By Christy Vannoy
Vannoy
is a columnist for McSweeney’s, an
online magazine of sorts, which is where she first published this piece in
2011. “A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay” is by far the lightest and
shortest essay in the collection. Vannoy wrote it as to criticize the
competitive world of writing essays. Her narrator is an actual personal essay: one
of ten being competitively considered for a magazine. The author writes, “The
Essay Without Arms worried me at first, but she had great bone structure and a
wedding ring dangled from a chain around her neck, so I doubted her life has
been all that hard” (210). Vannoy’s use of satire borders on open mocking of
the melodramatic nature of many essays. She implies that it’s nearly mandatory
for a personal essay to be equal parts tragic and inspiring. Vannoy
particularly utilizes humor in her exaggerated descriptions of typical essays,
including one that followed “a series of miscarriages and narcoleptic seizures
living in a work camp […] in communist China” (211). She realizes this is
hyperbole, but uses it to highlight the trend in personal essays about grief
and suffering.
Essayists
and essay readers alike would enjoy Vannoy’s critique of the industry. She
fulfills her purpose so well that the reader begins to reflect on the other
essays in the same collection. There’s a woman hit by a bus, a risky 1960’s
abortion, a mugging, a string of murders… The most popular essays, as Vannoy
suggests, seem to highlight the misfortune of the author. Are we sadists?
Vannoy’s narrator offers advice to other personal essays that might explain our
love of hardship. The author writes, “You are not a tragedy, you are a personal
essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic
grammar and easily recognized words” (212). For an essay to be enjoyable (and
therefore popular) it must leave the reader with some lesson or emotion; there is
seldom a better takeaway than a protagonist’s triumph over stacked odds.
The Drama!
Vannoy satirizes the trend in unfortunate and dramatic personal essays.
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