write a personal essay on what you perceive to be the pleasures particular to youth

• Leaving Cert. English (Higher) 2015: Paper 1 Section II Composing
• Back to the question >

Preparation

• Information
• You must write a short story. You can take a variety of approaches but generally all short stories have a beginning, middle and end, have at least one character, and have some sense of tension, climax and resolution.
• Ask yourself questions to create ideas: -    Where? -    What? -    Who? -    Why? -    When? -    How?
• Beware of creating an over-long timeline. You have limited space and time. It would be impossible to cover a character’s entire life in 2-4 A4 pages.
• Try to have just 1-3 main characters.
• You have a long time to write this essay. Re-read quickly what you have written to check it for mistakes.
• Create atmosphere and images for the reader — it will improve your writing.
• You must write a story in which the main character transforms when facing a daunting challenge.
• You will be rewarded for employing some of the conventions of a magazine or newspaper layout, e.g. headline, sub-headings, etc.
• Shape your response in a manner appropriate to the register of a magazine or newspaper.
• Think about the role played by romance in our lives. You might consider some of the following: -    The media's obsession with romance -    The popularity of romance as a genre in film and books -    The transforming power of romance.  
• Try to make your article interesting and entertaining.
• Provide a ‘hook’ at the start of the article to make your reader want to read your piece.
• Be careful with structure. You should have a clear introduction and a firm conclusion.
• Never forget your purpose, audience and language register (appropriate style, vocabulary and tone).
• Use all rhetorical devices at your disposal. Some effective examples include: -    Using rhetorical questions -    Flattering your audience -    Using emotive language, strong anecdotes, strong imagery -    Involving the listener -    Creating a sense of unity with the audience.
• Remember your audience; you are speaking to the United Nations Youth Conference.
• Your task is to provoke thought around the issues you wish to discuss.
• What would you consider to be the defining struggles of our age. You may consider some of the following: -    Global warming -    Poverty -    Globalisation -    The role of technology.
• You must consider both the causes and possible solutions to these problems.  
• This title gives you the opportunity to take a number of different approaches but remember it must be a personal account. Your ideas should be at the heart of the essay.
• A personal essay should have a degree of personal reflection.
• Think about the endings in your life. What was significant? You could consider some of the following: -    End of school -    A friendship -    Death -    A relationship.
• Your essay must be descriptive. Concentrate on creating images and atmosphere for the reader. Consider a multi-sensory approach.
• Think about what Ireland is like today. What would a time-traveller make of it? It is important to decide at this stage if your traveller is from the past or present. This will greatly influence his/her observations.
• Plan this essay carefully. Try to create a fluid piece.
• Try to create a lively and engaging piece for the reader.
• You must write a short story. You can take a variety of approaches but generally, all short stories have a beginning, middle and end, have at least one character, and have some sense of tension, climax and resolution.
• You have a long time to write this essay. Re-read what you have written quickly to check it for mistakes.
• You must include a closely guarded secret and its discovery in your answer.
• This is a discursive essay. You should be able to discuss the issues. If you have no ideas on people's privacy and its challenges in a modern world, then avoid this essay.
• Spend time properly planning your essay. Clarity is key to an effective discursive essay.
• Is privacy important to you? Why?
• How has the modern world compromised our privacy? Consider some of the following: -    Facebook -    Snapchat -    Google Chrome -    How much information can be gleaned about you from your profile? -    Is anything on the net really private? -    Reality T.V. -    Celebrity privacy.
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Tag Archives: sample personal essays

Tone (personal essay).

I love this cartoon from Natalie Dee on fanpop.com

Before Christmas I got my TYs (over 50 of them) and my Leaving Certs to write personal essays. Their essays for the most part were funny, sad, moving, at times mad and in many cases very very brave. Among other things I read about a childhood obsession with goldfish; a superhero granny; being an only child; falling into a river in front of the boy you absolutely love love love; suicide; a haunted church; spontaneous uncontrollable crying spells; and being wrapped in tin foil and carried off a volleyball court on a stretcher…

I also discovered that “ a commode i s the love child of a wheelchair and a portaloo! ”

I did notice however that very occasionally a personal essay didn’t  ‘ring true ‘. It’s hard for me to explain how I knew that the writer was inventing or embellishing a sad story (leaning towards or sometimes completely inventing a fiction) rather than drawing on real life experiences (fact) but when I asked a couple of students about it sure enough they said what they’d written about hadn’t actually happened but they felt compelled to give the personal essay a tragic ending in order to engage the reader emotionally.

Oddly, it had the opposite effect – I enjoyed these essays up to the point where they transformed into melodrama and then I just somehow knew that the writer was trying to force a reaction out of me.

Have a look at this beautiful personal essay – but be warned:

(1) It will make you cry

(2) You could never write this. You are not a thirty-something-yr-old widower with a toddler and a dead wife. You are a 17 or 18yr old Irish leaving cert student and this is the perspective you MUST write from when you write a personal essay in the exams because fundamentally a personal essay IS NOT A SHORT STORY and IS NOT FICTION. Of course you can write about something funny that happened to someone else and pretend it happened to you; of course you can exaggerate for dramatic or humorous effect. But try to write what you know or your essay is in danger of coming across as insincere and false.

Here it is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/19/telling-toddler-mummys-dead?CMP=twt_gu

Now have a look at this personal essay, whose tone is much more philosophical and opinionated rather than emotional – the tone is completely different but there is no question that it also falls into the category of personal essay.

Here it is (with the longest url in the history of life the universe and everything):

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/an-a-student-regrets-his-grades/article7359620/?cmpid=rss1&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20TheGlobeAndMail-National%20%28The%20Globe%20and%20Mail%20-%20National%20News%29&buffer_share=8b014

I guess I just want you to realise that you can write a serious opinion piece; an emotional admission; or a funny satire and ALL will still qualify as ‘personal essays’ as long as you write in the first person (“I”) and as long as you are yourself (Irish teenager) not a fictional narrator (a witchdoctor, a talking rubbish bin or a homeless wino).

For clarification of the difference between the personal essay and memoir check this out: http://meghanward.com/blog/2012/08/21/personal-essay-vs-memoir/

That’s all for now folks. Good luck with the mocks revision!

Posted in Composing , Discussions

Tagged ireland , leaving cert english , personal essay , sample personal essays , tone

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6 Steps to Writing the Perfect Personal Essay

Personal essays are easy once you know how!

• Tips For Adult Students
• Getting Your Ged

• B.A., English, St. Olaf College

It is the first day of a new school year and your teacher has just assigned a personal essay. They have good reasons for this assignment—personal or narrative essays allow teachers to assess your grasp of language, composition, and creativity.

If you don't know where to start or feel overwhelmed by the open-ended prompt, this list is here to help you navigate the process from beginning to end. Writing about yourself is easy to do when you keep the key ingredients of a great essay in mind.

Find Inspiration and Ideas

You can't begin a personal essay without a topic. If you are stuck on what to write about, look to some of these sources of inspiration:

• Consult lists of ideas to get your brain thinking about the possibilities of your essay. Remember that a personal essay is autobiographical, so do not write about anything untrue.
• Try writing a  stream of consciousness . To do this, start writing whatever is on your mind and don't stop or leave anything out. Even if ideas aren't connected to each other whatsoever, a stream of consciousness gets everything in your brain on paper and often contains many ideas.
• Do a little research. Browsing through whatever interests you can really get the creative juices flowing and lead to small self-reflections. Grab onto any of these that you think you might want to write about.

Don't be afraid to ask your teacher what they are looking for. If you still aren't sure what to write about, go to your teacher for suggestions or a more specific prompt.

Understand the Composition of an Essay

Before you start writing, remind yourself of basic essay composition. Almost all essays are made up of three parts: an introduction, a body of information, and a conclusion. The five-paragraph essay is a common iteration of this and it contains an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Use an outline, or general essay plan, to jot down your ideas before writing.

Introduction : Start your personal essay with a hook, or an interesting sentence that grabs your readers' attention and makes them want to read more. Select a topic that you know you can write an interesting essay about. Once you have a compelling topic, decide on the main idea you want to communicate and use it to capture your readers' interest in the first sentence.

After the hook, use the introductory paragraph to briefly outline the subject of your essay. Your readers should have a clear understanding of the direction of the rest of your piece from the introduction.

Body : The body of your essay is made up of one or more paragraphs that inform your readers about your topic, each paragraph accomplishing this in a unique way.

The structure of a paragraph resembles the structure of an essay. A paragraph contains an attention-grabbing topic sentence, several sentences elaborating on the point of the paragraph, and a conclusion sentence or two that summarizes the main idea. The conclusion sentence of a paragraph should also be used to transition into the next paragraph by smoothly introducing the next topic without going into too much detail.

Each paragraph should have its own idea that is closely related to the topic of the whole essay but elaborates on the main idea in a new way. It is important that topics flow logically from one to the next so that your essay is easy to follow. If your paragraphs are not related to each other or the main idea, your essay may be choppy and incoherent. Keeping your sentences concise also helps with clarity. Feel free to break a large paragraph up into two separate paragraphs if the topic changes or goes on for too long.

Conclusion : Close your essay with a final paragraph that summarizes the points you have made and states the takeaways. When writing personal essays, conclusion paragraphs are where you talk about the lessons you learned, ways that you changed as a result of your subject, or any other insights that were gained from your experience. In short: restate the ideas from the introduction in a new way and wrap up your essay.

Use Appropriate Voice for Essay and Verbs

In English grammar, there are many elements of writing that determine the quality of your work and voice is one of the most important. There are two types of voice: the author's voice and the voice of verbs.

Author's Voice

One of the things your teacher will be looking for when reading your personal essay is the use of voice in your essay, which is your own personal style of telling a story. They will be looking for features of your writing that make it unique, analyze the pacing of your essay, and determine how you establish your authority.

Because personal essays are works of nonfiction, your voice must be reliable. Other than that, you are free to play around with the delivery of your essay. Decide how formal or casual you want to be, how you want to keep the attention of your readers, how you would like your readers to feel when reading your essay, and how you would like your story to come across as a whole.

Voice of Verbs

Don't be confused—verbs have their own voice that is entirely separate from the author's voice. The active voice occurs when the subject of your sentence is performing the action or verb and the passive voice occurs when the subject is receiving the action.

The subject is italicized in the following examples.

Passive : An essay was assigned by Ms. Peterson.

Active : Ms. Peterson assigned a personal essay about summer vacation.

Generally, the active voice is most appropriate for personal essays as it is more effective at progressing a story forward. Using verbs in the active voice also tends to come across as more authoritative.

Be Consistent With Point of View and Tense

Personal essays are about yourself, so it is important that your point of view and tense be consistent with this. Personal essays are almost always written in first person tense, using the pronouns I, we, and us to tell what happened. Readers need to know what something was like from your perspective.

Remember that you can only speak to your own thoughts and feelings in first person tense unless you know for sure what another person was thinking or feeling and can quote them.

Personal essays are also written in the past tense because they describe something that happened to you, not something that is happening or will happen. You cannot speak confidently about experiences that have not happened or are still happening because you have not yet learned from them. Teachers will probably want you to write a personal essay to reflect on a real experience that taught you something.

Use Your Own Vocabulary

Just as you shouldn't lie when writing personal essays, you also shouldn't waver. Your choice of vocabulary can help you establish and maintain themes throughout your essay. Every word matters.

Your goal when writing a personal essay should be authenticity and you need to choose your vocabulary accordingly. Use the words that naturally come to mind when you are writing and don't try to be something that you are not. Your language should fit the topic and guide readers to interpret your writing in a certain way.

Here are some examples of how to choose the right words.

• When you are making a statement of opinion or fact, use powerful words that make your ideas clear. For example, say, "I ran like my life depended on it," rather than, "I ran pretty fast."
• If you are trying to communicate uncertainty that you felt during an experience, use words that convey these feelings. "I questioned whether or not it was a good idea," rather than, "I didn't know what would happen."
• Use positive language. Write about what did happen or what is rather than what did not happen or what is not . "I left room for dessert after dinner," instead of, "I hated dinner and couldn't even finish it."

Always be as descriptive as possible and incorporate all of your senses into your writing. Write about how something looked, sounded, felt, smelled, or tasted to help your readers imagine the experience for themselves. Use adjectives that support what you have described but do not use them to do the work of describing for you.

Edit, Edit, Edit

English grammar is tough even for native English speakers. Brush up on grammar rules before writing and revisit your work when you are finished to ensure that you have written an essay that you can be proud of.

No matter what you write, one of the most important parts of the writing process is editing . It is good practice to give yourself some space from your essay just after finishing it before you dive into editing because this can help you analyze your writing more objectively. A second opinion is always helpful too.

When editing, ask yourself these questions:

• Is the grammar/sentence structure of your essay correct?
• Is your essay well-organized and easy to follow? Does it flow?
• Is your writing on topic throughout the essay?
• Will your readers be able to picture what you have described?
• Did you make your point?
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Memoir coach and author Marion Roach

Welcome to The Memoir Project, the portal to your writing life.

How To Write a Personal Essay? Go Small to Reveal Life’s Large Themes

THE PERSONAL ESSAY will always be among my favorite forms of discovery. In it, one can have a little look, bounce something in the hand and gather one’s wits on the larger issues of life by reflecting on something small. And in that last phrase is the best advice on how to write the personal essay: Go small.

Granted, fewer venues run them. The New Yorker predicted the utter demise of the personal essay only a year ago . My local public radio station, long a hold-out against what appeared to be a gathering tide against the form, was still running them until recently, which is long after NPR shifted to airing far fewer than they once did.

No matter. I advise my students and clients to write them. After all, if you master the personal essay, you can master the scene. Master the scene and you can write seventy-five of them and have yourself a book. So write them. Anyway, they will be back, of course. Like high (or low) hemlines they are reflective of how much we want to show of ourselves.

How to write a personal essay? Go small. For instance, I find that considering a small object in my life can reveal large, broad themes of meaning. Want an example? I’ve got one right here. This a medium-length example of the form. For shorter shorter versions, see some of my NPR essays. For longer forms, read  Longform.

by Marion Roach Smith

At Christmas in 2004, my sister, Margaret, began giving me silver. Under the tree that morning were several long, slender but heavy boxes wrapped in white satin ribbon and addressed to me. I could not imagine what was in them: matching boxes, six of them all beautifully wrapped. First of all, she never wraps. Margaret gives gifts still in their shopping bags, sometimes swiping the price tags off as she passes them to the receiver.

The big cries of my life are easily recalled by their individual sounds. When the plane lifted off the runway from China and our baby was safely in my arms, I howled with previously unheard relief. A 5-night jag while serving on a molestation trial jury was mostly gasping and hiccuppy; much earlier in life, I achieved a true keening at the Flushing, Queens, corner newsstand reading my father’s obituary. The sound I made that Christmas morning, opening the heavy boxes, was unique as well, its topnote of the pure surprise in being allowed to be so happy. There was no mistaking the gift: only one person on earth would understand the value of it – the giver; only she fully knew what it meant to me to see this silver again.

I still cannot imagine all that went into her thought process as she planned reclaiming this silver. Not just any silver, it’s our parents’ simple wedding pattern which Margaret collects a piece at a time through a dealer in midtown Manhattan. Over the years that she’s been giving it, I’ve wondered if any of the pieces are from the entire service for twelve I pulled around behind me in a suitcase through Manhattan’s diamond district and finally sold one dreadful day in 1985, or perhaps, if it’s the same dealer who finally bought the entire lot.

It had been my assignment to sell it and we had agreed, she and I: The silver – five-piece place-settings for 12 – a diamond ring of Margaret’s, one of mine, and our mother’s diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band. At the last minute, needing to hoist the dollar amount into the needed territory, right off my wrist, I unscrewed the Cartier love bracelet a man had years before given me and tossed it onto the pile, having almost forgotten I still wore it. Frighteningly, it was what had interested the jeweler the most, sweetening for him the pot as I gazed on our otherwise-beloved three rings, each with its own rich history. The sum received was shocking, a quarter perhaps of their monetary worth, and nothing near their emotional value. But it paid for two more weeks of homecare for our mother, Allene, bridging the gap until she’d go into a nursing home. At the time of the sale, our mother was a 56 years-old, late-stage Alzheimer’s patient. Selling the stuff was only one among bad days at that time, of course, but this is not about that.

