Leslie Jamison

Summary

I sometimes say that I came to the essay as a mistress genre. I always thought of myself as a fiction writer; my first published book was a novel, and I studied fiction when I was getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But as a lark, during my last semester at Iowa, I took an essay-writing workshop – and found something immediately compelling about the form: it let me weave together personal narrative, historical narrative, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and all kinds of research. It’s what we call the ‘hybrid essay’, but at the time I just thought of it as freedom – more than anything, as a kind of intellectual honesty. All those materials were already jostling around together in my head, crossing wires and sharing stories.

Something about the form of the essay always felt freeing and unencumbered. The essay was allowed to be messy. This had something to do with the form itself, and something to do with the fact that my ‘training’ was in fiction, which meant that whenever I wrote fiction I had all these ghostly voices from workshop perched on my shoulder, backseat-driving the work. In the essay, I didn’t have that. Plus, I was allowed to tell the reader things directly! In fiction workshops, I’d been instructed in various versions of the ‘show-don’t-tell’ ethos, and it was refreshing to tell as much as I pleased. I love telling. I believe in telling that deepens complexity rather than reducing it.

Years after that first nonfiction workshop, I started writing essays when my second novel was going badly. That’s when the essay really started to feel like a mistress, I suppose: a secret, almost illicit zone of exploration and play. Essay writing wasn’t the thing I was supposed to be doing, which was writing a big historical novel that felt ambitious – far away from my own life, stuffed with research. But it was dead on the page. And my essays felt alive.

Of course, at a certain point I began to feel married to the essay. After my first collection, The Empathy Exams, came out in 2014 and did better than anyone ever expected it to do, I became professionally associated with the essay, almost a spokesperson for the essay.