Two-and-a-half years ago, the fiction writer Chris Dennis published an evocative personal essay in The Paris Review. It’s about his struggle with addiction, but it’s also about the nature of addiction and recovery more broadly. Finally, it’s also a portrait of a specific place—Eldorado, Illinois—which, in the author’s rendering, appears to epitomize something essential about what makes America’s struggle with addiction and hopelessness so harrowing.
It is a positively exemplary personal essay, and there are many lessons writers of personal essays can learn from it. Here are three that have stuck with me.
1. The personal story is used to make larger points.
In other words, it’s not just about the author, or something that happened to them, or even their reflections about something that happened to them. This is the trap so many personal essayists fall into. They rehash a personal experience that was no doubt meaningful to them, in the assumption that it will in turn be meaningful to the reader.
But harrowing personal experience, like beautiful prose, is not as inherently interesting or worth readers’ time as writers so often think. These things are tools, and should more preferably be used in service of a larger purpose, such as to convey something interesting or novel or true about the world the reader and the writer both share.
That’s what Dennis does in this piece. Through his story he manages to articulate something true and insightful about the nature of drug addiction, and recovery, as well what a depressed town looks and feels like. The result is a piece that’s not only melodious and moving and eloquent, but affecting.
2. The essay is symmetrically constructed, and thus self-contained, and thus feels “complete.”
Here is how Dennis begins this essay:
I am in a barn-red house on a hill. In my room there is a bookshelf, a desk for me to write at, a soft bed covered by a blue quilt, a wooden crucifix on the wall that opens to reveal the items necessary for administering last rites. Where I am now, there are peacocks, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, and hundred-foot-tall pine trees. Where I am now, I have my own bedroom.
Here is how, after unspooling a story about how, before arriving in this barn-red house on a hill, he’d embraced his art, chased a dream, succumbed to addiction and depression, lost everything, went to jail, learned several different lessons about himself, his hometown, and writing, he ends the piece:
After my grandmother posted bond in April, I had the same strange dilemma: how to readjust to the danger of my own freedom. A dear friend offered to let me stay in her home in the country. I’ve been here ever since, attending treatment and court hearings. Where I am now, in this barn-red house on a hill, there are peacocks whose night-calls sound like a person yelling for help, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, hundred-foot-tall pine trees, and a creek that renders the road impassable after heavy rains. Where I am now, in this barn-red house on a hill, I have my own bedroom.
The effect is similar to that of the classic hero’s journey, in which the hero ends up where they began, but much changed.
3. The prose is just perfect—which is to say, employed perfectly.
Beautiful prose is a tool. Here it’s wielded to remarkable effect. The prose, first, is melodious, which is the same thing as hypnotizing, a way of coercing the reader into complete trust of and affection for the writer. You stick around, on the one hand, perhaps at a surface level, because the writing simply sounds so good.
The prose is also surprising and specific. Consider how Dennis follows up that first paragraph:
…Where I am now, I have my own bedroom.
Here are some of the places I slept last year: Under a bush in front of a high school in Evansville, Indiana. In the stairwell of an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri. In a car-wash stall in Kentucky. In an open field behind a McDonald’s in Illinois. In a booth at that same McDonald’s. In a laundromat. In the backseat of an abandoned car. In a stranger’s garage. In a chair at the public library. In a toolshed. In a burned-out mobile home. In a drug dealer’s backyard. On a drug dealer’s living room floor. On a drug dealer’s couch. In a drug dealer’s bed. On more than one occasion I’ve woken up on a total stranger’s front porch with no memory of how I got there.
Specificity is a mark of great and interesting writing. So is surprise. This paragraph is surprising. Contrast at its best.
Finally, the descriptions are vivid. This serves to enhance the images Dennis conjures in the readers’ minds of the places he’s writing about: ElDorado, jail, the bedroom he finds solace in. The vividness of the pictures actively help us understand the point he makes about these places. “Eldorado consists of a few gas stations, a pizza parlor, a main street lined with abandoned storefronts built during the last century, a single grocery store, and sixteen churches,” he writes. These gas stations and storefronts and churches comprise “possibly one of the most spiritually and intellectually bankrupt places on earth.” We believe him, because we can see it.
These are not the only things that make this essay incredible. But as a writer continually seeking out examples of beautiful writing to aspire to in my own work, they’ve stuck in my head. In what I’m working on now, I’m trying to pay close attention to whether I’m mirroring what Dennis here did so well.
—Dan
Agree 100%. Personal essays are a vehicle for reflecting on the wider world, they aren't really about the narrator.