It’s not that uncommon to come face-to-face with an icon of one’s youth. It can happen at a baseball stadium or at the zoo, but then there are those rare things on which you perhaps prided yourself or assumed were evergreen, or from which you organically acquired your cues toward taste. There in the Christmas wrapping were the long, flat knife handles that I gently fingered during Thanksgiving dinners, the forks I balanced on the backs of my hands as my parents told stories, the spoons from which I fed the dog under the table and ate my grandmother’s cranberry ice from her small silver tureens.

All told, they represented a tribal currency that I had once thought was securely in the bank. There was a time when I thought that people were expected to have silver and china and crystal, and that I expected to have them, choosing them at the time of my own wedding. Merely silver, perhaps, to me it had been gold bullion, a representation of the standard below which you did not slip. Then the exchange rate changed, and the flatware would have to be counted among the least of our losses during that time.

What went away with the silver was only really appraised at full value when I saw it again. I looked as best I could at Margaret over the first of the open boxes, but I remember dropping my head close to my chest, hushed except for the quiet exhalation of something long held in, recognizing in that moment that I was not only understood by her but also accepted for who I am. I had loved these things and apparently neither one of us was ashamed to admit it. It was a genuine reckoning between us.

Gifts can be like that. We know, because mostly they’re not, are they? Usually it’s another purple sweater or cellophaned supermarket flowers, inspiring a silent repetition of the mantra that it’s the thought that counts, the thought that counts. Long ago, I began buying myself a yearly birthday present, sure that a small indulgence is good preventive medicine, a fine hedge against any resentment of either being forgotten or worse, misunderstood. We want to be understood.

When we were kids, Margaret made herself well understood on the topic of gifts. One Christmas in Douglaston, our hometown, she simply made two piles: The keepers and the take-backs, stacking the boxes in their respective columns right there, under the Christmas tree and in front of the givers. She was 15. I was as amazed as I was appalled, but remained inclined to thank my parents and grandparents and shove the gift in some drawer. Not Margaret, who was honest to a fault as soon as she could speak.

Me, I still own a terrycloth bathrobe whose huge turquoise and cerulean blocks make me look like an enormous stained-glass door. It’s one of the yearly gifts my father insisted on buying all by himself, and he’s been dead for 30 years. It hangs in my bathroom to this day, having survived so long from such little use. When she was probably 25, Margaret’s boyfriend asked me to help him with a gift, which I did, buying her the prettiest Tiffany pin, of a single gingko leaf on its stem. She had just begun her serious study of botany and I thought the simplicity as well as the image suited her. She opened the box, looked right at him and said, “You didn’t pick this out, did you?” And back it went.

I may be the loud one, but she’s the tough one, hands down. And never tougher than on gifts. Perhaps the best example is the sweater I knit her that I have never seen her wear. And this is after I let her pick out the yarn, the color, and  the pattern: Wool, grey with no flecks of color, no cables, bobbles or anything to break up the boredom of the knitter. Made to spec, I have never once seen it on the woman.

Of course, true to pecking order, when she’s around, I’m always either wearing or using at least one thing she’s given me. But that’s easy to do since her gifts are always exquisite. There’s the string of perfect pearls and the duvet cover, the opal ring, the garnet necklace, two sets of dishes of the bought-new, and then, among the recent hand-me-downs are two black jackets, some formal wear, and two leather couches. To me, she has perfect – if eccentric – taste. I also use the moisturizer she recommends, the shampoo she started me on, as well as the lip balm she does.

Whenever I read those social-science pieces about birth order I always laugh, so heavy are they on language and clinical observation and so utterly naked of the illustration that any sister can provide. This is what the adult big-sister/little sister relationship looks like: one handing off stuff to the other, the other nodding enthusiastically, shucking her shirt right then and there, and putting the new one right on her body. Reversed, the little sister as giver, the big sister screws in her jeweler’s eye and may or may not deign to actually wear the gift, but in accepting it, accepts the giver. And on they go.

These quirky roles irk husbands and lovers, but sisters know that these are the proscribed roles that keep the engine moving forward. Any deviation from these and things start to break down like they did when we were younger and we didn’t value balance. Envisioning families, I see a mobile, and balance as being in the very best interest to those who hang within them. Suspicion, that great heavyweight, throws off the balance, when we ask ourselves why someone did something – why, for instance, she gave me this Godawful thing. From my sister’s point of view, I would be choosing her clothing only were she horribly disabled, while she is expected to choose mine on any given day. Any deviation from that, questions of the heart get asked: Does she really think that of all the things I need, I need this most of all? Doesn’t she know me at all? Another cotton sweater can only make a sister feel like little more than an afterthought.

When these questions start to brew it’s the balance that takes the hit and we struggle in our ways to get it back, overcorrecting as we do on a seesaw or a beam, usually throwing ourselves wildly off course in the effort. In my case, when threatened by Margaret, I usually make the mistake of getting tough with her. Big mistake. Big, since the balance actually depends on the difference between us, and the differing roles being enacted. Balance forbids that we play the same role at the same moment – that I, for instance, get tough, when that’s her role most every time. When she’s needed me to get tough – when she’s been sick or exhausted, I jump like a crazed tiger – but not unless cued by her behavior to do so. Counterweights, we are not bookends. We are sisters.

By the time the silver began to arrive there had been an extended period of balance between us. In several succeeding years a piece or two from the pattern was under the tree. Several people asked about it as it was used at dinner parties, and I found that when I spoke of the silver there was a distinct lack of longing in my voice. It was almost as if the precious metal had become demagnetized and had instead acquired a new charge; shifting away from being about them , it was now about us, this family right now. Having been lost for so long must have abetted that response, but it was more than that. Quite simply, I loved it differently. No longer a currency, it was now a decoration, a pure delight to behold.

As I spied the most recent Christmas box, I quickly did an inventory in my head: I had everything; complete place settings for eight, as well as serving spoons, polished and safely tucked away in silver cloth to be unwrapped later in the day for the Christmas feast.

Tearing open the box, I laughed right out loud as soon as I saw it, spitting my tea right down my pajama front as I did. Margaret shook her head and rolled her eyes, taking me in over her half-rimmed glasses as I waved my new acquisition over my head.

My husband looked at us, and then at what I had in my hand, and asked, “What is  that?”

In unison came the reply, “A tomato fork! Of course!” Two sisters, one voice.

It’s my favorite piece. She knew it would be. So damn odd, its sharp little pixie peak and drainage holes make it look like something Dr. Seuss would give the Whos. A frippery, a bibelot it is utterly, absolutely unnecessary to anyone’s life.

It’s perfect.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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Reader interactions.

Margaret Best says

February 17, 2019 at 12:13 pm

Interesting. A very long personal essay.

Amber Starfire says

February 17, 2019 at 12:44 pm

This is a beautiful piece and excellent example of how a personal essay dips into and out of the “personal” and into the universal. Thank you for sharing it.

Anne Bellissimo says

February 17, 2019 at 1:46 pm

Wow! This is a great example of how writing can crystallize emotions and personal history. I love to write essays, and usually run out of anything substantive to say after a few pages. Thanks for posting.

Diane Cameron says

February 17, 2019 at 1:48 pm

Dear God–this is exquisite! Thank you.

Diane (Youngest of five, two older sisters)

Stephen Boren says

February 17, 2019 at 3:18 pm

What a beautiful piece of writing. Different emotions came over me as I read it. I got choked up with your account of having to sell your valuable possessions for the sake of your Mother. Part of the brilliance of this essay is that you vividly talk about your feelings without using specific “feeling” words.

Thank you so much for posting this essay.

February 17, 2019 at 5:53 pm

Susan G says

February 17, 2019 at 8:49 pm

“…she simply made two piles: The keepers and the take-backs, stacking the boxes in their respective columns right there, under the Christmas tree and in front of the givers. She was 15.”

I did the same thing at age 15! It made my mom so mad. She said, “that does it! From now on I’m just going to give you money.”

I WISH I could have been less honest, more polite, but I’m still the same way. I dislike getting gifts, I always feel dread that I won’t like them and the giver will be mad at me. AND THEY ARE! :)

But what a wonderful portrait of your sisterly relationship you’ve painted…. stirred up so many memories of my sister whose love language is gifts. She loves to give and receive gifts, so we still exchange them in our 50s…even tho we both have way too much stuff; I ‘d love to stop, but I know that would take away her joy.

Thanks for sharing.

Cathy Baker says

February 20, 2019 at 8:03 am

I love this piece, Marion. It almost makes this only child wish she had a sister. How delightful it would be to have someone with the same blood running through their body totally understand and balance me.

I’m also a total sap when it comes to family heirlooms. Last week, I used my great-grandmother’s china to host a Valentines Day tea party for twelve.

Thank you for sharing this essay. Now I look forward to learning from your tips (because I always do!)

Linda Lee says

February 20, 2019 at 8:55 am

“Long ago, I began buying myself a yearly birthday present, sure that a small indulgence is good preventive medicine, a fine hedge against any resentment of either being forgotten or worse, misunderstood. We want to be understood.”

Colleen says

February 20, 2019 at 1:54 pm

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Moving and instructive, the essay captured the essence of heirlooms. Your portrayal of Margaret is at once glowing and realistic. My favorite part was reveling with both of you at the presentation of the tomato fork. Stuff, as the younger generation calls it, is best appreciated with the wisdom of age.

Jennifer Williams says

February 20, 2019 at 8:56 pm

I love this. I love essays and memoirs and I love to read them and when people tell me stories that have happened in their everyday life I always tell them they should write it down.

marion says

February 28, 2019 at 11:50 am

Thank you, Jennifer.

Gwendolyn says

February 22, 2019 at 5:00 pm

Exquisite in its entirety.

And the bathrobe. Beautiful, beautiful.

P.S. Short form example you shared about 9/11 is something I’d like to read aloud to my grown children at Sunday dinners. What a dear man you had for a father.

Many thanks for this. Best Marion

Mark Bottsq says

February 27, 2019 at 2:55 pm

Beautiful and tough.

February 28, 2019 at 12:03 pm

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Join me on instagram, mroachsmith.

Module 4: Writing in College

Writing a personal essay, learning objectives.

• Describe techniques for writing an effective personal essay

How to Write a Personal Essay

One particular and common kind of narrative essay is the personal narrative essay. Maybe you have already written one of these in order to get to college or for a scholarship. The personal essay is a narrative essay focused on you. Typically, you write about events or people in your life that taught you important life lessons. These events should have changed you somehow. From this choice will emerge the theme (the main point) of your story. Then you can follow these steps:

Figure 1 . Brainstorming the details of a personal experience can help you to write a more complete story with elements like vivid details, dialogue, and sufficient character development.

• Once you identify the event, you will write down what happened. Just brainstorm (also called freewriting). Focus on the actual event. You do not need to provide a complete build-up to it. For example, if you are telling a story about an experience at camp, you do not need to provide readers with a history of your camp experiences, nor do you need to explain how you got there, what you ate each day, how long it lasted, etc. Readers need enough information to understand the event.
• Use descriptions/vivid details.
• “Nothing moved but a pair of squirrels chasing each other back and forth on the telephone wires. I followed one in my sight. Finally, it stopped for a moment and I fired.”
• Passive voice uses the verb “to be” along with an action verb: had been aiming, was exhausted.
• Even though the “characters” in your story are real people, your readers won’t get to know them unless you describe them, present their personalities, and give them physical presence.
• Dialogue helps readers get to know the characters in your story, infuses the story with life, and offers a variation from description and explanation. When writing dialogue, you may not remember exactly what was said in the past, so be true to the person being represented and come as close to the actual language the person uses as possible. Dialogue is indented with each person speaking as its own paragraph. The paragraph ends when that person is done speaking and any following explanation or continuing action ends. (If your characters speak a language other than English, feel free to include that in your narrative, but provide a translation for your English-speaking readers.)
• Remember, if it is a personal narrative, you are telling the story, so it should be in first person. Students often worry about whether or not they are allowed to use “I.” It is impossible to write a personal essay without using “I”!
• Write the story in a consistent verb tense (almost always past tense). It doesn’t work to try to write it in the present tense since it already happened. Make sure you stay in the past tense.

Sample Personal Statement

One type of narrative essay you may have reason to write is a Personal Statement.

Many colleges and universities ask for a Personal Statement Essay for students who are applying for admission, to transfer, or for scholarships. Generally, a Personal Statement asks you to respond to a specific prompt, most often asking you to describe a significant life event, a personality trait, or a goal or principle that motivates or inspires you. Personal Statements are essentially narrative essays with a particular focus on the writer’s personal life.

The following essay was responding to the prompt: “Write about an experience that made you aware of a skill or strength you possess.” As you read, pay attention to the way the writer gets your attention with a strong opening, how he uses vivid details and a chronological narrative to tell his story, and how he links back to the prompt in the conclusion.

Sample Student Essay

Alen Abramyan Professor X English 1101-209 2/5/2022

In the Middle of Nowhere Fighting Adversity

A three-punch combination had me seeing stars. Blood started to rush down my nose. The Russian trainers quietly whispered to one another. I knew right away that my nose was broken. Was this the end of my journey; or was I about to face adversity?

Ever since I was seven years old, I trained myself in, “The Art of Boxing.”  While most of the kids were out playing fun games and hanging out with their friends, I was in a damp, sweat-filled gym. My path was set to be a difficult one. Blood, sweat, and tears were going to be an everyday occurrence.

At a very young age I learned the meaning of hard work and dedication. Most kids jumped from one activity to the next. Some quit because it was too hard; others quit because they were too bored. My father pointed this out to me on many occasions. Adults would ask my father, ” why do you let your son box? It’s such a dangerous sport, he could get hurt. My father always replied, “Everyone is going to get hurt in their lives, physically, mentally and emotionally. I’m making sure he’s ready for the challenges he’s going to face as a man. I always felt strong after hearing my father speak that way about me. I was a boy being shaped into a man, what a great feeling it was.

Year after year, I participated in boxing tournaments across the U.S. As the years went by, the work ethic and strength of character my father and coaches instilled in me, were starting to take shape. I began applying the hard work and dedication I learned in boxing, to my everyday life. I realized that when times were tough and challenges presented themselves, I wouldn’t back down, I would become stronger. This confidence I had in myself, gave me the strength to pursue my boxing career in Russia.

I traveled to Russia to compete in Amateur Boxing. Tournament after tournament I came closer to my goal of making the Russian Olympic Boxing team. After successfully winning the Kaliningrad regional tournament, I began training for the Northwest Championships. This would include boxers from St. Petersburg, Pskov, Kursk and many other powerful boxing cities.

We had to prepare for a tough tournament, and that’s what we did. While sparring one week before the tournament, I was caught by a strong punch combination to the nose. I knew right away it was serious. Blood began rushing down my face, as I noticed the coaches whispering to each other. They walked into my corner and examined my nose,” yeah, it’s broken,” Yuri Ivonovich yelled out. I was asked to clean up and to meet them in their office. I walked into the Boxing Federation office after a quick shower. I knew right away, they wanted to replace me for the upcoming tournament. “We’re investing a lot of money on you boxers and we expect good results. Why should we risk taking you with a broken nose?” Yuri Ivonovich asked me. I replied, “I traveled half-way around the world to be here, this injury isn’t a problem for me.” And by the look on my face they were convinced, they handed me my train ticket and wished me luck.

The train came to a screeching halt, shaking all the passengers awake. I glanced out my window, “Welcome to Cherepovets,” the sign read. In the background I saw a horrific skyline of smokestacks, coughing out thick black smoke. Arriving in the city, we went straight to the weigh ins. Hundreds of boxers, all from many cities were there. The brackets were set up shortly after the weigh ins. In the Super Heavyweight division, I found out I had 4 fights to compete in, each increasing in difficulty. My first match, I made sure not a punch would land; this was true for the next two fights. Winning all three 6-0, 8-0 and 7-0 respectively. It looked like I was close to winning the whole tournament. For the finals I was to fight the National Olympic Hope Champion.

