In Defense of the Personal Essay
Ghost it at your peril. Look what happened to E. Jean Carroll.
If you’ll read it, I’ll write it. Basically, that’s my attitude about what I do. Give ’em what they want. My love of writing and need to feed the reader beast led to a time travel novel recently in which the main character opens a door and tumbles back through time.
And blow me down, if that’s not what I thought had happened to me when I browsed through Medium recently and found some unhappy members.
The founder of a fledgling startup wrote a piece back in 2015 complaining bitterly that Medium’s discourse had fallen off a cliff. He wasn’t getting the intellectual engagement he had been used to. Since the (then) current crop of articles wasn’t lighting his fire, he threatened to leave. Don’t go, I thought. You’re teaching me about bitcoin.
Next, I came across a few more disgruntled writers. They hit closer to home. They focused their attacks on the personal essay. The subjective article. They argued this type of writing didn’t offer value and had no place on the platform. They suggested Medium has become a girly thing, squeezing out the men.
That’s when the room swooshed, and I got a little dizzy. I felt myself falling, falling, falling, and I landed with a thump. My clothes were still so 21st century, yet everything else smelled like I’d landed back in the 1950s. Not the gender wars again.
In the past 80 years, I’d watched our neighbor Mr. Colon start up his old Ford with a hand crank under the bumper to viewing astronauts dangle in space on my phone. Yet here I was in the middle of a battle I’d hope would be over by now.
Back in the day, when I was coming up, we‘d talk about the war between the sexes. Well, the women would talk, and the men would talk down. Ref. Mad Men. These days it’s the patriarchy.
By whatever name, it’s men and women fighting each other for a place in the sun. The battlefield seems to be the personal essay. Subjective writing. It’s what I do on Medium, and suddenly I had skin in the game.
Some people call the personal essay whining, and I say, thank you for noticing.
One person’s whine is another’s cry from the heart. Last time I checked Medium’s TOS, we could write anything short of libel. Medium provided the perfect device for turning off stories we don’t like; it’s called No, thank you, next, please. Meaning we can scroll through content until our eyes light up at something interesting, a piece that makes you clap. Medium’s way of saying More please, sir.
Family drama isn’t your thing? Great, how about book reviews? Stories of addiction and recovery set your teeth on edge? May I interest you some travel pieces? Don’t care to read about anyone else’s sex life? Then why should you? Dive deep into the latest discovery on the effectiveness of morning habits or how Facebook’s cryptocurrency is going to affect the global economy.
Nobody has to read personal stories (though you might learn a thing or two), but stop for a minute before you call them whining. Don’t’ extinguish them from the platform by saying they don’t matter. These pieces that speak to the writers’ life experiences mired in injustice, abuse, discrimination, or some other suffering based simply on who they are.
Women who’ve been sexually assaulted. LGBTQs deprived of civil liberties. People of color denied access to voting. People coming up in vile family situations who’ve made bad choices for which they’ve paid dearly and now struggle to find their way. Sufferers of every variety of mental illness. Workers who don’t receive equal pay for equal work. No one has to read any of this, but a little empathy helps a person grow.
Just don’t call a subjective article whining. You might be pointing the finger at yourself.
Before joining Medium, I wrote fiction and the occasional cookbook. I never felt compelled to write personal stories. I don’t kiss and tell, I always said. But that’s what I’ve been doing on Medium, talking about my life. If you’re on Medium and don’t write hard science or tech, or poems, fiction or recipes, what’s left but subjective essays? Whether it’s how to hack productivity, found a startup, cheer on a writer facing rejection, or recover from depression, we’re all writing what we know, our lives.
The form is the personal essay. People who write disparagingly of those who chose to reveal their innermost lives also write personal essays, though they couch it in topics such as Work. Productivity. Secrets of Success. But it’s all a subjective slant on a slice of life. They can give their pieces any label they like, but if it’s couched in personal experience, describes a challenge overcome, or gives vent to a rant, well, a personal essay by any other name is still a subjective story.
That’s what Jeff Bezos did when he chose Medium to out David Pecker, making clear his feelings about being blackmailed. I’d say Bezos, the richest man in the world, creator of the company that changed the way the world works, knows where the power readers are. Some of those CEOs even clap for my very subjective stories about what it’s like to get old, something even rich guys and data nerds have to face.
After reading all the complaints, I decided I’d had enough of the grumbling and debates about Medium-worthy content. From my brief review, it’s still the big boys that get 30k claps for their niche-rich articles on data, tech, biz, and science to my measly few hundred for a successful subjective piece.
I’m done with the gender wars, I thought. I’ve seen this before, back in the ’50s and ’60s when a female was called the little lady. It will never end, so let the fighters fight. Whose got some cat videos?
And then E. Jean Carroll told her story, and I had to rethink this whole argument.
When Ms. Carroll described the president raping her, I thought, surely, he won’t survive this allegation. What could be bigger than the president accused of a capital crime?
But I watched the story get dropped, or put on the back pages of big newspapers. Some news outlets swallowed or made jokes of Trump’s dismissal of the allegations. The story clawed its way back into the news, but it hasn’t really stayed there.
Jeffrey Epstein. Now that’s a story. A man’s story. Power and politics. We’ll be hearing about that one for a while, I suspect. As well we should. Except, in both instances, crimes are alleged. That’s when I made a connection to the complaints about personal essays, or let’s call a thing by its name, it’s mostly stories by women on Medium.
Medium must pay attention to this moment. It’s clear to me that we dismiss personal stories, especially stories by women, at our peril. Dismissing them outright puts our moral fiber in jeopardy.
Events on the national stage and in Washington can seem so far removed from us until you take a closer look. Why do I think the early, easy dismissal of Ms. Carroll’s account as not newsworthy enough is relevant to the writers of personal stories on Medium?
It’s easy to lose track of how close we actually are to our national politics. For those of us who write and publish on Medium, many of our stories are up close and personal. Do they have value on Medium? Let’s be clear, Medium is an online newspaper, just like the New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal, offering stories of interest to a wide swath of readers.
Whatever Medium was in the early days, it’s morphed into a broad platform. Even the angry startup guy kissed and made up and continues to publish on Medium. WaPo and WSJ have tech columns and book reviewers, as well as food sections. Why should Medium delete a whole category of writers? Oh, they’re mostly women. I get it.
I believe this debate reflects what’s happening in Washington. If our president can bury a rape charge with a callous wisecrack, then why should we care about someone’s heartfelt exposure of a broken childhood by a pedophile uncle? If the president can’t care about children in cages, why should we care about a young man trying to come to terms with his sexual identity?
If we’re even having a debate about climate change when the evidence is right in our faces, then see how easy it is to dismiss a whole category of writing because it doesn’t fit someone’s idea of what’s important?
If you think it’s a stretch to compare an in-house argument about form here on Medium with E. Jean, Trump, or other national horrors, then don’t make it easy to cross that divide. Times are changing in our country. People say attitudes in DC don’t reflect who we are. I say time will tell.
We could start by making sure we honor everyone’s story, even if you don’t want to read it. I’ll bet even the startup guy gets value from an article on busting stress after a hard day of confronting investors. Let’s declare a line and leave the politics of indifference to human pain behind us.
Medium can be a place of inclusion, or it can discriminate and advance the politics of exclusion. I know what I want. How about you?