Letter from the Editor #3
Defending the personal essay *again*; A visit from mom; RIP MTV...?
Readers,
Hello! I’m enjoying writing these missives, and I hope you’re enjoying reading them. Read the rest of the series here. Tomorrow I’ll have one heck of a Friday Link Roundup for you.
By the by, I emailed free subscribers this week about a 20% discount on paid subscriptions for life, to make up for an Amazon Web Services outage last week that interfered with several subscribers converting to paid. Then that email got stuck in everyone’s Gmail “promotions” folder.
Oy vey. 🤦🏻♀️
Defending the Personal Essay for About the Ninety-Millionth Time
I’ve lost count of how many times someone with a big platform has taken a giant, public dump on the two (related) literary categories that mean the most to me: personal essays and memoirs. It always involves a mean kind of punching down at those of us willing to vulnerably wear our tender insides on the outside, and each time I’ve felt compelled to stand up for us.
It just happened again. Someone specifically derided personal essays on
. Not on my watch, Bucko.
(I’m not going to dignify the kerfuffle by explaining the who, what, where—it’s just the same B.S. all over again. And I’m not referring to the Dirt piece that essay nerds are freaking out over.)
To know me is to know that I freaking love personal narratives—can’t get my hands on, nor publish, enough of them. I absolutely devour memoirs and personal essay collections. Sometimes I read fiction, but the novels I prefer read like memoirs. This is the writing I naturally gravitate toward. It moves me, expands my understanding of what it is to be human, and makes me feel less alone in this crazy world.
To know me is to know that I freaking love personal narratives—can’t get my hands on, nor publish, enough of them. This is the writing I naturally gravitate toward. It moves me, expands my understanding of what it is to be human, and makes me feel less alone in this crazy world.
For a long time I firmly believed personal narratives alone could effectively change the world. The backlash against all kinds of social progress in this country has sadly disabused me of that notion—that there’s a direct line between the sharing of true stories, and meaningful, lasting social change. But I still very much believe it’s possible to open people’s hearts and minds through personal writing. And I find the identification that takes place between writer and reader to be incredibly valuable.
This is the kind of exchange I live for: A skilled writer compellingly shares an experience they’ve had, lending new insight, often into a phenomenon that is somewhat common or mundane; a reader suddenly understands their own similar experience in a new, more expansive light; the reader reaches out to tell the writer how much they identified; both feel seen, and understood, and less alone.
***
Currently I’m reading Diane Keaton’s 2011 memoir, Then Again. While on vacation in early September, back-to-back I inhaled
’s How to Lose Your Mother one day, and ’s All the Way to the River the next. My all-time favorite book, the one I always come back to, is ’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.
Somewhat famously, I love Joan Didion’s essays that are more personal, not just “Goodbye to All That,” (duh) but also “On Keeping a Notebook,” “Why I Write,” “On Self-Respect,” etc. (Somehow I still haven’t read The Year of Magical Thinking or Blue Nights. I have copies of both, and I need to get on that! I’ve been too conflicted to read Notes to John, containing her posthumously published journals. )
A dozen years ago, I turned my admiration for Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” into the cornerstone of an entire career built around personal essays and memoir. Inspired by it, I published two essay anthologies about loving and leaving New York City. I went on to serve as the personal essays editor at Longreads for several years. In addition to publishing personal essays every week here at Oldster, I also publish another magazine on Substack called
, which features, and is all about, first-person writing. (And which has a “Goodbye to All That” section.) Plus I’ve published a memoir of my own.
So, yeah, I’m deep in it. Obviously I’ll keep working in these categories as a writer, editor, and publisher—and defending them for as long, and as often, as is necessary.
And here’s my brilliant recommendation for people who don’t enjoy personal essays and memoirs: Just don’t read them. Maybe that will leave you less inclined to shit on them. Think of all the time that will save you.
Going Through Old Photos with Mom (and Taking New Ones)
My mom came to visit last weekend. We had the loveliest time—playing Rummikub, going for walks around my neighborhood, visiting with friends of mine whom she’s met before, eating, eating, and eating some more.
She got to meet my friends’ 2-year-old son, and they hit it off instantly. My mom, a long-time elementary school teacher, has a great affinity for little kids. After we all had lunch together, the toddler grabbed my mother’s hand, led her over to our piano, climbed up on the bench, and proceeded to play “moosic” for her.
On the final evening of her visit, I took a box of old family photos down from a shelf so we could look at them together. We’ve done this before, but not with a particular album, my falling-apart “baby book,” containing the earliest photos of me as an infant.
At the beginning of the month, on my birthday, I’d flipped through it on my own, realizing maybe for the first time just how young my mom was when she had me. She was just 25.
It was kind of wild bookending a 60-year time span in this way. The disintegrating album holding the photos made me appreciate just how long a span of time that really is.
It also made me appreciate that the photos, and our physical forms, have survived in better shape. Time to transfer the pics to a new album…
RIP MTV
Is MTV dead? I think it might be? I’m not going to pretend I understand the difference between MTV “Shutting Down Some of Its Music Channels After 40 Years” and being completely dunzo, but a lot of journalists and music fans are now eulogizing the channel that pioneered music videos, so make of that what you will.
Also, MTV co-founder and former Viacom CEO Tom Freston has a new book, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, due out November 18th. (Vulture/NYMag has an excerpt.)
So I’ve been thinking a lot about my time working at MTV News.
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