To call oneself a born personal essayist seems implicitly ironic, like calling oneself a born dowager. But there are people like that -- people like me -- who seem to stay latent until a suppressed vocation gene is switched on by the attainment of some appropriate life stage. I remember registering the following thought: now that I've waited out the lived part of my life, my real work can finally begin.
Emily Fox Gordon, Book of Days
At the age of 43, wildly frustrated at my inability to publish my two novels and several short stories, I enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. I'd resisted this route -- opposition to the academicization of writing has been one of my pet peeves -- but I felt I had no choice. I joined Rosellen Brown's wonderful fiction workshop, where I continued to write competent but not very interesting fiction. At the end of the semester, she drew me aside and said "I think you're an essayist."
Essayist? To me, essays were the 19th century chestnuts I'd read in high school -- or had been told to read. (I spent most of my class time in the bushes, smoking, and missed many highlights of the curriculum.) But Phillip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay was published later that year, and it was a revelation. Here was a genre that captivated me, and one that made use of exactly the tendencies I'd taken to be liabilities in myself. Self-doubt, rumination, detachment, introspection: all these are the materials of the personal essay.
Over a span of nearly twenty years, I wrote the ten essays that appear in Book of Days; Personal Essays. Along the way, two of these grew and became memoirs, a process about which I've had some doubts (see "Book of Days"). Putting these essays together in a book has been one of the great satisfactions of my life, and I've been delighted to realize that they themselves form a kind of patchwork memoir, a more honest one, really, than either of the two memoirs I've published.
But what about fiction? Could I take another crack at it? I needed, I realized, to pick my spots. I would never be a big-canvas novelist like Annie Proulx, but I could certainly try my hand at comic fiction. I decided it would be best to write what I know. This was life in academia, where as faculty brat and faculty wife and occasional instructor, I've been a prisoner all my life. The result was my first novel, It Will Come To Me.
My second novel, Madeleine and Jane, a comic bildungsroman that features two twenty-ish girls struggling to survive in the Manhattan of 1968, is currently under review.
In the past few years, I've returned to the well of personal essay. My current project, supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, is to put together a second collection, tentatively titled The View From Now. Three of these essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in American Scholar, Colorado Review and Southwest Review.
Essayist? To me, essays were the 19th century chestnuts I'd read in high school -- or had been told to read. (I spent most of my class time in the bushes, smoking, and missed many highlights of the curriculum.) But Phillip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay was published later that year, and it was a revelation. Here was a genre that captivated me, and one that made use of exactly the tendencies I'd taken to be liabilities in myself. Self-doubt, rumination, detachment, introspection: all these are the materials of the personal essay.
Over a span of nearly twenty years, I wrote the ten essays that appear in Book of Days; Personal Essays. Along the way, two of these grew and became memoirs, a process about which I've had some doubts (see "Book of Days"). Putting these essays together in a book has been one of the great satisfactions of my life, and I've been delighted to realize that they themselves form a kind of patchwork memoir, a more honest one, really, than either of the two memoirs I've published.
But what about fiction? Could I take another crack at it? I needed, I realized, to pick my spots. I would never be a big-canvas novelist like Annie Proulx, but I could certainly try my hand at comic fiction. I decided it would be best to write what I know. This was life in academia, where as faculty brat and faculty wife and occasional instructor, I've been a prisoner all my life. The result was my first novel, It Will Come To Me.
My second novel, Madeleine and Jane, a comic bildungsroman that features two twenty-ish girls struggling to survive in the Manhattan of 1968, is currently under review.
In the past few years, I've returned to the well of personal essay. My current project, supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, is to put together a second collection, tentatively titled The View From Now. Three of these essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in American Scholar, Colorado Review and Southwest Review.