How Trivial is the Personal Essay

[Ethan Gach]

At the New Inquiry, Phoebe Maltz Bovy makes the bold statement that, "Only fiction can be about the trivial without being trivial."

 

She cites Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan,

“there is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time.” Nolan advises journalists to turn to the “billions of people in the world who do have interesting lives” and to tell their “stories of love, and war, and crime, and peril, and redemption.”

She argues that the emphasis on non-fiction and the convergence of 90% of online writing to some sort of boilerplate amalgamation of aggregated news and personal experience/reaction has led to weaker writing in many cases. Where as certain material would have been eventual fodder for a more decisive fictional piece, it's not spit out every couple hours with all the seeming care of a facebook update (this may be overstating it just a bit).

 

While I'm not in agreement with all of it, and think she should flesh out some of her points more (e.g. what IS in fact so magical about the shift in expectations that accompanies something when it's fiction vs. non-fiction?), I think the important take-way is that if you want to write a personal essay, fiction or not, you have to tell an interesting story--full stop. And that's of course where the whole writer thing comes in.