In 2019 the debate around “personal writing” felt both heated and stale. Anti-memoir screeds were clogging up our timelines; legions of book reviewers chanted “Narcissism!” in unison. We were sick of reading personal writing, but even more sick of reading about it. Even so, we couldn’t stop reading it, and we couldn’t stop talking about it.
We hoped this dossier could help us work through our reluctant obsession. We assembled critical essays and new creative works that we think get traction on this critical impasse. The work collected here pulls apart the genres, styles, and strategies that get lumped into the “personal.” Writers consider how memoir operates in contexts other than the US literary sphere, or look at the economic conditions of cultural production, or take a historical approach. One thing we like about many pieces in the dossier is their close attention to the material conditions that make writing personal, asking what labor conditions push writers into the first person.
Both the essays and creative works suggest that “personal writing” is a more flexible and open category than it usually gets credit for. The pieces in this dossier not only offer fresh diagnoses, but also push the form. Notably, none of the pieces collected here are straightforward, recognizable “memoir,” even though that was not what we set out to avoid in crafting this forum. CR has recently published memoir, such as works by Dawn Lundy Martin and Trey Sager in issue 63:3/4. But the people we solicited here simply didn’t send memoir. These non-memoirs demonstrate how “the personal” messes up easy oppositions of fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, archive and repertoire, creative and critical. As a supposedly “experimental” magazine, we like wreaking havoc on these default categories.
The variety of the writing we received suggests that maybe the problem with memoir isn’t the fact that it’s personal. Instead, we’d point to the staleness of the bestseller list and the arts grant–industrial complex that underwrites it. (However, if you work at a major foundation and are reading this, we would love to talk about what you’re looking for in a grant application.) One specific, saleable genre of memoir is pretending to be everything the personal has to offer. If genres are supposed to trap some quality of felt experience not yet accessible to cognition, this one is fraying at the seams. Here we’re trying to stir up something like excitement about what could come next, and the criticism that will come with it.
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Besides, the personal is never really not there. It seems to insist on itself, to haunt even scholarly writing whether a critic admits it or not. The dossier opens with Diana Hamilton’s “I’m Telling You,” a poem-lyric-song-essay sick of denying the “I” and the “you,” fed up with a history of “poems / that avoided their authors’ subjectivity / enough to disguise as a rejection / of conservative form a realer desire to hide / that the self doing the writing sort / of sucked.” You’ve always already overshared, but haven’t given enough of yourself just yet. “Replace yourself with an experiment,” commands this superego.
Cultural critics writing in major media outlets have done this replacement for decades, turning to the personal as a stopgap for their insights. Mitch Therieau asks what readers and writers of critical work want from the personal, anyway. Promising to deliver experience itself to readers, personal material seems to offer extra intellectual insight (in exchange for a writer’s soul). In these essays, the “analysis proceeds by shuttling back and forth between description of the object and the critic’s self-narration until it either resolves in an epiphany or collapses in a heap, exhausted from its efforts at bridging the gap between ‘the personal’ and ‘the critical.’” To which we all reply: “Fucking kill me.”
Sarah Brouillette asks what’s valuable about the personal, literally: corporations like Wattpad and Substack literally profit off data harvested from the autobiographical impulses nourished by social media culture; meanwhile influencers make a living turning personal writing into sponsorships. The most commodifiable life stories automatically go viral, determining what many think a life is supposed to look like, while corporations harvest the profits.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poem “Đổi Mới” unfolds the tastes and textures of personal experience, realizing the transnational intersections of food and language. Taste becomes a medium of personal experience while also indexing the ways that the personal is constantly intersected by the world. Whether using the tongue for tasting or speaking, Nguyen asks where we locate the personal: “Decolonization is not as simple as closing a door. It begins by picking up where my four-year-old self left off. // What will happen when I can tell my story in my mother tongue?”
For Grace Lavery, the personal and impersonal facets of writing are indeterminate; they depend “on the angle of one’s approach,” and so blanket ethical evaluations of the form are pointless. Moreover, the labor conditions of culture workers often force personal branding, so autobiographical style is less a formal decision and more a career imperative.
In Diane Seuss’s “Another Ballad,” a column of tercets spills out free associative recollections. Here the “personal” is what fills in the details of aesthetic forms: “an undistinguished bottle” accrues familiarity “Like one of my grandfather’s whiskey bottles, / drained of its minimal magic.” Seuss’s other poem, “Poetry,” explores what kinds of togetherness talking about yourself may afford and preclude: “There’s no sense / in telling you my particular / troubles. You have yours too. / Is there value / in comparing notes?”
Ania Loomba looks closely at the print history and political uses of memoir for colonized writers and readers, focusing on a range of Indian memoirs. For the Dalit, hijra, and working-class memoirists she considers, telling and retelling creates togetherness that takes its most vital form in political action. Here “the ‘I’ did not stand in opposition to the collective but was an expression of it.” The personal becomes a deindividualizing occasion for telling the world how one would like it to be.
As Peter Coviello puts it in his closing essay: “It can leave you, this stark crossing of imperatives around first-personish address, just a faint bit downhearted.” Coviello writes about still desiring memoiristic criticism, despite agreeing with others’ complaints. Maybe autobiography is indeed a “protocol of self-cultivating self-management” under the sway of capital, but it’s worth fighting for what’s vital and productive in the first-person as a means of critique.
We, too, are constantly renegotiating our continued attachments to what’s personal about writing, how writing can thematize, interrogate, and reopen what the personal might be and how it’s constituted. We see this dossier as an occasion to do this renegotiation together.