Personal Essay Industrial Complex and Keith McNally's Swiftie Turn
Diamond Concierge Service #011
The personal essay is back, baby! At least that’s what people have been saying since The Cut published two Internet breakers in one week. Emily Gould and Charlotte Cowles revived a time-honored tradition I thought was dead by getting people to talk about anything other than how screwed up the world is. Instead, Gould on divorce and personal struggles and Cowles, the site’s financial advice columnist, on getting scammed, became the news. I saw more than a few people make some form of the same joke about how “This is xoJane all over again,” but I found the single call for Thought Catalog to make a comeback even better.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “it’s back!” thing. I’ve always felt like the personal essay and the internet go together like any other cliche pair of things because it’s a way for readers to see just how fallible other humans truly are. Maybe they teach us something, but I think most people read personal essays so they can feel smug about themselves. I can only imagine how many people read Gould or Cowles and thought, That would never be me. But the thing is that you never know. It could be you. I don’t know how many people read personal essays considering that, but judging by the amount of vitriol online pointed at both writers, their essays, and their lives, I’m guessing not many. And there’s something sad about that to me.
Of course, personal essays are also good for business. The same day her story went online, Gould announced that she sold a book about her experiences. I’ve always liked Gould’s essays and I’m curious to see how she expands on the essay in The Cut. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about as I watched the discourse around the two essays was that at the same time, I scanned through another profile on a book that I’ve seen routinely described as polarizing, controversial, grueling, etc., but I haven’t actually heard anything about whether the book is good or not. I haven’t read if it’s worth picking up to learn anything that all the articles don’t already tell me, and that’s the rub when it comes to the writing about yourself game: you’re just inviting people to gawk. I don’t think that’s (always) the intention, but it says a lot to me about our culture that we’d rather read about people going through hardships, and then pile on them as soon as we’re done. We treat misery like another transaction. It’s something we read about, judge, make fun of, then move on. There’s something sad about that to me.
In Keith McNally news this week, our man in SoHo seems to be going full teenage girl by posting a pop star’s lyrics on his Instagram. He’s “not exactly a ‘Swiftie,’” but that sounds like he’s leaving room to have his mind changed.
Or maybe he’s already decided. Not long after the Instagram post, X user @enfant_cerebral got some killer footage of the man himself going over paperwork with some Red era Taylor Swift blasting from the Balthazar sound system.
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