the year of magical overthinking

I got an email last month to remind me that my website subscription and domain name were due for renewal, which also served as a much-needed reminder that I actually have a website. I haven’t written anything here in ages; my last post was my book deal announcement, almost a year ago. Various things have got in the way; I moved house twice in the last twelve months, I changed jobs, I’m in the final weary throes of my PhD. I spent a lot of time this year editing my novel and short stories, and a lot of time trying to plan and write new ones, and then a lot of time having an existential crisis about whether I would be able to write anything good ever again. (Jury still very much out!)

I started a blog years ago partly because I really wanted to get into writing personal essays. I read a lot of memoirs and essay collections in my twenties; I especially loved the ones that made me feel as though I was at the pub with a friend who always has the best anecdotes. I suspect a lot of people around my age (and I am including myself in this) have often adopted an Ephron-inspired ‘everything is copy’ attitude to processing our experiences—instantly turning them into material with which we can entertain people, fancying ourselves colourful raconteurs like Miriam Margoyles on a chat-show couch. I think my urge to write personal pieces came from a desire to somehow bottle the high I got from swapping stories with my friends, all the mirth and meltdowns logged in neat paragraphs.

I’ve hit the skids a little with personal essays over the past year or more. I subscribe to multiple newsletters by authors whose essays are thoughtful and intimate and beautiful with a well-crafted arc and a satisfying conclusion, and when I read their work I sometimes go back to glance over my own unfinished essays, and I wonder how exactly I once thought a longread that swung very clumsily between discussions of disordered eating, roast potatoes, Hannibal Lecter, and The Devil Wears Prada (2004) was going to be the centrepiece of my White Album.

As well as this, my social media feeds have been filled with discourse spirals about viral first-person pieces clearly designed to garner rage clicks and drive up engagement. One of the main sources of frustration for me when I read this sort of piece is when the author seems to think that candour (real or affected) automatically translates to good writing. I read these articles and wonder if their authors think that simply serving up problematic cold cuts from their personal life demonstrates a brave and brutal honesty and self-awareness that deserves congratulation. I don’t believe readers should necessarily judge an essay to be bad based on its writer’s poor moral conduct, but nor do I think an essay should be uncritically praised just because someone owned up to being a prick in their twenties. Confession doesn’t equal skill or usefulness of prose.

I think of times I’ve been to stand-up comedy nights when there’s a first-timer doing a five-minute spot, and they don’t have the structure, pacing, or presence to be good at formally telling jokes on stage, but you can sometimes tell they’re probably very funny in conversation. Their friends have likely laughed at their stories and told them they’re hilarious and perhaps some have said ‘you should do comedy!’ and they have supposed that a good sense of humour in an informal conversational setting will naturally transfer well to the stage, when this often isn’t true. It doesn’t mean they aren’t funny, it just means that stand-up isn’t the right forum for them.

In the same vein, although I like to think I can spin my intimate personal experiences into a good yarn over wine with friends, I’m not sure the field of raw confessional essays is somewhere I will ever really thrive. Everything may well be copy, but pretty much any aspect of my interior life that would make for genuinely exciting reading is copy you couldn’t waterboard out of me.

I renewed my website subscription in the end; I went back through the blog archive and realised that although it’s not Didion, it’s not terrible, and I enjoy writing it. I don’t think I’ll have the courage to bare my soul any time soon, but I do like writing busy nothings about my work, my friendships, my passions (Jane Austen, Sex and the City, wine), and I want to write more. If you’re here, thanks for reading! Keep er lit. xx

Cover photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash