Arthur F. 146–7 Saji, Sweetha 207 Schumacher-Matos, Edward 188, 191 “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (McPhee) 121–2 The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Philyaw) 56

Index  235 segmented essays 114, 117, 121–2, 124, 126, 129–32, 136 Selasi, Taiye 170–1 “Self-Made Men” (Douglass) 34 Self-Portrait in Apologies (Einstein) 117–19, 122 Selinger, Evan 226 Serial 4, 179, 181–2, 188 Shah, Sejal 130–1 “The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study (Miller)” 125–6 Shockley, Evelyn 44 Sick (Khakpour) 50 The Situation and the Story (Gornick) 4 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Irving) 10, 15 Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Didion) 80 Smarsh, Sarah 14–15 Smith, Chris 170 Snapchat 199, 217, 223–4 Snap Judgment 188–91 “Snowbound” (Lima) 119–20 The Social Network (film) 214–15 Solnit, Rebecca 9, 13 Somebody’s Daughter (Ford) 68–70 “Some Childhood Dreams Really Do Come True” (Fennelly) 129 “Son of Mr. Green Jeans” (Moore) 129 So Sad Today (Broder) 224–5 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 38–9 speculative nonfiction 24–5 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe 167–8 Stanton, Maureen 22 St. Augustine 22–3 Steffens, Lincoln 99, 109 Steger, Lawrence 176–7 Steinberg, Michael 4–5 Steinitz, Rebecca 201 Stern, Julia 142 The Still Point of the Turning World (Black) 55 Stone, Zak 211–12 “The Story of A” (Frangello) 71, 129 S-Town 4, 179, 182–8 Strayed, Cheryl 51, 60 Strung Out (Khar) 61–2 Stuckey-French, Ned 10–11 Styron, William 50 Substack 203, 226 “Success in Circuit: Lyric Essay as Labrynth” (Czerwiec) 135

Sukrungruang, Ira 48 Supremely Tiny Acts (Huber) 134–5 Syed, Adnan 179–82 Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (Sukrungruang) 48 Tall, Deborah 115 Talusan, Grace 49 Taranto, Claudia 179 TED Talks 169–72, 179 The Telling (Zolbrod) 49 This American Life 175–8, 188, 191 This Is One Way to Dance (Shah) 130–1 Thoreau, Henry David 25, 33–6, 49, 128 Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (Krakauer) 98 TikTok 199, 218, 225 Transcendentalism 5, 33–6, 78, 84–5 “Transgender Day of Remembrance” (Peters) 128–9 Trembath-Neuberger, Lauren 116–17, 126 Treuer, David 82–3, 85 True Crime: An American Anthology (Schechter) 100 Truman, Harry S. 41 Trump, Donald 6, 41, 72, 122–3, 159–60, 213–14 Truth, Sojourner 161–3 Tsumagari, Fusa 152 Twain, Mark 40, 100 Twitter 198–9, 207, 210, 213, 217, 224–5 The Unexpected Universe (Eiseley) 65 Up From Slavery (Washington) 38 van Dijck, José 219–22 Van Meter, Ryan 17–18 Vaughan, William 28–9 Venkatesan, Sathyaraj 207 Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto (Huber) 15 Wagner, Vivian 70 Walden; or, Life In the Woods (Thoreau) 33–5, 49 Wampole, Christy 20 Ward, Jesmyn 51–2 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Wilkerson) 90–3

236 Index Warnock, John 97 Washington, Booker T. 38 Washington, Carvell 193 Washington, Glynn 188–91 Washuta, Elissa 122–4 Wayne, Teddy 179 “We Regret to Inform You” (Miller) 125–6 We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (Gourevitch) 109 Weinstein, Harvey 198, 213 Wells Barnett, Ida B. 110–11 Wheaton, Whil 209 When Breath Becomes Air (Kalanithi) 50–1 Whip Smart (Febos) 62–3 The White Album (Didion) 80 White, E. B. 11, 22 Whitehead, Karsonya Wise 139–41 Wild (Strayed) 51, 60 Wilkerson, Isabel 85, 90–3 Williams, Evan 210–11, 214, 217 Williams, Jhodie-Ann 191

Williams, Sharone 2 Wilson, Christopher P. 84, 99 Wolfe, Tom 80, 89–91, 97, 109, 187 Wolff, Tobias 67 The Woman Warrior (Kingston) 48 “Women These Days” (Butcher) 129 Wood, Jessica 146 Woodlin, William P. 140 Woods, Earlonne 191–3 Wordpress 200, 202, 208 World of Wonders (Nezhukumatathil) 131 The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) 53–4 yellow/sensational journalism 79, 88–9, 109 Yglesias, Matt 210 Zhaabowekwe, Tara Houska 168 Zolbrod, Zoe 49 Zuckerberg, Mark 199, 214, 216, 218–19, 222