The night before the finals was coincidentally the 200th anniversary of the city. All night by my hotel, I heard screams of laughter and partying. I couldn’t sleep a wink. The morning of the fight I was exhausted but anxious. I stepped into the ring knowing that I was tired. I fell behind in points quickly in the first round. I felt as if I were dreaming, with no control of the situation. I was going along for the ride and it wasn’t pleasant. At the end of the second round, the coach informed me that I was far behind. “?You’re asleep in there,” he yelled out to me, confirming how I felt. I knew this was my last chance; I had to give it my all. I mustered up enough strength to have an amazing round. It was as if I stepped out and a fresh boxer stepped in. I glanced at my coaches and see a look of approval. No matter the outcome, I felt that I had defeated adversity. My opponent’s hand was raised , he won a close decision, 6-5. After I got back to my hotel, I remembered Yuri Ivonovich telling me they expected good results. “How were my results,” I asked myself. In my mind, the results were great, with a broken nose and with no sleep, I came one point shy of defeating the National Olympic Hope Champion.

Even from a very young age, I knew that when my back was against the wall and adversity was knocking on my door, I would never back down. I became a stronger person, a trait my family made sure I would carry into my adult years. No matter what I’m striving for; getting into a University; receiving a scholarship; or applying for a job, I can proudly say to myself, I am Alen Abramyan and adversity is no match for me.

Link to Learning

Sandra Cisneros offers an example of a narrative essay in “Only Daughter”  that captures her sense of her Chicana-Mexican heritage as the only daughter in a family of seven children.

Do Personal Essays have Thesis Statements?

While many personal essays include a direct statement of the thesis, in some personal essays the thesis may be implied, or suggested, rather than stated outright.

Imagine, for example, that in your personal essay you decide to write about the way someone influenced you. The influential individual could be a relative, a friend or classmate, an employer or a teacher. As you shape your essay, you would not simply assemble a collection of miscellaneous observations about the person; instead, you would be selective and focus on details about this person that show his or her impact upon you.

Let us say that the person who influenced you is a grandparent. You may know a lot about this individual: personality traits, family and marital history, medical history, educational background, work experience, military experience, political and religious beliefs, hobbies, tastes in music, etc. As you shape your essay, you wouldn’t try to catalog all that you know. Instead, you would try to create a dominant impression by including details that guide your reader toward the idea that is central to the essay.

For example, if you developed certain habits and attitudes as you and your grandparent worked together on a project, that experience might provide the focus for the essay. If you chose details consistent with that focus, then you wouldn’t need to state that this was the point of the essay. Your readers would understand that that was the governing idea based on the details you had so carefully chosen.

Whether the thesis is stated outright or implied, then, the personal essay will have a governing idea—an idea that is “in charge” of what you decide to include in the essay in terms of content, vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone. In short, the personal essay may not have a thesis statement, but it  will  have a thesis.

Consider a personal essay in which a student was asked to write about a person she admired, and she wrote about her cousin. She wrote:

• I admired my cousin’s decision to enlist because she had to withstand criticism from people who thought women shouldn’t be in the army and because in basic training she had to stand up to physical and mental challenges that I don’t think I could face.

The thesis statement provides guidance for both writing and reading the essay. Writer and reader alike are able to see what the subject of the essay is and what is being stated about the subject and how the essay should be organized. No matter how many body paragraphs there are, this thesis implies that the paper will be divided into two sections. One section will group together the paragraphs on this topic: cousin “had to withstand criticism from people who thought women shouldn’t be in the army.” Another section will group together the paragraphs on this second topic: “in basic training she had to stand up to physical and mental challenges.”

Are Narratives Persuasive?

In a personal essay, you may not think of your thesis as “arguable” in the same way as a claim in a persuasive essay would be arguable, but in fact, you can think of it as something that should need to be demonstrated—backed up through explanations and illustrations. Usually, the idea that should be demonstrated is that you are a thoughtful, reflective person who has learned from the events and people in your life.

If the thesis does  not   need to be demonstrated, then there may not be much purpose in writing the essay. For, example, a statement that “George W. Bush was the forty-third president” or the statement that “Senior proms are exciting” would not be considered arguable by most people and likely would not spark a reader’s interest to make them want to keep reading.

On the other hand, the thesis statements below would need to be explained and illustrated. In that sense, these personal essay thesis statements are equivalent to claims that are “arguable.”

• The evening was nearly ruined because parents acting as dress-code vigilantes threw several people out of the prom.
• My team spent hours planning the prom and managed to head off a repeat of the after-prom drinking that caused some parents to question whether the prom should be held this year.
• Everyone was able to attend the prom proudly because our prom committee got several stores to loan outfits to make certain everyone would feel like they fit in.
• I opted to attend an alternative prom because the principal refused to allow a same-sex couple to attend.

Keep in mind that the actions or events in your essay do not have to make you look heroic. You could write a convincing and powerful essay about how you attended the school-sponsored prom, even though the principal refused to allow a same-sex couple to attend. Your essay, in this case, might, for example, focus on your regret over your decision and your subsequent understanding of how you think you can best challenge the status quo in the future. In other words, you can write an effective personal essay about a moment of regret.

• Narrative Essay. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/rhetorical-styles/narrative-essay/narrative-essay-see-it-across-the-disciplines/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Narrative Essays. Authored by : Marianne Botos, Lynn McClelland, Stephanie Polliard, Pamela Osback . Located at : https://pvccenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/eng-101-inside-pages-proof2-no-pro.pdf . Project : Horse of a Different Color: English Composition and Rhetoric . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Sample Narrative Essay. Provided by : Georgia State University. Located at : http://gsuideas.org/SCC/Narration/Sample%20Narrative%20Essay%20Personal%20Statement.html . Project : Writing For Success. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Writing a Narrative Essay. Provided by : Boundless. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-writing/chapter/types-of-rhetorical-modes/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of person writing on sticky notes. Authored by : Nappiness. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/brainstorming-business-professional-441010/ . License : Other . License Terms : https://pixabay.com/service/terms/#license
• Do Personal Essays have Thesis Statements?. Provided by : Radford University. Located at : https://lcubbison.pressbooks.com/chapter/core-101-personal-essay-assignment/ . Project : Radford University Core Handbook. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

How to Write a Personal Essay

Published September 27, 2020. Updated May 20, 2022.

Personal Essay Definition

A personal essay is an essay that tells about you, about some aspect of yourself and your life that you wish to share.

Overview of a Personal Essay

A personal essay is all about the one who is writing the essay, but it is structured and organized in a predictable pattern. A personal essay is a part narration (telling a story), part description, and part reflection (analyzing something that happened and attributing meaning to it). You can write a full-length personal essay without doing research. This kind of essay helps to show your writing skills and abilities and helps the reader get to know you and your writing voice. However, a personal essay still needs a focus.

This page covers the following points:

Key Takeaways

What is a personal essay, parts of an essay, why would you be asked to write a personal essay, what a personal essay needs to have, possible topics to write about.

• A personal essay is about you, about some aspect of yourself and your life that you wish to share
• A teacher might assign a personal essay as a way to get to know you and your writing style
• A personal essay still needs to follow the conventions and structures of essay writing
• A personal essay should have a well-defined beginning, middle, and end

If you look at the name, a personal essay is an essay about YOU. You know something about yourself, right? This should be a piece of cake to write!

Now, hang on just a second…

Yes, it’s about you, but don’t forget that second part of the name: essay. It is still an essay that needs to follow the conventions and structures of essay writing.

So a personal essay is not just five paragraphs that go on and on about your favorite movies.

A personal essay is all about you, but it is structured and organized in a predictable pattern. It is part narration (telling a story), part description, and part reflection (analyzing something that happened and attributing meaning to it).

To help you write a personal essay, this guide will:

• Tell you why a teacher might assign a personal essay
• List what a personal essay needs to have
• Give you a list of possible topics to write about
• Take you through the parts of an essay, with a sample

Worried about your writing? Submit your paper for a Chegg Writing essay check , or for an Expert Check proofreading . Both can help you find and fix potential writing issues.

Most essays have three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.

Think of the organization of an essay like this:

• Intro – Tell your reader what you’re going to write about
• Body – Write about it
• Conclusion – Tell them what you wrote about

Let’s go through each part of a personal essay. Each part includes a sample.

Introduction

You want to begin your essay with a hook . A hook is an interesting opening that “catches” your reader and makes them want to read more. Your hook is usually the first sentence or two. Since this is a personal essay, it’s fine to have your hook be something interesting about you.

After you’ve hooked the reader, you want to give some context or background information. Think of each sentence in your intro as a stepping point. Each sentence brings you closer to your thesis statement.

Once you’ve given some context, write a thesis statement, which tells the reader exactly what they’re going to read about. Since it’s a personal essay, this should preview for the reader what they’re going to learn about you. Think of it as a map to the rest of your essay.

Sample Introduction

Can you identify the hook, background information, and thesis statement in this sample?

Did you know that children can “absorb” languages without even trying? Until the age of about nine, children acquire languages, and they can acquire more than one at a time. After that age, new languages must be learned, which is a long, slow process. I acquired two languages as a child because my parents spoke Spanish at home, but I learned English at school. Then, in university, I decided to try to learn a third language: French. After years of learning and some practicing, I can communicate in basic French.

A typical essay has between one and three body paragraphs, although you can write as many as you need (or as many as your teacher assigns you). Regardless of how many body paragraphs, they will all be organized in a similar manner.

Start with a topic sentence to show your reader what is coming up. This is a general sentence that gives an overview of that paragraph.

The substance of a personal body paragraph is, of course, information about you. Whatever you’re sharing with the reader goes here.

End a body paragraph with a sentence that summarizes what you wrote or that leads into the next paragraph.

Sample Body Paragraphs

Can you identify the topic sentences? Is all of the information in the body paragraphs about the writer?

In university, I chose to study French for two reasons. First, I thought it was the most beautiful language I’d ever heard. Second, I wanted the experience of learning a language, of learning vocabulary and grammar little by little. I took a French class every semester of college and by the time I graduated… well, the truth is that I still couldn’t communicate easily. But I was determined to continue learning until I could.

In graduate school, I needed an elective, so I chose a French class. I took a placement test and was placed in French 102. At first, I was devastated – four years of college French and I was back in French 102? But I decided to embrace the opportunity to keep learning. My decision paid off. Because I was a little older, I approached my French in a more mature way. I was able to understand the grammar better, and I was less shy about speaking up. One of our assignments was to give a three-minute presentation in French about a French topic, and I spoke about cheese. I will admit that a lot of translation took place while I was writing my presentation, but the presentation was a success.

After graduate school, I took the opportunity to spend six months in a French-speaking country. At first, I was very nervous. We have all heard the stereotype of finicky French people who won’t talk to you if your French isn’t perfect. That wasn’t my experience at all; I was able to communicate enough to buy a baguette every morning, ask for directions, order a pizza, and generally make my way in this French-speaking country.

Before you turn in that paper, don’t forget to cite your sources in APA format , MLA format , or a style of your choice.

This is how your essay ends and is the last impression your reader takes away.

Conclude your essay by tying back to your thesis statement (from the introduction). Then, summarize the main points of your essay.

If you want, end with a closing statement: an idea that you want your reader to walk away with. If you haven’t included a reflection in the body paragraphs, the closing statement would be a good place to put it.

Sample Conclusion

Can you identify the sentence that ties back to the thesis statement? Can you identify the summary of the main points? Can you identify a closing statement?

Even now, I wouldn’t say I’m a fluent French speaker. Will I ever be? I don’t know, but I can proudly say that I am able to communicate in French well enough to make myself understood and to understand what other people tell me, even if I often have to ask, “Can you speak more slowly, please?” in French. Learning another language is not an easy process. You have to really want it because it will take time and effort. However, if you are dedicated, you can definitely learn another language successfully enough to communicate. 

Example Personal Essay on Learning French

Example personal essay on loving writing.

A teacher might assign a personal essay for a variety of reasons, especially early on in the semester or school year. Here are a few of those reasons:

• You might need to brainstorm or outline what you want to write about, but you shouldn’t need research. After all, you’re writing about YOU.
• Your teacher will be able to see how you write. Can you structure sentences? Are your ideas coherent? Are you creative? How is your vocabulary?
• Do you know what the introduction, body, and conclusion are? Do you include a thesis statement and paragraphs? Do you clearly transition your ideas?
• At the beginning of a school term, this is an excellent way for a teacher to get to know their students. What you choose to write about will reveal who you are, and how you choose to write tells the teacher something about your writing voice.

It would be nice to think you can just write whatever you want about yourself, but that would not necessarily be an essay.

A personal essay still needs to have a focus: what is it about? It won’t address everything about you. This is an essay, not a 20-volume encyclopedia.

A personal essay still needs to be organized. It needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The reader should feel like they took a trip to a particular destination, not like they’re lost in the woods, wandering aimlessly.

A personal essay still needs to have developed characters. Characters? Yes. They don’t just appear in fiction. Whoever populates your essay – whether it’s just you, or you and your family, or you and your friends – they are considered characters, and they should be developed.

A personal essay still needs to have consistency in point of view and verb tense. This sounds more technical, but because you’ll be writing about yourself, you want to make sure your point of view remains consistent. Adopting the first-person point of view is perfectly acceptable. Write “I” all over the place! But don’t start referring to yourself as “she” or “he” halfway through, because that will confuse your reader. Also, keep your verb tenses consistent. Are you writing in the present tense? Be consistent. Are you writing in the past tense? Be consistent. Will you jump back and forth in time? Make sure you don’t lose your reader when you make those switches.

A personal essay still needs to make a point by the end. Reflect on what this all meant. Why did you choose to write about this ? Let’s say you write about your relationship with your grandmother. At the end of the essay, your reader should understand what was important about your relationship with her. How did she impact you? How is your life different, better, sweeter because of your relationship with her? Make sure your essay answers those questions for your readers.

Since a personal essay is, you know, personal, it’s better to choose a topic that resonates with you. If the topic makes you feel meh , don’t choose that one! Don’t like any of these? Choose something else that you want to share!

For each of these topics, you can write about something positive or negative, as long as it was meaningful to you:

• Your relationship with a family member
• Your relationship with a friend or loved one
• An animal, such as a pet, that affected you
• A place where you felt comfortable
• A place where you felt uncomfortable
• An experience you had growing up
• A situation that didn’t turn out the way you expected
• A difficult lesson you learned
• A strong belief you have
• A goal you accomplished with hard work

Published September 7, 2020.

By Halina Stolar. Halina has a master’s degree in teaching and taught English as a Second Language and writing for almost 15 years overseas. She now works as a freelance writer and geeks out over grammar for fun.

Common Writing Assignments, Apps & Tests

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• Informative Essay
• Narrative Essay
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• Persuasive Essay
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10 Personal Statement Essay Examples That Worked

What’s covered:, what is a personal statement.

• Essay 1: Summer Program
• Essay 2: Being Bangladeshi-American
• Essay 3: Why Medicine
• Essay 4: Love of Writing
• Essay 5: Starting a Fire
• Essay 6: Dedicating a Track
• Essay 7: Body Image and Eating Disorders
• Essay 8: Becoming a Coach
• Essay 9: Eritrea
• Essay 10: Journaling
• Is Your Personal Statement Strong Enough?

Your personal statement is any essay that you must write for your main application, such as the Common App Essay , University of California Essays , or Coalition Application Essay . This type of essay focuses on your unique experiences, ideas, or beliefs that may not be discussed throughout the rest of your application. This essay should be an opportunity for the admissions officers to get to know you better and give them a glimpse into who you really are.

In this post, we will share 10 different personal statements that were all written by real students. We will also provide commentary on what each essay did well and where there is room for improvement, so you can make your personal statement as strong as possible!

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Personal Statement Examples

Essay example #1: exchange program.

The twisting roads, ornate mosaics, and fragrant scent of freshly ground spices had been so foreign at first. Now in my fifth week of the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco, I felt more comfortable in the city. With a bag full of pastries from the market, I navigated to a bus stop, paid the fare, and began the trip back to my host family’s house. It was hard to believe that only a few years earlier my mom was worried about letting me travel around my home city on my own, let alone a place that I had only lived in for a few weeks. While I had been on a journey towards self-sufficiency and independence for a few years now, it was Morocco that pushed me to become the confident, self-reflective person that I am today.

