Where's the 'you'?
The obligatory personal essay
Ciao a chairde,
I’m lucky: I only started writing journalistically once the confessional essay’s online golden age had passed. It was already going out of fashion when I wrote my first novel in 2017. By the time the book was published in 2020, editors were too immersed in the current pandemic misery to demand my feelings on being raped a few years prior. (True story.) They did want to know why various immutable qualities of mine were hard for me: autism/ADHD, queerness, being mildly ambidextrous. (True story.) But the requested tone was ultimately upbeat, an angle that became harder to offer as I progressively lost my mind. (True story.)
Traces of that era do remain in book promotion, as Caroline O’Donoghue just pointed out powerfully in the Bookseller. A ritual sacrifice is expected of any woman who’s written a novel: an essay timed around publication about some big sad thing from her own life. It may or may not have anything to do with the book. It rarely reads like she was dying to write it.
At this point, I’m not even convinced that the personal essay sells books. I hear from the odd person in a signing queue that they came to my fiction through my journalism, but it’s as likely to be through an article on fossil fuels as a depiction of my antics at Berlin sex clubs. (I have never yet been offered enough money to actually write that one. Come at me with your best bid if you dare.)