How Reporting Can Add Layers of Meaning to Your Personal Essay
To elevate a first-person piece into a story that connects with readers, we often have to expand beyond our own lives and think about the stakes beyond ourselves.
Next week at Narratively Academy, Kristina Gaddy is teaching Focus on Craft: Reporting the Personal Essay. (Just 4 seats left!) Today, Kristina joins us to share some of her favorite examples, from Melissa Febos to E.B. White, of how research and reporting took personal stories to the next level.
I recently finished
’ new book The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex and she’s done again what she has become known for: infusing the deeply personal with the literary, the philosophical, the political. She takes her personal experiences and finds a way to make them feel bigger than just her.In the book, Febos tells us about her decision to be celibate for three months, then six months, then a year, and how it related to her past addiction to heroin, her life as a writer, and her often volatile relationships. Throughout the book, I was struck with how she uses reporting to bring in the cultural ideas of celibacy and instances when women have been able to abstain from sex; the universality of desire and flirtation; and how women’s bodies are perceived.
She’s long known how to do this. In Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Febos writes about the first time her classmates read an excerpt of what would become her first memoir, Whip Smart, and the criticism she received. “Simply transmitting my impressions of an experience at the site of their happening was not enough,” she writes. “This note led me to take a six-month hiatus from writing the book to conduct more research, primarily in the form of psychotherapy.”
Again, even though the book is primarily about Febos’ own experiences, that additional layer of reporting is what takes it to the next level—what makes it not just a recounting of her experiences, but a robust story.
I’ve been here, so I’m guessing you have been too: you have a good subject, theme, or topic to write about, but the actual story isn’t there. In Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, author Tracy Kidder and editor Richard Todd write that a story “is not a subject.” And writing a personal essay or memoir isn’t just recounting something that happened to us. A story is made up of “any number of topics or issues,” they write, and it lives “in the individuality of person, place, and time,” and through revelation, we transform an “event into story.”
So how do revelations and individuality transform an event into a story? For me, I think about the stakes of the piece: What do I, as the subject of the personal essay, lose or gain? What does the reader lose or gain? And how does a revelation for the reader lead them towards understanding that gain or loss? This applies to all nonfiction writing, but when it comes to personal writing, I think that research and reporting add a crucial component to the revelation and the transformation into story.
Sometimes, the research and reporting isn’t as straightforward as it is in The Dry Season, where Febos, for example, directly tells us about the life of the mystic and nun Hildegard von Bingen to add additional meaning to her own story. We can also research and report our own lives.
Maybe it’s the current heat wave that has me thinking about one of my favorite personal essays, E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” White begins by telling us that when he was a child, his father would rent a lake house for a month each August, and struck by nostalgia, he returns to the lake with his son.
When you first read it, a lot of the essay seems to be just recounting: White comparing the lake of his childhood with the fishing trip he’s on with his son. There is a lot of individuality in the place and people, but that isn’t what gives it meaning. It’s White’s reporting of his own memories that adds meaning.
White starts with four sentences about the lake during his childhood, and this gets expanded each time he tells us something about the trip with his son to the point where we lose track of what is past and what is present. And White has lost track, too: “Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.” And eventually, this cycling culminates with White recognizing his own mortality as his son puts on a cold, wet pair of swim trunks. Part of reporting a personal essay can also be evoking memories, writing about them, and connecting them to the present you.
Whatever approach you take, reporting personal writing isn’t just about making sure you get your facts right; it’s about creating meaning within your story that will resonate with your readers.
If you’re working on a memoir or a personal essay that you want to infuse with original reporting and research, don’t miss Kristina Gaddy’s special two-part craft-focused seminar: Reporting the Personal Essay.