As a child, my parents pressured me to achieve perfect grades, master my swim strokes, and discover interesting hobbies like playing the oboe and learning to pick locks. I felt compelled to live my life according to their wishes. Of course, this pressure was not a wholly negative factor in my life –– you might even call it support. However, the constant presence of my parents’ hopes for me overcame my own sense of desire and led me to become quite dependent on them. I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school. Despite all these achievements, I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success. I had always been expected to succeed on the path they had defined. However, this path was interrupted seven years after my parents’ divorce when my dad moved across the country to Oregon.

I missed my dad’s close presence, but I loved my new sense of freedom. My parents’ separation allowed me the space to explore my own strengths and interests as each of them became individually busier. As early as middle school, I was riding the light rail train by myself, reading maps to get myself home, and applying to special academic programs without urging from my parents. Even as I took more initiatives on my own, my parents both continued to see me as somewhat immature. All of that changed three years ago, when I applied and was accepted to the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco. I would be studying Arabic and learning my way around the city of Marrakesh. Although I think my parents were a little surprised when I told them my news, the addition of a fully-funded scholarship convinced them to let me go.

I lived with a host family in Marrakesh and learned that they, too, had high expectations for me. I didn’t know a word of Arabic, and although my host parents and one brother spoke good English, they knew I was there to learn. If I messed up, they patiently corrected me but refused to let me fall into the easy pattern of speaking English just as I did at home. Just as I had when I was younger, I felt pressured and stressed about meeting their expectations. However, one day, as I strolled through the bustling market square after successfully bargaining with one of the street vendors, I realized my mistake. My host family wasn’t being unfair by making me fumble through Arabic. I had applied for this trip, and I had committed to the intensive language study. My host family’s rules about speaking Arabic at home had not been to fulfill their expectations for me, but to help me fulfill my expectations for myself. Similarly, the pressure my parents had put on me as a child had come out of love and their hopes for me, not out of a desire to crush my individuality.

As my bus drove through the still-bustling market square and past the medieval Ben-Youssef madrasa, I realized that becoming independent was a process, not an event. I thought that my parents’ separation when I was ten had been the one experience that would transform me into a self-motivated and autonomous person. It did, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t still have room to grow. Now, although I am even more self-sufficient than I was three years ago, I try to approach every experience with the expectation that it will change me. It’s still difficult, but I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important.

What the Essay Did Well

This is a nice essay because it delves into particular character trait of the student and how it has been shaped and matured over time. Although it doesn’t focus the essay around a specific anecdote, the essay is still successful because it is centered around this student’s independence. This is a nice approach for a personal statement: highlight a particular trait of yours and explore how it has grown with you.

The ideas in this essay are universal to growing up—living up to parents’ expectations, yearning for freedom, and coming to terms with reality—but it feels unique to the student because of the inclusion of details specific to them. Including their oboe lessons, the experience of riding the light rail by themselves, and the negotiations with a street vendor helps show the reader what these common tropes of growing up looked like for them personally. 

Another strength of the essay is the level of self-reflection included throughout the piece. Since there is no central anecdote tying everything together, an essay about a character trait is only successful when you deeply reflect on how you felt, where you made mistakes, and how that trait impacts your life. The author includes reflection in sentences like “ I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success, ” and “ I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important. ” These sentences help us see how the student was impacted and what their point of view is.

What Could Be Improved

The largest change this essay would benefit from is to show not tell. The platitude you have heard a million times no doubt, but for good reason. This essay heavily relies on telling the reader what occurred, making us less engaged as the entire reading experience feels more passive. If the student had shown us what happens though, it keeps the reader tied to the action and makes them feel like they are there with the student, making it much more enjoyable to read. 

For example, they tell us about the pressure to succeed their parents placed on them: “ I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school.”  They could have shown us what that pressure looked like with a sentence like this: “ My stomach turned somersaults as my rattling knee thumped against the desk before every test, scared to get anything less than a 95. For five years the painful squawk of the oboe only reminded me of my parents’ claps and whistles at my concerts. I mastered the butterfly, backstroke, and freestyle, fighting against the anchor of their expectations threatening to pull me down.”

If the student had gone through their essay and applied this exercise of bringing more detail and colorful language to sentences that tell the reader what happened, the essay would be really great. 

Table of Contents

Essay Example #2: Being Bangladeshi-American

Life before was good: verdant forests, sumptuous curries, and a devoted family.

Then, my family abandoned our comfortable life in Bangladesh for a chance at the American dream in Los Angeles. Within our first year, my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He lost his battle three weeks before my sixth birthday. Facing a new country without the steady presence of my father, we were vulnerable — prisoners of hardship in the land of the free. We resettled in the Bronx, in my uncle’s renovated basement. It was meant to be our refuge, but I felt more displaced than ever. Gone were the high-rise condos of West L.A.; instead, government projects towered over the neighborhood. Pedestrians no longer smiled and greeted me; the atmosphere was hostile, even toxic. Schoolkids were quick to pick on those they saw as weak or foreign, hurling harsh words I’d never heard before.

Meanwhile, my family began integrating into the local Bangladeshi community. I struggled to understand those who shared my heritage. Bangladeshi mothers stayed home while fathers drove cabs and sold fruit by the roadside — painful societal positions. Riding on crosstown buses or walking home from school, I began to internalize these disparities. During my fleeting encounters with affluent Upper East Siders, I saw kids my age with nannies, parents who wore suits to work, and luxurious apartments with spectacular views. Most took cabs to their destinations: cabs that Bangladeshis drove. I watched the mundane moments of their lives with longing, aching to plant myself in their shoes. Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

As I grappled with my relationship with the Bangladeshi community, I turned my attention to helping my Bronx community by pursuing an internship with Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda. I handled desk work and took calls, spending the bulk of my time actively listening to the hardships constituents faced — everything from a veteran stripped of his benefits to a grandmother unable to support her bedridden grandchild.

I’d never exposed myself to stories like these, and now I was the first to hear them. As an intern, I could only assist in what felt like the small ways — pointing out local job offerings, printing information on free ESL classes, reaching out to non-profits. But to a community facing an onslaught of intense struggles, I realized that something as small as these actions could have vast impacts. Seeing the immediate consequences of my actions inspired me. Throughout that summer, I internalized my community’s daily challenges in a new light. I began to stop seeing the prevalent underemployment and cramped living quarters less as sources of shame. Instead, I saw them as realities that had to be acknowledged, but could ultimately be remedied. I also realized the benefits of the Bangladeshi culture I had been so ashamed of. My Bangla language skills were an asset to the office, and my understanding of Bangladeshi etiquette allowed for smooth communication between office staff and its constituents. As I helped my neighbors navigate city services, I saw my heritage with pride — a perspective I never expected to have.

I can now appreciate the value of my unique culture and background, and of living with less. This perspective offers room for progress, community integration, and a future worth fighting for. My time with Assemblyman Sepulveda’s office taught me that I can be a change agent in enabling this progression. Far from being ashamed of my community, I want to someday return to local politics in the Bronx to continue helping others access the American Dream. I hope to help my community appreciate the opportunity to make progress together. By embracing reality, I learned to live it. Along the way, I discovered one thing: life is good, but we can make it better.

This student’s passion for social justice and civic duty shines through in this essay because of how honest it is. Sharing their personal experience with immigrating, moving around, being an outsider, and finding a community allows us to see the hardships this student has faced and builds empathy towards their situation. However, what really makes it strong is that they go beyond describing the difficulties they faced and explain the mental impact it had on them as a child: Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

The rejection of their culture presented at the beginning of the essay creates a nice juxtaposition with the student’s view in the latter half of the essay and helps demonstrate how they have matured. They use their experience interning as a way to delve into a change in their thought process about their culture and show how their passion for social justice began. Using this experience as a mechanism to explore their thoughts and feelings is an excellent example of how items that are included elsewhere on your application should be incorporated into your essay.

This essay prioritizes emotions and personal views over specific anecdotes. Although there are details and certain moments incorporated throughout to emphasize the author’s points, the main focus remains on the student and how they grapple with their culture and identity.  

One area for improvement is the conclusion. Although the forward-looking approach is a nice way to end an essay focused on social justice, it would be nice to include more details and imagery in the conclusion. How does the student want to help their community? What government position do they see themselves holding one day? 

A more impactful ending might look like the student walking into their office at the New York City Housing Authority in 15 years and looking at the plans to build a new development in the Bronx just blocks away from where the grew up that would provide quality housing to people in their Bangladeshi community. They would smile while thinking about how far they have come from that young kid who used to be ashamed of their culture. 

Essay Example #3: Why Medicine

I took my first trip to China to visit my cousin Anna in July of 2014. Distance had kept us apart, but when we were together, we fell into all of our old inside jokes and caught up on each other’s lives. Her sparkling personality and optimistic attitude always brought a smile to my face. This time, however, my heart broke when I saw the effects of her brain cancer; she had suffered from a stroke that paralyzed her left side. She was still herself in many ways, but I could see that the damage to her brain made things difficult for her. I stayed by her every day, providing the support she needed, whether assisting her with eating and drinking, reading to her, or just watching “Friends.” During my flight back home, sorrow and helplessness overwhelmed me. Would I ever see Anna again? Could I have done more to make Anna comfortable? I wished I could stay in China longer to care for her. As I deplaned, I wondered if I could transform my grief to help other children and teenagers in the US who suffered as Anna did.

The day after I got home, as jet lag dragged me awake a few minutes after midnight, I remembered hearing about the Family Reach Foundation (FRF) and its work with children going through treatments at the local hospital and their families. I began volunteering in the FRF’s Children’s Activity Room, where I play with children battling cancer. Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up. When they take on the roles of firefighters or fairies, we all get caught up in the game; for that time, they forget the sanitized, stark, impersonal walls of the pediatric oncology ward. Building close relationships with them and seeing them giggle and laugh is so rewarding — I love watching them grow and get better throughout their course of treatment.

Hearing from the parents about their children’s condition and seeing the children recover inspired me to consider medical research. To get started, I enrolled in a summer collegelevel course in Abnormal Psychology. There I worked with Catelyn, a rising college senior, on a data analysis project regarding Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Together, we examined the neurological etiology of DID by studying four fMRI and PET cases. I fell in love with gathering data and analyzing the results and was amazed by our final product: several stunning brain images showcasing the areas of hyper and hypoactivity in brains affected by DID. Desire quickly followed my amazement — I want to continue this project and study more brains. Their complexity, delicacy, and importance to every aspect of life fascinate me. Successfully completing this research project gave me a sense of hope; I know I am capable of participating in a large scale research project and potentially making a difference in someone else’s life through my research.

Anna’s diagnosis inspired me to begin volunteering at FRF; from there, I discovered my desire to help people further by contributing to medical research. As my research interest blossomed, I realized that it’s no coincidence that I want to study brains—after all, Anna suffered from brain cancer. Reflecting on these experiences this past year and a half, I see that everything I’ve done is connected. Sadly, a few months after I returned from China, Anna passed away. I am still sad, but as I run a toy truck across the floor and watch one of the little patients’ eyes light up, I imagine that she would be proud of my commitment to pursue medicine and study the brain.

This essay has a very strong emotional core that tugs at the heart strings and makes the reader feel invested. Writing about sickness can be difficult and doesn’t always belong in a personal statement, but in this case it works well because the focus is on how this student cared for her cousin and dealt with the grief and emotions surrounding her condition. Writing about the compassion she showed and the doubts and concerns that filled her mind keeps the focus on the author and her personality. 

This continues when she again discusses the activities she did with the kids at FRF and the personal reflection this experience allowed her to have. For example, she writes: Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up.

Concluding the essay with the sad story of her cousin’s passing brings the essay full circle and returns to the emotional heart of the piece to once again build a connection with the reader. However, it finishes on a hopeful note and demonstrates how this student has been able to turn a tragic experience into a source of lifelong inspiration. 

One thing this essay should be cognizant of is that personal statements should not read as summaries of your extracurricular resume. Although this essay doesn’t fully fall into that trap, it does describe two key extracurriculars the student participated in. However, the inclusion of such a strong emotional core running throughout the essay helps keep the focus on the student and her thoughts and feelings during these activities.

To avoid making this mistake, make sure you have a common thread running through your essay and the extracurriculars provide support to the story you are trying to tell, rather than crafting a story around your activities. And, as this essay does, make sure there is lots of personal reflection and feelings weaved throughout to focus attention to you rather than your extracurriculars. 

Essay Example #4: Love of Writing

“I want to be a writer.” This had been my answer to every youthful discussion with the adults in my life about what I would do when I grew up. As early as elementary school, I remember reading my writing pieces aloud to an audience at “Author of the Month” ceremonies. Bearing this goal in mind, and hoping to gain some valuable experience, I signed up for a journalism class during my freshman year. Despite my love for writing, I initially found myself uninterested in the subject and I struggled to enjoy the class. When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines. Journalism required a laconic style and orderly structure, and I found my teacher’s assignments formulaic and dull. That class shook my confidence as a writer. I was uncertain if I should continue in it for the rest of my high school career.

Despite my misgivings, I decided that I couldn’t make a final decision on whether to quit journalism until I had some experience working for a paper outside of the classroom. The following year, I applied to be a staff reporter on our school newspaper. I hoped this would help me become more self-driven and creative, rather than merely writing articles that my teacher assigned. To my surprise, my time on staff was worlds away from what I experienced in the journalism class. Although I was unaccustomed to working in a fast-paced environment and initially found it burdensome to research and complete high-quality stories in a relatively short amount of time, I also found it exciting. I enjoyed learning more about topics and events on campus that I did not know much about; some of my stories that I covered in my first semester concerned a chess tournament, a food drive, and a Spanish immersion party. I relished in the freedom I had to explore and learn, and to write more independently than I could in a classroom.

Although I enjoyed many aspects of working for the paper immediately, reporting also pushed me outside of my comfort zone. I am a shy person, and speaking with people I did not know intimidated me. During my first interview, I met with the basketball coach to prepare for a story about the team’s winning streak. As I approached his office, I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block, and I could hardly get out my opening questions. Fortunately, the coach was very kind and helped me through the conversation. Encouraged, I prepared for my next interview with more confidence. After a few weeks of practice, I even started to look forward to interviewing people on campus. That first journalism class may have bored me, but even if journalism in practice was challenging, it was anything but tedious.

Over the course of that year, I grew to love writing for our school newspaper. Reporting made me aware of my surroundings, and made me want to know more about current events on campus and in the town where I grew up. By interacting with people all over campus, I came to understand the breadth of individuals and communities that make up my high school. I felt far more connected to diverse parts of my school through my work as a journalist, and I realized that journalism gave me a window into seeing beyond my own experiences. The style of news writing may be different from what I used to think “writing” meant, but I learned that I can still derive exciting plots from events that may have gone unnoticed if not for my stories. I no longer struggle to approach others, and truly enjoy getting to know people and recognizing their accomplishments through my writing. Becoming a writer may be a difficult path, but it is as rewarding as I hoped when I was young.

This essay is clearly structured in a manner that makes it flow very nicely and contributes to its success. It starts with a quote to draw in the reader and show this student’s life-long passion for writing. Then it addresses the challenges of facing new, unfamiliar territory and how this student overcame it. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on this eye-opening experience and a nod to their younger self from the introduction. Having a well-thought out and sequential structure with clear transitions makes it extremely easy for the reader to follow along and take away the main idea.

Another positive aspect of the essay is the use of strong and expressive language. Sentences like “ When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines ” stand out because of the intentional use of words like “lyrical”, “profound”, and “thrilling” to convey the student’s love of writing. The author also uses an active voice to capture the readers’ attention and keep us engaged. They rely on their language and diction to reveal details to the reader, for instance saying “ I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block ” to describe feeling nervous.

This essay is already very strong, so there isn’t much that needs to be changed. One thing that could take the essay from great to outstanding would be to throw in more quotes, internal dialogue, and sensory descriptors.

