The Writer on Her Work
How I came to write personal essays
When I was 23 years old, during some dead of winter month, my friend Noelle and I drove to her parents’ cabin in Roxbury, New York. We brought two guy friends along and it was a casual reunion of sorts: the guys — Jack and Patrick — had worked with Noelle at The Strand Bookstore some years earlier, and I’d recently moved back to Brooklyn from Seattle. The four of us weren’t as close as we’d once been, but we were close enough to notice the subtle shifts within each other’s character.
We ended up snowed in and going stir crazy: prank phone calling friends, learning “Three Blind Mice” on harmonica, playing long games of the card game Spit. I’m not 100% on this, but I feel safe saying the idea was mine: I proposed the four of us write essays about one another.
I tore pieces of paper from my journal and handed them out. Curiously, my friends were into it. We spread out on the couches and floor, and each wrote one essay about the other three — a sort of reflection on that person, what we admired about them, and what confused us. We did not write our pieces as letters, didn’t address each other as “you.” We wrote them as though we were turning them in to a teacher. Mind you: We were dead sober. (Aside from coffee and weed, and possibly beer. Who can really know?)
