In Defense of the Essay Collection

In these uncertain times for the book trade, when the very future of the printed word seems in question, the one thing certain is that no one wants to publish a collection of essays. Your agent would prefer not to have to sell it, your old publishers don't want to touch it, and even those pretty young editors who smile enticingly around the buffet table and give midlist authors such as yourself their cards don't want anything to do with it. Perhaps—perhaps—an essay collection with a focus, a hot topic that will get an author on talk shows, yes, that's conceivable. But a mere compendium of random essays previously published in magazines, forget it. What could possibly be justification for such a miscellany, except misguided ego? A hip, briskly selling novelist one knows from the start is not going to give it his all, but is only trying his hand at this minor form—that could work, but a writer idiotic enough to be dedicated to essays from the start, no way.

It seems to be general consensus that, as a TLS reviewer recently put it, "Collections of multi-purpose, previously published prose are often bitty and unsatisfying." The public no longer cares for such volumes. So they keep telling me. Graphic novels, yes, books about economic downturns, certainly, memoirs about addiction and seeing the light, by all means, but not those mealy-mouthed belletristic effusions. Yet I persist. More, I insist on putting forth a collection that will include my musings on movies, literature, friendship, sex, teaching, urban history, city form and the nail parings of daily life, so that the reader can enjoy the fluent play of a single consciousness, a single sensibility flowing through disparate subject matters. I persist because I know the truth, which is that, deep down, you love essays. You are just ashamed to admit it. You love essays, you love essays, you are getting very sleepy, you lo-o-ove essays, the stray meanderings, the sparkle and crackle of the essayist's voice.…

A fiercely accomplished essayist I know, an ex-student of mine, was advised to dismantle her collection of personal essays and restructure it as a memoir. She spent a year trying to do so, only to decide in the end that it wouldn't work, the original form had its own integrity that it made no sense to camouflage. Another writer friend, a distinguished midlist writer with many novels to her credit, put together a wonderful collection of personal essays for her regular editor, who agreed to publish it, but only with the proviso that the word "essay" not appear on the cover, the title page, or the publicity materials. The editor's thinking was that the public might be fooled into buying it if each piece were seen as a "chapter" in a larger, memoir-ish whole, rather than as what it was, a string of self-contained essays.

An essay collection is a distinctly different adventure from a memoir. Emily Fox Gordon, in her personal essay "The Book of Days," put her finger on one difference between the two genres when she argued that the memoir seems to have a built-in triumphalist or redemptive bent by the very nature of the author's having survived to tell the tale, the how-I-gotover aspect. In her words, "the memoir and the personal essay are crucially different forms. The memoir tempts the memoirist to grandiose self-representation. The essay, with its essential modesty, discourages the impulse. The memoir tends to deindividuate its protagonist, enlisting him to serve as a slightly larger-than-life representative of the sufferings of a group or community, while the essay calls attention to the quirks and fallibilities we take as marks of our essential separateness. The erratic zigzag of essayistic thinking—what has been called thinking against oneself—makes the essay proof against the triumphalism of memoir by slowing the gathering of narrative momentum. The essayist transects the past, slicing through it first from one angle, then from another, until—though it can...