౨ৎ Girl blog

When I first started writing essays, I couldn’t figure out where to put myself in the text. Trying to situate the “I,” which is necessarily attached to a body, has always felt like a trap. I didn’t want to succumb to that well-known female imperative of the confessional, “relatable” mode, where revealing your self is the basis for all your subseque... See more

Why write essays online like this? The truth is most people wake up and the first thing they do is look at their phone and read. What they read is not a book. Neither fiction nor nonfiction tomes, nor poetry nor autobiography, no, nothing like that at all. They’ll read social media posts, they’ll read news articles, their emails, sports summaries, ... See more

Text allows for the ultimate kind of selectivity: your constraint is not the sounds and sights of your actual life, but the depth of your imagination. When you share about your life over personal essays, you can hide your facial expressions and body language, your tone of voice. You can project decisiveness, self-assurance, and whatever else you wo... See more

Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in co... See more

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim... See more