It would be nice to see the nerves they felt interviewing the coach by including dialogue like “ Um…I want to interview you about…uh…”.  They could have shown their original distaste for journalism by narrating the thoughts running through their head. The fast-paced environment of their newspaper could have come to life with descriptions about the clacking of keyboards and the whirl of people running around laying out articles.

Essay Example #5: Starting a Fire

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the garb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This student is an excellent writer, which allows a simple story to be outstandingly compelling. The author articulates her points beautifully and creatively through her immense use of details and figurative language. Lines like “a rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees,” and “rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers,” create vivid images that draw the reader in. 

The flowery and descriptive prose also contributes to the nice juxtaposition between the old Clara and the new Clara. The latter half of the essay contrasts elements of nature with music and writing to demonstrate how natural these interests are for her now. This sentence perfectly encapsulates the contrast she is trying to build: “It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive.”

In addition to being well-written, this essay is thematically cohesive. It begins with the simple introduction “Fire!” and ends with the following image: “When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.” This full-circle approach leaves readers satisfied and impressed.

There is very little this essay should change, however one thing to be cautious about is having an essay that is overly-descriptive. We know from the essay that this student likes to read and write, and depending on other elements of her application, it might make total sense to have such a flowery and ornate writing style. However, your personal statement needs to reflect your voice as well as your personality. If you would never use language like this in conversation or your writing, don’t put it in your personal statement. Make sure there is a balance between eloquence and your personal voice.

Essay Example #6: Dedicating a Track

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay effectively conveys this student’s compassion for others, initiative, and determination—all great qualities to exemplify in a personal statement!

Although they rely on telling us a lot of what happened up until the board meeting, the use of running a race (their passion) as a metaphor for public speaking provides a lot of insight into the fear that this student overcame to work towards something bigger than themself. Comparing a podium to the starting line, the audience to the track, and silence to the gunshot is a nice way of demonstrating this student’s passion for cross country running without making that the focus of the story.

The essay does a nice job of coming full circle at the end by explaining what the quote from the beginning meant to them after this experience. Without explicitly saying “ I now know that what Stark actually meant is…” they rely on the strength of their argument above to make it obvious to the reader what it means to get beat but not lose. 

One of the biggest areas of improvement in the intro, however, is how the essay tells us Stark’s impact rather than showing us: His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The writer could’ve helped us feel a stronger emotional connection to Stark if they had included examples of Stark’s qualities, rather than explicitly stating them. For example, they could’ve written something like: Stark was the kind of person who would give you gas money if you told him your parents couldn’t afford to pick you up from practice. And he actually did that—several times. At track meets, alumni regularly would come talk to him and tell him how he’d changed their lives. Before Stark, I was ambivalent about running and was on the JV team, but his encouragement motivated me to run longer and harder and eventually make varsity. Because of him, I approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

Essay Example #7: Body Image and Eating Disorders

I press the “discover” button on my Instagram app, hoping to find enticing pictures to satisfy my boredom. Scrolling through, I see funny videos and mouth-watering pictures of food. However, one image stops me immediately. A fit teenage girl with a “perfect body” relaxes in a bikini on a beach. Beneath it, I see a slew of flattering comments. I shake with disapproval over the image’s unrealistic quality. However, part of me still wants to have a body like hers so that others will make similar comments to me.

I would like to resolve a silent issue that harms many teenagers and adults: negative self image and low self-esteem in a world where social media shapes how people view each other. When people see the façades others wear to create an “ideal” image, they can develop poor thought patterns rooted in negative self-talk. The constant comparisons to “perfect” others make people feel small. In this new digital age, it is hard to distinguish authentic from artificial representations.

When I was 11, I developed anorexia nervosa. Though I was already thin, I wanted to be skinny like the models that I saw on the magazine covers on the grocery store stands. Little did I know that those models probably also suffered from disorders, and that photoshop erased their flaws. I preferred being underweight to being healthy. No matter how little I ate or how thin I was, I always thought that I was too fat. I became obsessed with the number on the scale and would try to eat the least that I could without my parents urging me to take more. Fortunately, I stopped engaging in anorexic behaviors before middle school. However, my underlying mental habits did not change. The images that had provoked my disorder in the first place were still a constant presence in my life.

By age 15, I was in recovery from anorexia, but suffered from depression. While I used to only compare myself to models, the growth of social media meant I also compared myself to my friends and acquaintances. I felt left out when I saw my friends’ excitement about lake trips they had taken without me. As I scrolled past endless photos of my flawless, thin classmates with hundreds of likes and affirming comments, I felt my jealousy spiral. I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.” When that didn’t work, I started to feel too anxious to post anything at all.  

Body image insecurities and social media comparisons affect thousands of people – men, women, children, and adults – every day. I am lucky – after a few months of my destructive social media habits, I came across a video that pointed out the illusory nature of social media; many Instagram posts only show off good things while people hide their flaws. I began going to therapy, and recovered from my depression. To address the problem of self-image and social media, we can all focus on what matters on the inside and not what is on the surface. As an effort to become healthy internally, I started a club at my school to promote clean eating and radiating beauty from within. It has helped me grow in my confidence, and today I’m not afraid to show others my struggles by sharing my experience with eating disorders. Someday, I hope to make this club a national organization to help teenagers and adults across the country. I support the idea of body positivity and embracing difference, not “perfection.” After all, how can we be ourselves if we all look the same?

This essay covers the difficult topics of eating disorders and mental health. If you’re thinking about covering similar topics in your essay, we recommend reading our post Should You Talk About Mental Health in College Essays?

The short answer is that, yes, you can talk about mental health, but it can be risky. If you do go that route, it’s important to focus on what you learned from the experience.

The strength of this essay is the student’s vulnerability, in excerpts such as this: I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.”

The student goes on to share how they recovered from their depression through an eye-opening video and therapy sessions, and they’re now helping others find their self-worth as well. It’s great that this essay looks towards the future and shares the writer’s goals of making their club a national organization; we can see their ambition and compassion.

The main weakness of this essay is that it doesn’t focus enough on their recovery process, which is arguably the most important part. They could’ve told us more about the video they watched or the process of starting their club and the interactions they’ve had with other members. Especially when sharing such a vulnerable topic, there should be vulnerability in the recovery process too. That way, the reader can fully appreciate all that this student has overcome.

Essay Example #8: Becoming a Coach

”Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one.

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we competed with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

This essay begins with an in-the-moment narrative that really illustrates the chaos of looking for a coach last-minute. We feel the writer’s emotions, particularly her dejectedness, at not being able to compete. Starting an essay in media res  is a great way to capture the attention of your readers and build anticipation for what comes next.

Through this essay, we can see how gutsy and determined the student is in deciding to become a coach themselves. She shows us these characteristics through their actions, rather than explicitly telling us: To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side.  Also, by discussing the opposition she faced and how it affected her, the student is open and vulnerable about the reality of the situation.

The essay comes full circle as the author recalls the frantic situations in seeking out a coach, but this is no longer a concern for them and their team. Overall, this essay is extremely effective in painting this student as mature, bold, and compassionate.

The biggest thing this essay needs to work on is showing not telling. Throughout the essay, the student tells us that she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence,” she “grew unsure of her own abilities,” and she “refused to give up”. What we really want to know is what this looks like.

Instead of saying she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence” she should have shared how she taught a new move to a fellow team-member without hesitation. Rather than telling us she “grew unsure of her own abilities” she should have shown what that looked like by including her internal dialogue and rhetorical questions that ran through her mind. She could have demonstrated what “refusing to give up” looks like by explaining how she kept learning coaching techniques on her own, turned to a mentor for advice, or devised a plan to win over the trust of parents. 

Essay Example #9: Eritrea

No one knows where Eritrea is.

On the first day of school, for the past nine years, I would pensively stand in front of a class, a teacher, a stranger  waiting for the inevitable question: Where are you from?

I smile politely, my dimples accentuating my ambiguous features. “Eritrea,” I answer promptly and proudly. But I  am always prepared. Before their expression can deepen into confusion, ready to ask “where is that,” I elaborate,  perhaps with a fleeting hint of exasperation, “East Africa, near Ethiopia.”

Sometimes, I single out the key-shaped hermit nation on a map, stunning teachers who have “never had a student  from there!” Grinning, I resist the urge to remark, “You didn’t even know it existed until two minutes ago!”

Eritrea is to the East of Ethiopia, its arid coastline clutches the lucrative Red Sea. Battle scars litter the ancient  streets – the colonial Italian architecture lathered with bullet holes, the mosques mangled with mortar shells.  Originally part of the world’s first Christian kingdom, Eritrea passed through the hands of colonial Italy, Britain, and  Ethiopia for over a century, until a bloody thirty year war of Independence liberated us.

But these are facts that anyone can know with a quick Google search. These are facts that I have memorised and compounded, first from my Grandmother and now from pristine books  borrowed from the library.

No historical narrative, however, can adequately capture what Eritrea is.  No one knows the aroma of bushels of potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic – still covered in dirt – that leads you to the open-air market. No one knows the poignant scent of spices, arranged in orange piles reminiscent of compacted  dunes.  No one knows how to haggle stubborn herders for sheep and roosters for Christmas celebrations as deliberately as my mother. No one can replicate the perfect balance of spices in dorho and tsebhi as well as my grandmother,  her gnarly hands stirring the pot with ancient precision (chastising my clumsy knife work with the potatoes).  It’s impossible to learn when the injera is ready – the exact moment you have to lift the lid of the mogogo. Do it too  early (or too late) and the flatbread becomes mangled and gross. It is a sixth sense passed through matriarchal  lineages.

There are no sources that catalogue the scent of incense that wafts through the sunlit porch on St. Michael’s; no  films that can capture the luminescence of hundreds of flaming bonfires that fluoresce the sidewalks on Kudus  Yohannes, as excited children chant Ge’ez proverbs whose origin has been lost to time.  You cannot learn the familiarity of walking beneath the towering Gothic figure of the Enda Mariam Cathedral, the  crowds undulating to the ringing of the archaic bells.  I have memorized the sound of the rains hounding the metal roof during kiremti , the heat of the sun pounding  against the Toyota’s window as we sped down towards Ghinda , the opulent brilliance of the stars twinkling in a  sky untainted by light pollution, the scent of warm rolls of bani wafting through the streets at precisely 6 o’clock each day…

I fill my flimsy sketchbook with pictures from my memory. My hand remembers the shapes of the hibiscus drifting  in the wind, the outline of my grandmother (affectionately nicknamed a’abaye ) leaning over the garden, the bizarre architecture of the Fiat Tagliero .  I dice the vegetables with movements handed down from generations. My nose remembers the scent of frying garlic, the sourness of the warm tayta , the sharpness of the mit’mt’a …

This knowledge is intrinsic.  “I am Eritrean,” I repeat. “I am proud.”  Within me is an encyclopedia of history, culture, and idealism.

Eritrea is the coffee made from scratch, the spices drying in the sun, the priests and nuns. Eritrea is wise, filled with ambition, and unseen potential.  Eritrea isn’t a place, it’s an identity.

This is an exceptional essay that provides a window into this student’s culture that really makes their love for their country and heritage leap off the page. The sheer level of details and sensory descriptors this student is able to fit in this space makes the essay stand out. From the smells, to the traditions, sounds, and sights, the author encapsulates all the glory of Eritrea for the reader. 

The vivid images this student is able to create for the reader, whether it is having the tedious conversation with every teacher or cooking in their grandmother’s kitchen, transports us into the story and makes us feel like we are there in the moment with the student. This is a prime example of an essay that shows , not tells.

Besides the amazing imagery, the use of shorter paragraphs also contributes to how engaging this essay is. Employing this tactic helps break up the text to make it more readable and it isolates ideas so they stick out more than if they were enveloped in a large paragraph.

Overall, this is a really strong essay that brings to life this student’s heritage through its use of vivid imagery. This essay exemplifies what it means to show not tell in your writing, and it is a great example of how you can write an intimate personal statement without making yourself the primary focus of your essay. 

There is very little this essay should improve upon, but one thing the student might consider would be to inject more personal reflection into their response. Although we can clearly take away their deep love and passion for their homeland and culture, the essay would be a bit more personal if they included the emotions and feelings they associate with the various aspects of Eritrea. For example, the way their heart swells with pride when their grandmother praises their ability to cook a flatbread or the feeling of serenity when they hear the bells ring out from the cathedral. Including personal details as well as sensory ones would create a wonderful balance of imagery and reflection.

Essay Example #10: Journaling

Flipping past dozens of colorful entries in my journal, I arrive at the final blank sheet. I press my pen lightly to the page, barely scratching its surface to create a series of loops stringing together into sentences. Emotions spill out, and with their release, I feel lightness in my chest. The stream of thoughts slows as I reach the bottom of the page, and I gently close the cover of the worn book: another journal finished.

I add the journal to the stack of eleven books on my nightstand. Struck by the bittersweet sensation of closing a chapter of my life, I grab the notebook at the bottom of the pile to reminisce.

“I want to make a flying mushen to fly in space and your in it” – October 2008

Pulling back the cover of my first Tinkerbell-themed diary, the prompt “My Hopes and Dreams” captures my attention. Though “machine” is misspelled in my scribbled response, I see the beginnings of my past obsession with outer space. At the age of five, I tore through novels about the solar system, experimented with rockets built from plastic straws, and rented Space Shuttle films from Blockbuster to satisfy my curiosities. While I chased down answers to questions as limitless as the universe, I fell in love with learning. Eight journals later, the same relentless curiosity brought me to an airplane descending on San Francisco Bay.

“I wish I had infinite sunsets” – July 2019

I reach for the charcoal notepad near the top of the pile and open to the first page: my flight to the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes. While I was excited to explore bioengineering, anxiety twisted in my stomach as I imagined my destination, unsure of whether I could overcome my shyness and connect with others.

With each new conversation, the sweat on my palms became less noticeable, and I met students from 23 different countries. Many of the moments where I challenged myself socially revolved around the third story deck of the Jerry house. A strange medley of English, Arabic, and Mandarin filled the summer air as my friends and I gathered there every evening, and dialogues at sunset soon became moments of bliss. In our conversations about cultural differences, the possibility of an afterlife, and the plausibility of far-fetched conspiracy theories, I learned to voice my opinion. As I was introduced to different viewpoints, these moments challenged my understanding of the world around me. In my final entries from California, I find excitement to learn from others and increased confidence, a tool that would later allow me to impact my community.

“The beauty in a tower of cans” – June 2020

Returning my gaze to the stack of journals, I stretch to take the floral-patterned book sitting on top. I flip through, eventually finding the beginnings of the organization I created during the outbreak of COVID-19. Since then, Door-to-Door Deliveries has woven its way through my entries and into reality, allowing me to aid high-risk populations through free grocery delivery.

With the confidence I gained the summer before, I took action when seeing others in need rather than letting my shyness hold me back. I reached out to local churches and senior centers to spread word of our services and interacted with customers through our website and social media pages. To further expand our impact, we held two food drives, and I mustered the courage to ask for donations door-to-door. In a tower of canned donations, I saw the value of reaching out to help others and realized my own potential to impact the world around me.

I delicately close the journal in my hands, smiling softly as the memories reappear, one after another. Reaching under my bed, I pull out a fresh notebook and open to its first sheet. I lightly press my pen to the page, “And so begins the next chapter…”

The structuring of this essay makes it easy and enjoyable to read. The student effectively organizes their various life experiences around their tower of journals, which centers the reader and makes the different stories easy to follow. Additionally, the student engages quotes from their journals—and unique formatting of the quotes—to signal that they are moving in time and show us which memory we should follow them to.

Thematically, the student uses the idea of shyness to connect the different memories they draw out of their journals. As the student describes their experiences overcoming shyness at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and Door-to-Door Deliveries, this essay can be read as an Overcoming Obstacles essay.

At the end of this essay, readers are fully convinced that this student is dedicated (they have committed to journaling every day), thoughtful (journaling is a thoughtful process and, in the essay, the student reflects thoughtfully on the past), and motivated (they flew across the country for a summer program and started a business). These are definitely qualities admissions officers are looking for in applicants!

