10 Amazing Personal Essays
My favorite personal essays showcase a vivid personality and clear mind or perception of the world. I find these qualities more engaging than really amazing material.
There are great, award-winning essays focusing on horrifying or remarkable stories—a hitchhiker who survives an encounter with a serial killer targeting hitchhikers, for example. Of course, those story-driven essays also have to be very well written, and the one I alluded to in the previous sentence contains beautiful prose.
But I’m especially interested in essays that manage to achieve a similar level of potency with somewhat mundane material.
This list contains an essay by Melissa Febos, for example, whose first book was about her time as a dominatrix (exciting material!) but by far my favorite writing from her is after she’d exhausted that “dramatic” material.
Here are ten of my favorite personal essays, though I may add more in the future. Many are wonderful demonstrations of the nine types of essays. Of course, you or anyone else has the right to make your own best-10 list.
1. Annie Dillard: "This is the Life"
I adore this essay. Written in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it doesn’t talk about those events directly, or even obliquely. Instead, it offers a mind-expanding dirge on cultural relativism, which sounds abstract, but I assure you it is not. The piece lays bare the ephemeral nature of all human endeavors and shows how our values are only the reflection of our own very narrow field of perception.
First line: Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit, as everyone else does.
2. Leslie Jamison: "Dreamers in Broad Daylight"
Jamison’s best essay might be “The Empathy Exams,” but everyone says that. This essay is a great example of how a writer can take a narrow subject (in this case, daydreaming), and go at it from numerous angles—using her own embarrassing stories of daydreaming about guys she’s attracted to, among other things.
But Jamison also interviews researchers, performs her own research, and weaves it all together. Jamison’s personal essay shows the advantages of having a clear subject and multiple “modes” — personal story, interviews, and analysis. This is what I call “mode shifting,” and if you take my Personal Essay Masterclass, you’ll hear all about it.
First line: Once upon a time I met a stranger and in my mind we lived an entire life together.
3. Wesley Morris: "My Mustache, My Self"
Morris weaves a riveting, sometimes funny, often probing and moving essay about what might be the most boring topic — growing a pandemic mustache.
Morris finds stakes deep within this, and produces a deep meditation on the meaning of mustaches across historical and cultural spaces, the mustache within Black culture (if there is such a thing), gay culture (ditto), and more.
First line: Like a lot of men, in pursuit of novelty and amusement during these months of isolation, I grew a mustache.
4. Terry Castle: "My Heroin Christmas"
Castle was assigned an article by the London Review of Books about an exhibition on Madame Pompadour and Seventeenth Century French court life. She turned this vastly too long piece, which has nothing to do with that subject, many years after her deadline.
The essay is absurdly long and details how Castle’s life is more of less upended by her inexplicable obsession with an obscure biography about a jazz musician named Art Pepper who lived a colorful (often extremely obscene) felonious and debauched life.
First line: Writing this in San Francisco, having just come back from San Diego and a heroin Christmas at my mother’s.
5. Tim Kreider: “I Know What You Think About Me”
A relatively short essay, in which the first third focuses a situation where Kreider was cc’d on an email disparaging him; the last two-thirds of the essay ruminates on the larger subject of knowing or not knowing what people actually think about you.
I admire how he demonstrates the power of curiosity and a compelling train of thought. He has Interesting things to say about, “Do you want to know what people think about you? If so, why? If not, why not?”
First line: Recently I received an e-mail that wasn’t meant for me, but was about me.
6. Melissa Febos: "The Wild, Sublime Body"
This essay appeared in Best American Essays 2022 after being published in The Yale Review, and showcases the best of Febos, in that it is intensely corporeal. Febos’s personal essay has a very clear subject—her body and her relationship with her body. Moving, interesting, and wonderfully digressive.
First line: My mother had raised me vegetarian, and though I harbored no real desire to eat meat, sometimes, in summer, I would take a hunk of watermelon to a remote corner of our yard and pretend it was a fresh carcass.
7. John Jeremiah Sullivan: "Mister Lytle"
Possibly my favorite example of one of my favorite forms of personal essay, what I call a “portrait essay.” In this piece, Sullivan tells of a time he spent living with a beloved old writer in the South.
A very heterosexual Sullivan worked for the writer, who we eventually discover was smitten with his young lodger/employee. It’s a beautifully written essay and you get a delicious dramatic arc of a relationship between two people.
First line: When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade.
8. Sarah Manguso: "The Cure"
This 750-word personal memoir essay is an intense depiction of Manguso’s college experience of nearly dying from a rare blood disease. Manguso worried death would certainly happen if she didn’t have sex with more than one person in her life.
At last, one of her “legendarily promiscuous” friends agreed to have sex with her—and she recovered. Surprisingly heartbreaking, also funny, this essay is notable for the fact that 50% of it is devoted to a detailed description of the medical procedures used to treat her illness.
First line: For a year I worried that I might die having had sexual intercourse with only one person.
9. James Baldwin: "Notes on a Native Son"
Baldwin was, I suspect, one of the smartest writers of the 20th Century, and this essay shows his roving mind at its best. Ostensibly about a period of time when Baldwin was in his late teen years, and his father’s dying, but also about living under Jim Crow, and later in life when he lived in a still segregated New Jersey.
A true train-of-thought essay, the performance is less in terms of story, as digressions expand and probe in different directions. This is the kind of piece I’m reluctant to use with students, as it’s almost impossible to emulate.
First line: On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died.
10. David Sedaris: "Understanding Owls"
This comic personal essay has a pretty great turn in the second half and contains amazing dialogue. Sedaris is in a shop of curiosities and oddities, trying to buy a taxidermied owl for his husband, Hugh. The shop owner instinctually sees deep into Sedaris’s morbid soul and offers a surprising object to show him. And makes him touch it.
First line: Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, “I’ve got to weed out some of these owls”?
FAQs About Great Personal Essays
How Do I Write a Great Personal Essay?
First, understand your ideal reader’s expectations. Does the reader expect to be entertained, amused, or enlightened by your personal essay? Most likely, they’ll expect all three. Then, craft your essay to meet your reader’s needs while revealing underlying truths about the world and telling a great story. To understand what your reader wants, it can help to review editors’ insights on the personal essay.
Where Do I Send a Personal Essay?
You can send your personal essay to contests and to publications accepting personal essays. However, before you start sending out your work, you might try taking a personal essay class and having your piece workshopped—essentially, other writers read the work and give you feedback to improve the piece. Personal essays are a very challenging form to succeed at, right away.
How Do I Get Started on a Personal Essay?
Writers begin personal essays in a few ways—by recalling a pivotal moment in their lives that contains a narrative arc, or by using a writing prompt.
This is an asynchronous class, which starts on Monday, July 8, 2024, is for anyone struggling with a book. Although that first sprint of fifty pages into a book—either novel or nonfiction—can be exhilarating, it’s hard to sustain. Sooner or later, you’re likely to find yourself in a creative ditch, wheels spinning. We’ll take a look at when to revise and when not to, as well as which questions are productive and which are not. We’ll seek out ways to reinvigorate ourselves for much more writing. The final class will be a tutorial on the business of finding an agent and/or publisher for your book.