This post, by Katie Roiphe, originally appeared on Slate on 1/9/13.
There has lately been a rising backlash against the ubiquity of personal writing. Hamilton Nolan’s anti-confessional diatribe in Gawker claims that journalism students are now taught only to write about themselves, which I can say as a full-time faculty member at a journalism school is patently absurd, but he raised some interesting points about the dubious rise of confessional writing over the last two decades and the market pressure, especially on younger writers, to make a splash, or at least publish something somewhere, by turning to their own, possibly limited, life experience.
And then, of course, there were recent critiques of Elizabeth Wurtzel babbling incoherently about her pure heart in New York Magazine.
All of which leads me to believe it may be time to think methodically about what separates good confessional writing from bad confessional writing. It’s dangerously cartoonish to say all personal writing is bad, and to automatically attack every writer who dares to delve into his own experience, but there are a million different ways to write personally and some of them are undoubtedly better than others. Here, then, are some basic principles I have come to over the years as both a professor and a writer (though, of course, I am still puzzling through them and tinkering with them and will continue to do so probably for the rest of my life):
1. The writer should turn her fierce critical eye on herself. (One of the great masters of this is Mary McCarthy, who was terrifying and brilliant in her critiques, even of her own pretentions and snobbisms.) It is always satisfying to read a writer who sharply and deftly attacks the hypocrisies and delusions of the world around him, but we trust that writer more completely when he also attacks himself, when he does not hold himself to a different standard, or protect himself from scrutiny. Take David Foster Wallace’s famously dazzling essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” He obsessively, comically, gorgeously dissects everything around him on the cruise ship, but does not exempt himself from his high level satire:
Read the rest of the post on Slate.