Although this essay is already exceptionally strong as it’s written, the first journal entry feels out of place compared to the other two entries that discuss the author’s shyness and determination. It works well for the essay to have an entry from when the student was younger to add some humor (with misspelled words) and nostalgia, but if the student had either connected the quote they chose to the idea of overcoming a fear present in the other two anecdotes or if they had picked a different quote all together related to their shyness, it would have made the entire essay feel more cohesive.

Where to Get Your Personal Statement Edited

Do you want feedback on your personal statement? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

Next Step: Supplemental Essays

Essay Guides for Each School

How to Write a Stellar Extracurricular Activity College Essay

4 Tips for Writing a Diversity College Essay

How to Write the “Why This College” Essay

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The Pleasures of Youth

Written by Sarah Diver 4th July 2019

‘In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. You have the capacity for anything.’ So why not go out and live to that full potential?

• #Gurls Talk Youth

The evening sun shines through the trees and projects itself onto the wall. The shadows sway over the light, crossing paths, moving together as one. ‘Nature is like a dance,’ I think to myself. I think about what would feel like to be a part of this union ─ and then I remember that I am. How good it feels to closely observe nature, how intimate, how sensual, how grounding, to observe something with detached curiosity, without judgement. And then I think about the body-scan meditation I sometimes do in the morning, the woman speaking in a steady, sedative voice, ‘and without trying to change anything, but just recognising what is there.’ It’s not as easy as it sounds. I would like to look at myself the way I look at nature ─ something that seemed to come naturally when I was younger ─ before my self-awareness turned into self-consciousness and insecurities began to bury themselves in my body. But like anything, it can be helped, so I do my body-scan and try to remind myself that I too am a part of nature. After all, the Earth is a woman.

I have to meditate now, to feel present, though my mind still wanders, even when I’m making a conscious effort for it not to. The skill is directing your thoughts back to your breath. Humans don’t learn to time travel as we get older, but our minds are constantly going from the past to the future, then back to the past. I find it funny that we have apps now, for meditation. I feel like phones are ruining our attention spans. There’s always something interesting to look at on them ─ they’re literally designed to be stimulating/addicting. We use meditation apps as a way to disconnect, to tune into our bodies without having to turn off our phones.

I find it really strange/worrying how many children have smartphones now. Every time I think about it, my stream of consciousness goes a little like this: ‘This is absolutely ridiculous! Being present is one of childhood’s greatest gifts. A smartphone pales in comparison and would undoubtedly cause more harm than good. Children have only just begun to dip their toes into the real world, and we already want to expose them to a virtual one? Give them a chance to smell the roses, to take in their surroundings with hungry eyes, open minds and tender hearts. How can you possibly be present if you’re always in two places at once?’

I remember making daisy chains as a young girl, how I spent my summer days sitting on our picnic rug with my legs crossed over each other like a pretzel, picking each and every long-stemmed daisy in my vicinity, carefully and purposefully joining them together until my creation was complete. I remember the feeling of pressing my thumbnail into the stem, feeding the next daisy into the slit, like threading a needle, repeating the process, over and over, like saying the Rosary, and then, when it was finished, placing it on the grass and leaving it there, like an offering.

I remember walking barefoot on the beach beside my granny’s house, how the sand would get in between my toes, how we would paddle in the rock pools before putting our flip flops back on. I remember the sound they made as we walked back down the lane, our stomachs rumbling like thunder, moving closer to the house.

We’d walk in and the house would be alive with aroma. There’d be pots and pans spread across the surface of the stove and ingredients covering every inch of the counter. My granny would be working away in the kitchen; making lots, wasting little. She knew the recipes by heart, so much so that she never needed to write them down. Like a song she’d been singing since she was a child or the prayer she grew up reciting, the recipes were as much a part of her as they were the women who passed them down to her. And we always wanted to hear her sing it again, again, again.

I remember the floury, fluffy, buttery, boiled potatoes, the fish that practically fell off the bone, the steamed broccoli and carrots that somehow tasted better than any vegetables I’d ever eaten, and the hollandaise sauce made it all melt in your mouth. I remember how I savoured every morsel, every mouthful, every moment of the meal until we would all begin to chime, as if on cue, variations of ‘thank you for the meal.’ Between the sea air and the beautiful food, we’d all sleep like babies come nightfall.

I can’t remember the last time I made a daisy chain or walked barefoot in the sand or enjoyed a meal as thoroughly as I did in my granny’s when I was younger. I’d forgotten the pleasure simply being present can give. It’s true that children tend to find joy in the smallest of things, things that adults have learned to take for granted. Children aren’t worried about the future. Children don’t live in the past. If anything, writing this serves as a reminder to myself to try and live in the moment as much as possible. Of course, adults do need to spend a bit more time thinking about the future/forward-planning, and a healthy dose of nostalgia won’t do any harm either! But I don’t want to forget the way it feels to be present, to enjoy right now, today.

And then a stream of ideas start to flood in about all the ways that I can be more present in my everyday life, including the ways that I already try to be, like when I sit down and drink my ginger tea in the evenings, or how I should probably stop eating my lunch in front of the TV, how I sing to myself around the house, singing every lyric like I’m the one who wrote them, laughing when I make a mistake, letting the emotions flow through me. Or when I play open strings on my cello, how I let my left hand rest and just concentrate on moving the bow across the strings, over and back, over and back, and again. I think of those healing ‘sound bowls’ I sometimes see videos of on Instagram, where people sit and move this stone around the edge of this bowl-shaped bell, which to me looks like a large pestle and mortar. When the instrument sings, it is said to produce healing tones. Every time I hold my cello against my chest and feel its vibrations as I play, I always think of sound bowls and how I don’t need one because I have a cello. It’s funny, but I often forget why I wanted to play cello in the first place. It’s difficult, it requires so much dedication, and most of the time, it doesn’t sound the way I want it to. I started playing the cello at sixteen. A lot of cellists would consider this to be a late start, but my teacher tells me that the only advantage children have over adults when it comes to mastering an instrument is the sense of fearlessness that they possess.

Children are not afraid of failure. Children don’t care about that! They care about trying new things, learning about their surroundings. Curiosity is the driving force behind their fearlessness. All they want out of this life is to feel, to understand, to simply live. And they give themselves room to do so. Their curiosity overrides their fear and replaces it with a sense of bright-eyed anticipation and joy.

When you’re a teenager, I feel like that sense of fearlessness is lessens a little (it did for me, anyway), along with your innocence, but your curiosity, your lust for life, tends to remain somewhat in tact. Oftentimes, it just assumes new forms to fit with the times, like inquisitiveness, a greater sense of adventure, a rebellious spirit. For me, once I turned fourteen/fifteen, I began to develop an interest in a wide range of topics that fit under the umbrella of ‘feminist issues.’ I had enough knowledge about the world and just enough experience to question the oppressive systems that made up our society and the role I played in upholding them — something I wouldn’t have had the means to do when I was younger. Knowledge is power, and I had only just begun to understand just how true this statement rang. I was determined to educate myself on topics that weren’t necessarily taught in schools but were, nonetheless, important and relevant world issues. I was driven by the prospect of becoming the change I wished to see in the world. I was a force to be reckoned with, and I wasn’t afraid.

I have yet to go to my first protest ─ an interesting ‘first’ that a lot of my friends have experienced as of late. In fact, there are a lot of ‘firsts’ that I have yet to experience. Obviously, I know it’s not a race. There’s no set list of things you absolutely have to do before you become an adult. I believe that it depends entirely on the individual. But with that being said, I still keep track of a few things I want to do, compiling them into a mini ‘to-do-list’ in my mind.

Some of them are basic and have already been ticked off, like learning to ride a bike or getting my first pet (her name is Paws and I got her for my sixth birthday. She’s a black and white cat. She loves milk, hugs, kisses and long naps on the bench), going to my first concert (One Direction), singing in front of a group for the first time (this might not seem like a big one but I was so nervous and so proud of myself afterwards. I’ll never forget it), the first time I cried happy tears (at One Direction), or the first time I tried my favourite food (pasta and tomato sauce with grated cheese ─ my dad made it for me when my mom was in the hospital after having my baby brother ─ and it was heavenly).

Then there are the things I have yet to do, like learn how to drive or get my first job, have my first kiss, travel on my own, watch ‘Lion King,’ the latter often evoking the (understandable) response: ‘You’ve never seen Lion King?! Have you been living under a rock?!’ But there’s no set time limit to when you should do these things. I feel like, especially as a teenager, you’re more inclined to compare your experiences (and, to some extent, yourself) to that of your peers, to weigh up your milestones to judge where you think you ‘should’ be, but what’s the point in that? If every single person was experiencing the exact same life, at the exact same time, how boring would that be? Our ‘universal’ experiences and ‘firsts’ are what connect us as human beings, but the way that we experience these ‘firsts’ as individuals are what make us interesting/unique.

It’s not that these pleasures are exclusive to young people, but youth tends to be when these pleasures are experienced to the fullest. As we get older, we often forget the amount of joy we can get out of simply being present, trying something new, or even, to a degree, feeling the fear and doing it anyway, but of course, they can be recreated.

When was the last time you felt truly present? When was the last time you tried something new, something out of your comfort zone, and felt a surge of anticipation instead of anxiety? In what ways can you become more present in your everyday life? What aspects of your life could you afford to be a little bit braver in? What’s something new you could try this week? Be it a new recipe, a new perfume, meditation, yoga, skydiving, witchcraft. Whatever it is, try to approach it the way you would have when you were younger. In the words of cellist Pablo Casals: ‘In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. You have the capacity for anything.’ So why not go out and live to that full potential?

In other news

Mimosa Pudica

Letter to my pre-pandemic self

When I Was 30

Seven of the 30 L.G.B.T.Q. subjects interviewed about their 30th year were captured on video, including, in order of appearance, André De Shields, Lady Bunny, Michael R. Jackson, Juliana Huxtable, BD Wong, J.D. Samson and Pat Oleszko.

Justin French

A first starring role, a first gallery show, a first apartment, a first love, a first loss. In honor of Pride Month, 30 creative people, ranging in age from 34 to 93, share an indelible memory from an all-important year. Together, they offer a personal history of queer life as we know it today.

Introduction by Mark Harris Interviews by Nicole Acheampong, Max Berlinger, Jason Chen, Kate Guadagnino, Colleen Hamilton, Juan A. Ramírez, Coco Romack, Michael Snyder and John Wogan

André De Shields

Jenna lyons, jayne county, bill t. jones, willie norris, edmund white, pat oleszko, brian michael smith, avram finkelstein, j.d. samson, kristen kish, joe mantello, big freedia, thom browne, catherine opie, danez smith, alexander chee, phillip lim, john cameron mitchell, juliana huxtable, donna gottschalk, michael r. jackson.

What’s it like to be 30 and queer and an artist? To try to put something meaningful into the world while simultaneously figuring out who you are? For many, it’s a pivotal year — a time when you start to know yourself with greater clarity and to understand what you want and how you want to pursue it. But beyond that, there are as many answers as there are people to ask. So, this Pride Month, T asked 30 Americans to look back on that age, and the responses constitute both a chronology and a group portrait. This collection of memories — snapshots of a year in many lives — also serves as a multivalent gay history from almost a decade before Stonewall to the day before yesterday. Our oldest participant, the novelist and cultural outlaw John Rechy , turned 30 in 1961, before “gay pride” was a phrase, a concept or much of a possibility; our youngest, the nonbinary poet and performer Danez Smith , reached that threshold toward the end of the Trump administration. The years they bookend encompass the story of a movement, an identity, a people, a force — and a culture that grew from forbidden, banned and encoded to ubiquitous, contentious and constantly evolving.

The artists who shared memories of their earlier selves were all on different journeys, because 30 can mean almost anything. They were dating. Breaking up. Searching. Together. Alone. In a mob. In a club. In the spotlight. In obscurity. Finding a job, finding a therapist, finding a friend, finding a purpose, finding the love of their lives, finding the passion of their lives. And they were everywhere, although, naturally, New York City was a magnet, as it has always been for L.G.B.T.Q.+ people looking for a place in which they can be themselves. One was joyfully participating in West Village orgies a decade before anyone knew about AIDS, one was touring in “The Wiz” during America’s bicentennial, while another was fleeing red-white-and-blue jingoism for the drag and trans scenes of Berlin. Several found a home in the worlds of activism and protest, a touchstone for gay identity that spans more than half a century and countless generations.

Thirty means something whether you’re queer or not, of course: It’s a milestone, sometimes celebratory, sometimes uneasy, a time to cast a brief glance back over your shoulder and turn to the road ahead. For me — a slow and agonized starter — it was one of the first years in which I lived as an out gay man, albeit one who, by 1993, was certain that he’d figured out who he was much too late to ever fully catch up with a world that was racing ahead and would have little patience for his baby steps. For all the delayed-adolescent stumbles that followed, it still felt like an indescribable relief to know myself.

For other L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, that path to self-recognition, self-acceptance and self-assertion now begins by middle school; for still others, it takes a lifetime. Although, today, the process regularly occurs long before one’s 30th birthday, it shouldn’t be forgotten that coming out young, whether as gay, bi, trans or something else, is a relatively recent phenomenon; surveying the decades, it’s clear that, by 30, a queer person can feel ancient or newborn or not yet born. “Am I ever going to get married and have kids like everybody else?” the designer Jenna Lyons wondered. The ACT UP activist and artist Avram Finkelstein spoke of his recollection that “other people came to love much earlier; I did when I was 30. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it before then.” The actor and director Joe Mantello, then co-starring on Broadway in “Angels in America,” lived the reality that being an “out gay actor … was a rarity.”

It’s a time that the photographer Catherine Opie calls “that moment when you’re really trying to be a grown-up” — and if you’re queer, you have to figure out when being a grown-up means coming down to earth and when it means flying free. One inherent contradiction of being 30 is that you often feel too old to be so new at things; another is that you won’t understand how young you were until you’re no longer that young. That’s often exponentially truer if you’re queer. And yet, the more you have to struggle to get to the starting line, the harder you run the race: Many of the artists who shared their stories were already blazing new trails by the end of their 20s, finding their voices and pathways. And they weren’t doing it alone: A word you’ll see again and again here is “community.” That’s to be expected, because no gay creative person is truly a soloist. We nourish one another, and we need one another — sometimes, other people are the only way we can figure out who we are. As the trans fashion designer Willie Norris , one of the youngest people interviewed, says, “I’d understood community as a concept but had never known how it felt before, and that understanding changed how I moved through the world.”

In journalism, 30 has a particular meaning. Styled “—30—,” apparently for reasons that date back to telegraphy, it goes at the end of a piece of copy to indicate that a story is over; there’s no more to tell. It couldn’t be less apt here. Thirty is not a year of giving up or closing doors. These are stories of beginning, of setting forth, of walking into the waiting universe, of embarking. It’s a year during which, no matter what you’ve done or how you’ve lived, if you’re determined and lucky, you get one more chance to look in the mirror or out the window, take a deep breath and say, “Chapter 1.” — Mark Harris

André De Shields, actor, 78 , New York

1976 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1976 , and i was pregnant in a planned parenthood ad..

From left: a 2024 video portrait made by T of André De Shields recounting his 30th year; De Shields in a 1976 Planned Parenthood ad.

Left: Justin French. Right: De Shields photo by Chuck Ashley. Poster photo by Anthony Cotsifas

When I was on the national tour of [William F. Brown’s] “ The Wiz ” [playing the title role], this gentleman approached me after the San Francisco show. He said he was on assignment for Planned Parenthood: They were looking for someone to portray a pregnant man in an ad. I was hot, I was out — I was born out, I don’t have a coming-out story — and he wanted to photograph me. The idea was that men might be more responsible if they had to carry babies. I thought it was a smart idea: “Men, it’s called a condom.”

I thought of my nephews back in Baltimore who just wanted to have a good time; sometimes, the result of a good time is a new life. My youngest sister had a child at 14, so I wanted to help.

We stuffed a sleeping gown with rags, and the photographer taped it so it looked like a burden in the abdomen. I touched it there, how women do. Later, in 2017, I did an Off Broadway play, [Robert O’Hara’s] “Mankind,” about a time in the future when there are no women and men evolved to have children. When we were rehearsing it, I said, “You know, some years ago I did this thing …” and they put the poster in the Playwrights Horizons lobby.

