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March 13, 2006
Making the Private Public (Discourse)
My supervising professor and I had a bit of a verbal a few weeks ago. He said that written accounts of personal experiences -- particularly in the vein of "my life was like such and such and now it's so much better" -- were useless as pieces of public discourse. Such writing, he argued, is only good for the writer's personal expression. It does not give the audience anything to do...other than perhaps become jealous or jaded.
He's right, of course, in his observation that many a "testimony time" devolves into a perverted challenge to one-up other folks with the extent and severity of one's own trials and sins. And I suppose he's also correct in saying that a lot of undergraduate "personal experience" writing falls far short of even a broad definition of "public discourse." But I wanted to argue for a place, albeit a limited one, for the personal essay to live in the public realm. "Maybe when I'm older," I told him, "I'll agree completely with you. But right now I'm young, and I need it."
In their "Modern Love" column, the New York Times ran an essay entitled Two Decembers: Loss and Redemption" (you have to pay for the article now, but you can read a copy of it here). When the author, Anne Marie Feld, was sixteen, her mother committed suicide. In precise, evocative sentences, Feld's essay recounts her mother's last day, the painful uncovering of her mother's hidden mental problems, and Feld's attempt to distance herself from the ordeal. It's written faithfully... not dramatically, not emotionally, not self-pityingly. Redemption comes when Feld gives birth to her own daughter almost twenty years to the day after her mother's suicide. She ends, "But when they finally returned her raw, chickenlike body to me after bathing her, my first thought was that she looked like my mother."
After reading that essay for the first time, I felt more human. You see, I'm only twenty-four. My hurt, my losses, my triumphs, and my relationships have all been real...but they've also been thoe of a young woman who grew up on a small island and who went to college on a small mountain. I'll be the first to admit that my slice of life-participation has been a narrow one.
Essays like Feld's -- authentic, thoughtful, and well-written reflections on private experiences -- let me ache or rejoice in a new way. They let me be baffled about tensions I did not know existed. They let me struggle with temptations I have never faced. They let me mourn for people I did not know. They let me marvel at places I have not traveled.
Novels can often incite the same catharsis, of course. But, to me, there's something transparent and intimate about the short, focused, personal essay. So much life is compressed into a few short pages and explodes when read by a curious mind. In this thing, at least, I do not think I would mind being old before my time.
Writing | By elissa | 03:56 PM
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Comments
elissa
i agree. your remarks are especially pertinent to blogging, the recently established realm of e-gushing. if people are going to tell their stories (which i think they should), they need to draw others in via clear, thoughtful, and heartfelt communication. otherwise it becomes a one way conversation that benefits no one. the best story tellers are the ones who enable their audience to suspend belief and experience what is being relayed. the worst story tellers are the ones who cause their audience to want to suspend the telling until . . . .
mg
Posted by: matthew gillikin at March 14, 2006 11:07 PM
Zora Neale Hurston says in Their Eyes Were Watching God that the greatest human longing is self-revelation (a paraphrase). Funny how that is God's longing, too, and he accomplished it by giving us a story to live by. A very real, personal story.
Posted by: laura k at March 15, 2006 07:54 AM
