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.