I have a formula when it comes to performing: I had it in “The Wiz,” and I had it in [Anaïs Mitchell’s] “ Hadestown ” [on Broadway, where De Shields originated the role of Hermes in 2019]. What I bring is my queerness. If you’re not willing to show that part of yourself, you’re missing the target. It’s that quality that scares everybody, that makes people go “Oh!” Bring that to a character? It changes everything. — Max Berlinger

Jenna Lyons, creative director and designer, 56 , New York

1998 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1998 , and i couldn’t get over the beautiful women in “antonio’s girls.”.

Clockwise from left: flipping through “Antonio’s Girls” (1982) by Antonio Lopez; Jenna Lyons’s first-edition copy of the book; Lopez’s “Personal Study, Grace Jones” (1983); Jenna Lyons (left) with a friend in 1998.

Clockwise from left: Anthony Cotsifas (2); artwork © The Estate and Archive of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos (3); courtesy of Jenna Lyons

I thought I knew so much and I knew nothing. I had a 29-and-a-half party at the Odeon [restaurant in New York’s TriBeCa] because I was scared to have a 30th birthday. There was this feeling of “Am I ever going to get married and have kids like everybody else?”

I really had no idea [about being attracted to women]. But it’s not like I was hiding it. When I look back, there could’ve been signs. I came to New York City because of [the American photographer and illustrator] Antonio Lopez’s 1982 book , “Antonio’s Girls.” Flipping through, you see him admiring the beauty of Grace Jones, Tina Chow and Marisa Berenson. These women weren’t the kinds of beauties that I saw in magazines. They were interesting for their personality and their style. He made me want something other than my sun-bleached, “Baywatch” California upbringing. (I did, however — and still do — adore Pam Anderson.)

I think if I’d been exposed to [more gay women], it would’ve been different for me. I had no visible references, and certainly no one that looked like me. When I started dating a woman for the first time, at 43, it’s hard to say I had some sort of revelation. I think I was just open enough to try. But in the late ’90s, there were such stereotypes about gay women. A lot of them still exist: There is the [male] fantasy of two hot girls or the idea that gay women don’t take care of themselves — that they aren’t attractive, that they look like men. I spent so much time trying to be beautiful in the eyes of men. That’s not the thing I look for anymore. As soon as I stopped, it changed so much for me. — Jason Chen

Jayne County, actor and musician, 77 , Atlanta

1977 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1977 , and it was just easier being trans in europe..

From left: Jayne County performing onstage with her band, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, circa 1978; a clip from a 1978 show in Dortmund, Germany.

Left: Gus Stewart/Getty Images. Right: © WDR 1978

I got an offer to go to London, and then I toured through Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Berlin, which I liked so much I stayed for two years. It was a boring city unless you knew where to go. But they loved trans people there. A girl could go and try out her footwork — how to act, her attitude. It was a good training ground. Drag shows and trans shows weren’t a big deal, like in America, where everyone would freak out about them. In Berlin, it was just another form of entertainment.

I had this successful tour where the Police and Billy Idol opened for [her band Wayne County & the Electric Chairs]. It gave me confidence in myself, the fact that people were willing to accept an angry old trans person — we used the word “transsexual” back then — fronting a rock ’n’ roll band. I transitioned in front of my audiences.

I think I opened people’s minds. I believed in what I was doing and my messages: about gender, about what’s gay and straight, the [categories] that are made up [so we can be] comfortable. We overflow those labels. — M.B.

Bill T. Jones, choreographer, 72 , Rockland County, N.Y.

1982 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1982 , and it was (and still is) all about arnie..

Clockwise from left: Arnie Zane with Bill T. Jones in 1981; a clip of a performance of “Blauvelt Mountain” (1980) at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop; Jones and Zane in 1984, in front of a backdrop by Keith Haring; a headshot of Jones from the same year.

Clockwise from left: Lois Greenfield; courtesy of New York Live Arts; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images, Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation; Peggy Jarrell Kaplan, courtesy of BAM Hamm Archives

I came to dance late, [after being] an athlete in upstate New York. But I discovered modern dance and had to educate myself about what that was around the time I was falling in love with this man, Arnie Zane , whom I met in my first year at university. He and I were excited about art. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were our patron saints. By 1982, we’d gotten some attention as a [sexually provocative] duet who’d done something no one had done before: a Black man like me, a Jewish-Italian man like Arnie, standing in front of the world and saying, “We are a company.”

Suddenly, Arnie decided that he didn’t “live to dance.” He was an artist first — a photographer, a painter. But “Bill and Arnie” was our primary identity, and while we tried to go do our own things, we [would always] come back together. I’m glad we did, because he had the first bumps on his arm that turned out to be [AIDS-related] lymphoma in 1986, and he died in ’88. I think us coming back together was the triumph of our love that overcame the ego involved in having independent careers.

Right now, I’m sitting in the very room [in Rockland County] that he died in. I’m in this house because he and I bought it together. New York City was where you lost your soul, and we wanted to be closer to the earth. We still had to negotiate the world surreptitiously. We said we were art partners, but we were also partners in life. We knew we were fiercely committed to each other, but there was no gay marriage and we didn’t want to be in a gay ghetto. I learned early on that my strength was in him. Where did that come from? Art! That’s it. We weren’t religious, but we had a church we could be members of. And it was a church of two. — Juan A. Ramírez

Willie Norris, fashion designer, 34 , Brooklyn

2020 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2020 , and i crafted a truer self..

From left: Willie Norris at the 2021 Brooklyn Liberation March in a T-shirt of her own design; footage from the 2020 march; a stencil Norris used to make signs for friends to carry in 2021.

From left: Yael Malka; Tomas Abad/Getty Images; Anthony Cotsifas

My friend, the performer and artist West Dakota, was organizing the first Brooklyn Liberation March [to protest police violence against Black trans people] in June and united a huge group to help — my role was to source and create Black Trans Lives Matter shirts. I still see those everywhere.

I made a lot of new friends through the action. I’d understood community as a concept but had never known how it felt before, and that understanding changed how I moved through the world. Until then, I hadn’t been public about my gender. This group gave me the self-assuredness to know that what I was feeling was real. It wasn’t a delusion: I had to make that jump [to transition], which at the time seemed huge. It felt like life or death, but now it feels almost negligible.

The focus of the next Brooklyn Liberation March was “Protect Trans Youth,” and I remember feeling [many] emotions that day: I cried hearing young and old trans people speak. I felt accepting of the childhood I didn’t have. I felt angry that there were so many kids still not being heard. What became apparent was the frustrating reality that the work never ends, which felt like an adult realization; when you’re younger, you think you can shape the world into something of your own creation.

I wore my beloved Zabar’s T-shirt, which I’d had since 2012, and printed “Protect Trans Youth” on top. That’s always been part of my design process — to topically apply images on top of existing clothing. The march went from the Brooklyn Museum to Fort Greene Park. I live [nearby], so I went home and fashioned my T-shirt into a halter. I scooped out the back, tied the neck and returned to the park, where my friends were waiting. It felt like a bridging of selves and timelines — like being fully alive. — Colleen Hamilton

BD Wong, actor and director, 63 , New York

1990 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1990 , and i began singing for a cause..

From left: a 2024 video portrait made by T of BD Wong recounting his 30th year; Wong in his “M. Butterfly” dressing room at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 1988.

Left: Justin French. Right: courtesy of BD Wong

The two years before I turned 30 were seismic. I came out to my parents, I was performing as Song Liling in [David Henry Hwang’s] “M. Butterfly” on Broadway, and in 1990 I moved into an apartment with my then-partner Richie [Jackson]. I started living more out in the open — even with the fear that it could ruin my career. Richie had this energy for political activism, and I was enamored of his leadership. He wasn’t just complaining, but taking action. We were in this terribly despairing state of loss from AIDS, but there was something very special happening in the theater community, which was openhearted and fearless.

Those were the early days of what would become [the nonprofit organization fund-raising for AIDS-related causes] Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 1992, which turned into the heartbeat of the whole movement on Broadway. Musicians, dancers, hairdressers, makeup and wardrobe artists — we all took the situation into our own hands. From the beginning, I rarely said no to any invitations to perform at Broadway Cares concert benefits. It was an opportunity for me to be creative and silly. I wasn’t really a musical performer but I had a musical background, and so my best friend [the composer] Wayne Barker would make up new arrangements or medleys that I’d sing to. And these were absolutely not galas — they were scrappy, artistic pursuits by anybody who felt that they had something to share. The vibe was very humble.

No one in the government was going to lift a finger, and homophobia was all around us, so you had to do it. Even today, you can’t just think, “We’ve done it now.” We have to remind ourselves that nothing is guaranteed. — John Wogan

Edmund White, writer, 84 , New York

1970 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1970 , and the boys all came to my place..

Clockwise from left: Edmund White in his apartment on New York’s Horatio Street in 1970; Leonard Fink’s “Bars, West Street, 1978”; the trucks parked along the West Side Highway in New York, where gay men would cruise for sex in the 1970s.

Clockwise from left: Barbara Confino; Leonard Fink Photographs, The LGBT Community Center National History Archive; Joseph Rodriguez/Gallery Stock

When I came back [to New York from Rome] in July of 1970, my college lover met me at the airport, popped some acid in my mouth and took me on a tour of the city until the wee hours of the morning. There were now all these discos with back rooms and go-go boys. In the ’60s, a bar would open and the same night it would be raided — I was astonished by how everything had changed.

Before long, I got a horrible one-room walk-up for $100 a month on Horatio Street, not far from the Trucks [an area under the West Side Highway, where all the big-rig trucks would park, and where gay men would cruise], which was my main interest: lots of little beasts running around. I was very cute — I had muscles — but to make myself stay in and write, I would hire hustlers [instead]. I had a “madam” whom I’d call and say, “I want a six-foot blond top to come at three in the morning,” so that would keep me home. Of course, the most exciting thing was hearing his footsteps coming up the stairs: Fantasy is always more exciting than reality.

I’d also go down to the Trucks and bring back four, five, six boys for little orgies. In the ’70s, you could still walk around the Village and run into people you knew, by face if not by name. There was a kind of electricity about meeting someone on Christopher and Bleecker and talking about the play they were in or whatever they were working on. But I’m 84 now and don’t have a grasp on that anymore. As you get older, fewer people are interested in you.

People always say, “It must have been so great to be gay in the ’70s,” and I say, “Yeah, if you wanted to be an alcoholic and end up committing suicide.” You’d be having a party and we’d all be having a hoot (as we said then), and at a certain point in the evening, no matter how much fun we were having, a silence would fall over the crowd and you’d look around and say, “Gosh, we’re so sick.” We were all going to psychiatrists trying slowly to go straight. Eventually, I ended up with a gay shrink. — Michael Snyder

Pat Oleszko, multimedia and performance artist, 77 , New York

1978 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1978 , and i lost a lover and married my best friend..

Clockwise from left: a photograph that the artist Pat Oleszko took of her husband/best friend Chichi in 1977; a 2024 video portrait made by T of Oleszko recounting her 30th year; a Polaroid of Oleszko and her lover, Kirsten, taken in Aspen, Colo., in 1978; Oleszko picking up Chichi in 1977.

Center: Justin French: all other photos courtesy of Pat Oleszko

I went to Copenhagen to visit a friend who’d recently received a Fulbright, and she introduced me to one of her friends there — a small, unbelievably beautiful Danish artist named Kirsten. I was smitten. She finagled a grant to come to New York, where we cut quite a figure together. I always wore high heels, which made me about six-foot-four, and massive amounts of jewelry and hats. (The most common question I got was “Are you a man or a woman?”) Kirsten was shorter than me and had this impeccable sartorial sense. When we were together, there was no waiting in line at Studio 54 or the Mudd Club .

There wasn’t a term for “performance art” at the time, so one of my teachers came up with the idea that I could use my costumes as illustrations. That’s how I ended up in Ms. magazine. I wore an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall Statue of Liberty costume to the Easter Parade in New York City, and Kirsten came along with me. It was a hit.

I don’t think she’d had a female lover before, and things ended in a stupid way, which I know she regrets. But I also got married that year to my dear friend Chichi. He was on a visa [from Peru] and wanted to stay in New York because he was a fashion designer, but he couldn’t find anyone to marry him, despite the fact that he was offering money. I said, “Well, I don’t want you to leave.” I dressed up in a Victorian dress with embroidery all over it: I honestly didn’t think the [city] officiant would believe us because Chichi was so blatantly gay. I told him I would meet him at the courthouse down the street, but he insisted on picking me up. I heard the horn honking and there he was, lying on top of a long white limousine. We stayed married for eight years so that I could get health insurance. Now we’re both gay divorcés. — C.H.

Brian Michael Smith, actor and advocate, 41 , Los Angeles

2013 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2013 , and i finally took my own advice..

Clockwise from top left: a 2012 portrait of Brian Michael Smith; participants in New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center enrichment programs at the city’s 2013 Pride Parade; a flier Smith made for his last day at the Center in 2013; the Center’s Halloween Kiki Ball in 2012, for which Smith, bottom left, served as a judge.

Clockwise from top left: Josue Infante; Skyler Cruz; courtesy of Brian Michael Smith (2)

My mom had me when she was 19, and I always looked at things from that perspective. As I approached 30, there were things I couldn’t believe I was still struggling with — being avoidant; having these fear-based, childlike reactions. A trans friend of mine had worked at New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center and thought I’d be great for a position. I started working with young people there, sharing things I was picking up.

When I was in college, I took classes in mass communication, the Black experience and U.S. history; I saw how tools of mass communication have been used to put forward narratives and contribute to beliefs about ourselves. So, at the Center, we’d make our own films and have movie nights. We thought about how the community organized, and used performance [to discuss] activism. We did an H.I.V.-prevention/harm-reduction program, and I would tie filmmaking components into it.

[When I was] growing up, the media representation of anybody who was trans was all for spectacle: cross-dressing, people pretending to be the opposite sex, men in dresses. There were never real people who lived their lives as who they felt they were. It wasn’t a realistic concept. But I started looking things up and found [the trans activist] Jamison Green’s book, “Becoming a Visible Man” (2004). For once, I was able to read a whole story and just discover this regular dude. Before I started to think about acting, I was like, “First, let me just focus on becoming myself.”

I worked at the center from 2010 to 2013. I turned 30 that January and left in May. I’d been having conversations with young people about following your path and about how, no matter if you’ve never seen anybody doing what you want to do, you can be the first. I realized I hadn’t been doing that for myself, which was to act, perform, create movies and be on TV. I wanted to show up for the kids, but I also wanted to show up for myself, so I took what I was learning from them and put it into my work as an artist. — J.A.R.

Avram Finkelstein, activist and artist, 72 , Brooklyn

1982 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1982 , and i fell in love while looking at land art..

Clockwise from left: Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” (1982); a Polaroid photograph of Avram Finkelstein taken by Don Yowell, his boyfriend, during the same year; Yowell, as captured by Finkelstein.

Clockwise from left: Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield: A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (Green Wheat),” 1982, © Agnes Denes, courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; Don Yowell, courtesy of the Avram Finkelstein Archive; Avram Finkelstein, courtesy of the Avram Finkelstein Archive

My partner at the time, a musician named Don Yowell, began showing signs of immunosuppression in 1981, but people didn’t fully understand what AIDS meant or where it was heading. Before he died in 1984, he lived on North Moore Street, across from “ Art on the Beach ” — a Creative Time project that transformed a landfill into sandy, rolling dunes in the middle of New York City — so we used to sunbathe there. TriBeCa was being built: A grocery store had just opened and there was a dry cleaner, a video store, maybe two restaurants. Don lived in a two-bedroom with western exposure that cost around $325. While he played the piano, I would look out the windows at the planes circling around New York as the sun was going down and the [old] Maxwell House Coffee sign [across the river in Hoboken, N.J.] was lighting up. It was a very luxurious way to live for people who were impecunious. We would go on all-night walks as entertainment. Lower Manhattan was remote and underdeveloped and the streets were empty. You could fill them with conversations.

