౨ৎ Girl blog

Gornick, again: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”

But the essay as a literary form has long preceded the internet. So has the debate over the aesthetic metrics of a good essay. Merve Emre cites Virginia Woolf’s 1905 screed “The Decay of Essay Writing,” where Woolf bemoans the “amazing and unclothed egoism” of a new class of writers. “If one can set aside [Woolf’s] disdain, there is a larger point,... See more