The essay is the literary form most suited to the midlife mind. It is exploratory rather than declarative. It holds multiple positions simultaneously without demanding resolution. It is comfortable with ambiguity. It thinks out loud, changes direction without apology, and arrives at conclusions that are provisional rather than final.
Virginia Woolf's essays are among the greatest in the English language. Joan Didion's 'The White Album' is as formally innovative as anything written in the twentieth century. Zadie Smith's collected essays demonstrate a range and generosity of intelligence that few essayists have matched.
More recently, the essay has undergone a renaissance in the hands of women writers. Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, Hilary Mantel, Vivian Gornick — these writers have expanded what the essay can do.
The essay is the form of the examined life — and examined lives, it turns out, are the specialty of women who have had decades to practice the examination.
For the woman who has not been reading essays regularly, begin with Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own.' Then read Didion, then Smith, then Nelson. The essay is alive and thriving, and it is waiting for the reader who is ready to meet it.
Questions Women Ask
What makes a good personal essay?
A real question the writer has not yet answered, a particular scene rather than a general claim, and a willingness to be uncertain in public. Essays fail when they arrive already knowing what they think.
How do I start writing at fifty?
Write six hundred words about one afternoon you cannot forget, and do not decide beforehand what it means. Beginning with a scene rather than a thesis is what separates writing from explaining. See the fear of beginning.
Which essayists should I read first?
Read the women who made the form their own — Joan Didion for structure, Zadie Smith for argument, Annie Dillard for attention — and notice how little they announce and how much they show.