In all of my three years as an English Writing major, I’d never actually attended a Pitt Writers’ Café before this past April 8th’s event, “Writing Small, Writing Big: Making the Personal Essay Matter,” featuring Pitt alumna Emily Maloney, whose first essay collection, Cost of Living, came out from Henry Holt in February.
I’d read the book, which features 15 essays centering around Maloney’s experiences with and observations surrounding the American healthcare system, in preparation for the event, familiarizing myself with such intricacies of Maloney’s life as her time spent working in the healthcare field, the improper mental health care she received as a young adult, her suicide attempt at 19, and the subsequent hospital stay that she spent the next ten years paying off.
Still, I wasn’t exactly sure of what I was getting myself into—while I’d come away from Cost of Living feeling deeply affected, it was almost in a way I couldn’t place. At times, the collection gave me the sense that I had some sort of implicit knowledge that came from my own experiences receiving mental health care—a major topic of the earlier essays in the collection and generally, it would seem, a major theme of Maloney’s young adulthood—like some sort of gray-toned insiders’ club. At other points, though, I felt just as touched, but through far fewer points of contact. All the while, too, I was finding it so easy to melt into the sheer narrative of the essays that craft became a background element.
All of this is to say, then, that by the time I “arrived” at the virtual event, I had a lot of big feelings about Maloney’s work, but had approached it with little actual critical thought.
Maloney, for her part, was fully ready to tear this mindset down.
She opened, as a matter of fact, with something of a statement on avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to emotional instinct, specifically, in this case, as it applied to selecting topics for a personal essay. She mentioned a recent tragedy that had befallen a close friend and the profound impact that it was having on her, even in that moment—but said that trying to talk about it would make for a terrible essay. For one, she said, she didn’t have the narrative distance from the situation necessary to write about it in a productive way, but she also said that what had happened was more an experience than it was anything else.
She said that a good personal essay “has to be more than just what happened. It has both nominal and real subjects. You know what the essay appears to be about and what it's actually about are two different things.”
Her first prepared exercise of the afternoon, titled “Thumbnail Portraiture,” was meant to strengthen this approach, forcing the writer to consider the nature of “important” details in a personal narrative. For the exercise, participants were made to describe something in a small way, but make this description reflective of something larger—details about a setting, for instance, might have broader implications about characterization and theme.
Later, Maloney spoke on the common feeling of an overwhelming urgency to publish, the idea that an essay isn’t going to be profitable if it isn’t put into the world in one or two weeks’ time. “I think that in order to be a writer, you have to be wired for a certain level of anxiety. So, yeah, you're in great company, but I think the thing that might be helpful to consider in all of this is the staying power for your work,” she said at one point, adding that she often sees work get published too early because of this urge, for far less payment than it could be worth. Her advice was, in general, to wait—whether you need more time to refine your work, or you simply need more narrative distance from the topic of your essay.
On the subject of narrative distance, Maloney also devoted a solid portion of the session to discussing the relationship that writers might have with their narratives, as well as with their readers, asking the writers present to consider the nuances of narrator, author, and character within the context of their specific essays. Each of these, she said, can (but do not always) exist as their own separate entities within an essay and can provide a change in perspective with regard to what they can offer the audience.
To better illustrate her point, Maloney introduced the second and final exercise of the evening, titled “I Didn’t Know Then, But I Know Now,” in which participants were meant to think about the personal piece they were currently writing and consider what they knew, at the time of the workshop, that they did not know when the events of their essay took place. Participants were then asked to consider what this implied about the separation of the author from the narrator of their past self.
Maloney said, “You want somebody to think about your work long after they have come to the final sentence.” This was, I believe, my overall relationship to Cost of Living at its conclusion; Maloney had certainly established a connection with me through her work.
I’m still not sure, I suppose, what my main takeaway from Cost of Living is—maybe it’s her essay “Soft Restraints” which feels, to me, like the heart of the collection, in which Maloney details her experiences and connection with “Elizabeth,” a psychiatric patient at a hospital she worked at. In spite of the connection she felt with Elizabeth, Maloney recalls at one point being reminded by the charge nurse on duty that her concern may have been overzealous as Elizabeth was not even a patient in her care. But Maloney’s narration responds, hauntingly, “She might be my patient, I thought. She might be me.” Maybe it’s in the craft of the way Maloney writes, so relentlessly blunt and focused that you can’t help but feel the certainty in her statements. At any rate, whether I’m approaching Cost of Living as a writer or a reader, my time spent with Maloney’s work is far from over.
—Rebecca Reese
Rebecca Reese is a rising senior majoring in Writing (fiction) with a certificate in Television and Broadcast Arts.
Author photo ©2018 Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
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