There was tremendous interest in those blank spaces as [places] for art. Don had heard about [Agnes Denes’s] “ Wheatfield — a Confrontation ” (1982), in which the artist planted and harvested almost a 1,000 pounds of wheat [in downtown Manhattan], so we walked down the West Side Highway to see it on the Battery Park landfill. The first time [we went], it had just been tilled. The next time, there might have been sprouts. I went to the Museum School in Boston during the height of the land art and earth art movements in the 1970s, so I understood exactly what the gesture was about: a vast urban landscape of possibility.

If you think of wheat growing in Lower Manhattan as a parallel to being deeply in love, it’s a story about becoming myself as a queer person. I always refer to Don as the first person who loved me back. I had never stayed up all night, every night, talking endlessly about the world and ideas. Other people came to love much earlier; I did when I was 30. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it before then. — C.H.

J.D. Samson, artist and musician, 45 , Brooklyn

2008 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2008 , and i ate the same pizza almost every night..

Clockwise from left: a 2024 video portrait made by T of JD Samson recounting her 30th year; Samson out in New York with Sia in 2008; the Ranchero pizza (now called the Texan) from Vinnie’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn.

Clockwise from left: Justin French; Mark Hunter/Thecobrasnake; Anthony Cotsifas

I’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship and into a new one and, in the midst of all that, was trying to figure out my next step creatively. I was D.J.’ing with Johanna Fateman from [the electroclash group] Le Tigre and starting this new music project that would become [the band] MEN with a bunch of old friends, including [the musician] Michael O’Neill. We were all sharing ideas, a lot of which happened in my railroad apartment on Maujer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We worked on music all day, every day, and we ordered a lot of food, often the Ranchero pizza from Vinnie’s on Bedford Avenue. It was chicken, bacon and ranch — the thought of it now disgusts me, but at the time it was legendary. We’d eat the pizza in this closet I’d turned into a studio. The Ranchero became this inside joke for us: “We eat the Ranchero pizza. We are different. We are queer. ” We ended up using “Ranchero” as a holding title for our song “If You Want Something” (2011), which is one of my favorites, partly because it defies a normal pop structure. There are little moments of spiciness and different flavors, a melding of concepts.

That record felt really queer and sex-positive. It was a great — I would say pervy — era in my friend group and, in terms of visibility and joy, that felt political. Obama won the presidency, and we celebrated a lot, but I think we also felt that wasn’t the end of our woes. Every song is about the collective; I don’t think I say “I” once. It was this egoless moment: There was so much work to be done as a community, and we were always talking about the radical potential of dance music. I cherish those memories of writing when we had time for one another and were creating without hesitation, unconcerned with the response. That might’ve been the last time that happened for me. — Kate Guadagnino

Kristen Kish, chef and host, 40 , Austin, Texas

2014 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2014 , and i found myself on television..

Clockwise from left: Kish at the Copley Square Farmers Market in Boston in 2013; Kish on the Travel Channel’s “36 Hours” (2015); English pea broth and seared scallop prepared by Kish on her winning season of “Top Chef: Seattle” (2013).

Clockwise from left: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images; courtesy of Travel Channel; David Moir/Bravo

Before winning “Top Chef” [in 2013], I was living my life in a bubble, but everything shifted after that show. I started my first relationship [with a woman] and came out, left my job working at Menton restaurant in Boston, and I was approached to do [the travel and food program] “36 Hours” [based on the New York Times column ].

It was a crazy time in my life, trying to figure out who I was. I was also beginning to understand the responsibility I had. I’m an adoptee, an Asian American and part of a [culinary] industry that isn’t always friendly to queerness. The greatest thing that happened after “36 Hours,” though, is that people helped me feel part of my communities — privately, publicly, stopping me in person, through social media. I didn’t have to preach, because simply being out resonated with people and helped them feel seen.

Before that, it was hard to feel like I belonged. As much as I saw queer women on television (the Ellens, the Rosies), I most remember watching a random commercial that showed a [same-sex] couple. I don’t even recall what the commercial was for, but that was more impactful because I hadn’t seen anyone like me — a regular person in a queer relationship — yet. I was terrified of my own queerness, because no one teaches you. — J.W.

Joe Mantello, actor and director, 61 , New York and Rancho Mirage, Calif.

1993 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1993 , and i heard another gay man use the word “husband.”.

Clockwise from left: Joe Mantello (in blue sweatshirt) with his “Angels in America” cast on a float in the 1993 New York City Pride Parade; Mantello and his co-star Stephen Spinella in the original 1993 Broadway production; a ticket that Mantello has saved for more than three decades.

Clockwise from top right: Joan Marcus/Photofest; courtesy of Joe Mantello (2)

It wasn’t the first time I’d been at the Pride Parade, but it was the first time I’d been in the parade. We were really sequestered when we were making [Tony Kushner’s] “Angels in America” (1993) [in which he played one of the leads, Louis Ironson], just focused on getting the [Broadway] production in shape. We opened that May, so it was one of the first times I remember going out into the community and experiencing their appreciation. We all knew that we were involved in something that was a turning point for gay plays but there was no social media, so the way you would feel that was by actual personal interaction. We had this incredible float with a big “A” with a wing on it that Milton Glaser designed for the show’s branding. I seem to remember [most] of the cast was on it, as well as some of my friends. It would’ve been a Sunday, right? So my guess is we did it before our matinee.

When I first moved to New York, in ’84, I was a buddy at G.M.H.C. [formerly Gay Men’s Health Crisis]. You’d be assigned a different person and could do anything: just visit them, run errands for them, go [see] them at the hospital. I was terrified, as a sexually active young man, of the invisible, silent killer, but the way that I dealt with it was by going toward it. In some way, that calmed my anxiety.

To be an out gay actor at that time was a rarity. It’s strange to think of now because, 30-some years later, he’s married [to a man] and has a [teenage] daughter, but David [Marshall Grant, who played Joe Pitt, a closeted Mormon lawyer] wasn’t out at the time, and I remember him being terrified that [being open would] end his career. For me, it was never a question, but I wasn’t risking the same thing: I wasn’t a young leading man in the way that he was. It was also never a question for Stephen Spinella [who played Prior Walter , another lead]. I remember at the Tony Awards, when Stephen accepted his award, he thanked “the husband of his heart” — this man who was his lover. It was the first time I’d ever heard a gay man use that term. I remember really distinctly that word — “husband ” — seeming so foreign to me. — J.A.R.

Big Freedia, rapper, 46 , New Orleans

2008 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2008 , and bounce music saved me — and my city..

Clockwise from top left: Big Freedia (with microphone) performing at Club Caesar’s in New Orleans in 2010; Big Freedia with partner Devon Hurst in New Orleans in 2009; a clip of the rapper onstage with Sissy Nobby at One Eyed Jacks in 2009; the interior of Club Caesar’s with posters commemorating Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

Top and bottom left: Lyle Ashton Harris. Top right: courtesy of Big Freedia

I was living in Houston after [Hurricane] Katrina when I got a call from a promoter who wanted to start a music night back in New Orleans [where Big Freedia was born and raised], at the Club Caesar’s. Nothing was really open, so people were in the club, with their [emergency-assistance] money, their Red Cross money, popping bottles wearing their fresh tennis shoes. We called it FEMA Fridays. The city was a ghost town. It was pitch-black and still smelled like Katrina — spoiled meat. It was time to bring joy back.

On that first Friday, I’d say the club was half-filled, but the next one we were packed wall-to-wall, and there was a line down the block. I remember I had to squeeze through to get from the front door to the stage.

Bounce music is a heavy bass, call-and-response style of hip-hop that originated in New Orleans in the 1980s. It’s party music. When I was on the microphone, it was like I had an auditorium of choir members, and everyone was repeating after the pastor. Bounce had been spreading because we as performers were displaced by Katrina. But it was [also] the perfect way to rebuild the city and recruit people to New Orleans. I could be on the mic in Houston or Atlanta and say to [the audience], “It’s time to come home.” — M.B.

Thom Browne, fashion designer, 58 , New York

1996 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1996 , and an ibuprofen commercial became my lifeline..

From left: Thom Browne in the late-1990s Motrin ad in which he played a shirtless runner; Browne at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont in 1996.

Photo by Malcolm Venville

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in Los Angeles. I worked as a script reader, a production assistant, an actor every now and then. A job opportunity presented itself in the form of a Motrin IB commercial, in which I’d play a long-distance runner. That was so true to my life because I was a swimmer through college, and then running was part of my L.A. life.

The job let me pay my rent and figure things out for a bit longer. [Staying in the city] also allowed me to meet people who really opened my eyes — friends like [the interior designer] Paul Fortune and [the fashion designer] Michèle Lamy — and showed me the importance of creating my own life. That led me back to New York, where I began playing with tailoring and experimenting with vintage clothing.

That time in L.A. was when I became true to myself about [being] gay, too. I remember my sister visited me and asked if I had something to tell her, and when I asked if it would be a problem if I did, she said, “No, of course it wouldn’t be a problem.” As I was pursuing acting, I never really talked about it, but I wasn’t hiding it, either. Maybe I thought being myself was more important than pursuing something that I had to hide myself for.

Looking back, I think that commercial was an awakening to an important decision: What did I really want to do? As poor as I was, it was a special time in my life for what it taught me about doing work that meant something. — J.C.

Catherine Opie, artist, 63 , Los Angeles

1991 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1991 , and we all lived at casa de estrogen..

From left: Catherine Opie’s “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993), taken at Los Angeles’s Casa de Estrogen, where she lived at the time; an undated photograph Opie took of her friend Ian in the building.

© Catherine Opie, courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul

I moved into Casa de Estrogen [after] I’d broken up with a longtime girlfriend, my first domestic relationship, and I didn’t have any place to go. These lesbian friends of mine lived on Catalina Street, on the edge of Koreatown [in Los Angeles], in a [1920s] building with eight units. A one-bedroom came up, and the rent was only $500 a month. It had a little patio with an avocado tree, so I could have breakfast there. I stayed for 10 years, until I moved to New York to teach [photography] at Yale.

We called the place Casa de Estrogen because it was known for housing famous lesbians within the community. At one point, [the poet] Eileen Myles lived there; [the model and actress] Jenny Shimizu lived above me. Everybody had motorcycles and went out in leather. We’d ride in a line with fake mustaches on, and that wasn’t something you saw in L.A. in 1991. We were fighting for our ability to play with masculinity, with being feminists, with our sexuality — with everything . It felt like freedom.

My [original] studio was my living room. My friends let me photograph them: A lot of work was made there, half of my early portraits. I was so distraught after my breakup, and it’s the reason I made “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) on my back, in my Casa de Estrogen apartment. Everybody knew that I was really, really broken. And so my friends took care of me. This [kind of] community felt unprecedented to me, and I’ve never been able to have it back. That might be unique to turning 30 — that moment when you’re really trying to be a grown-up, you know? — Nicole Acheampong

Danez Smith, performer and writer, 34 , Minneapolis

2020 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2020 , and i met my husband on grindr..

From left: a selfie of Danez Smith (right) and their husband, Juan Cordero, circa 2020; the couple’s 2023 wedding.

Courtesy of Danez Smith

I’m on a keto diet, I’m feeling cute. I was at the Saloon, one of the bigger gay bars here in Minneapolis, and met this cute guy. We’re flirting and he’s like, “My partner is a really big fan of your work.” Womp womp. But what gay relationship isn’t open nowadays, so he invites me over. We have a couple of threesomes, and I get this nice little couple to attach to. One day, the partner hits me up on Grindr and shows up to my place alone. This should’ve been my first red flag. They’d been fighting and the next day broke up. I felt like I was a tool used in the breakup, but the partner who came over and I ended up falling into a relationship. We dated in this weird, noncommittal-but-committed, polyamorous-but-way-too-monogamous situation. [After the Covid-19] lockdown happened, I broke up with them, and that’s the end of that chapter. We don’t keep up.

Early next year, I have the most basic of Grindr hookups and, after, we start talking about our exes. We’re telling these stories and things are matching up. I think I was the one who slipped and said their name: We realized our ex is the same person — though we didn’t overlap — and then became a misery support group.

Keep in mind, this whole time the ex is married [to another guy]. So this is all just gay people zigzagging across immigrant statuses: Who’s married for love, or for sex … which is real? That’s the real messiness of queer life; of trying to survive, or be intimate, with somebody in America. What happens when two people don’t love each other anymore, but one’s status is dependent upon the other one’s citizenship? We perform these choreographies that are so complicated, just trying to be gay here.

It’s great to know that your partner hates the same things, but then we had to make rules to stop circling conversations back to the ex. We were trying to parse out whether we actually liked each other or were just wounded in the same way. We’ve been together for three and a half years, married since last August. It was messy, but also indicative of what it means to be a Midwest gay: You’re always two or three degrees of separation. — J.A.R.

Lady Bunny, drag performer, 61 , New York

1993 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1993 , and “i can’t get no sleep” was my song..

Clockwise from top left: Lady Bunny at New York’s Webster Hall in 1992; a 2024 video portrait made by T of Lady Bunny recounting her 30th year; spinning “I Can’t Get No Sleep” by Masters At Work feat. India (1993).

Clockwise from top left: Linda Simpson; Justin French; Anthony Cotsifas, music © Cutting Records

New York was one of the places that developed house music, and we could feel that we were in the middle of something — the coolest songs, the coolest producers. We’d walk in the club, throw our coats down and dance until we met someone or the place closed. In those days, there were enough people who wanted to go out and hang out to keep the lights on at places like Palladium and the Pyramid Club in the East Village, where I D.J.-ed.

The group Masters at Work put out “ I Can’t Get No Sleep ,” featuring the singer India, six months after my 30th birthday. It has those house chords we craved, but it also has different mood swings before going into overdrive at the end. We’d hear it every night, if not twice a night. We’d lip-sync every word. Masters at Work became the soundtrack to my entire 30s.

Half a year after the song was released, Little Louie Vega, who’s one half of Masters at Work, and India performed it at Wigstock , the drag music festival I’d cocreated in the mid-80s. Seeing them arrive, I couldn’t believe it. Tens of thousands came to Tompkins Square Park for the festival that year but, still, they left me star-struck. At the time, ACT UP was demanding better drugs for AIDS patients, and while I didn’t become a politically minded person for another 10 years, it was such a dark time that I felt [Wigstock] could lighten everyone’s load. You have to make demands, but you also need a day to remind yourself of what you’re fighting for, of great dance music and silly things and the way it feels to sashay over to the park with a wig on. — K.G.

Alexander Chee, writer, 56 , Vershire, Vt.

1997 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1997 , and all my lovers kept giving me books..

Clockwise from top left: Alexander Chee’s 1984 first-edition copy of Marguerite Duras’s “L’Amant,” given to him by a lover; a contact sheet from a photo shoot of the writer at 30 in New York’s East River Park; Chee in Seoul, visiting Jeongneung, the tomb of King Jungjong, a few months later.

Clockwise from top left: Anthony Cotsifas; Eric McNatt; Chris Chee

I was just out of a three-year relationship with a year-and-a-half of breakup sex; I’d exited my M.F.A. fiction program in Iowa and moved back to New York and was, I think, learning how to just be somewhere. I wanted to write, make money, have sex with interesting people and meet up with friends — if I ran into them. I didn’t want to make plans. I found a column I wrote around this time for Out magazine in which I was like, “I’m trying this thing called dating,” and, in retrospect, I’m like, “You. Were. Not.” I do admit to enjoying a night out at a bar and meeting someone and going home with him. This, I would learn later, is an ancient tradition of our people.

I had a few longstanding relationships of the casual kind, and I even have the books that marked their end. The first — I remember he had a kind face — gave me a first edition of Marguerite Duras’s “ The Lover ” (1984), but in French. [J.D. Salinger’s] “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” (1963) came from a man who had a serious partner at home (they had an open relationship). And while I didn’t have a rule that if someone gave me a [book], I had to end the relationship, the presents were a red flag. I’d wanted nothing from these men except friendly, irregular sex. The thing about a gift is that it’s an expression of intimacy. It feels threatening.

I remember that I briefly dated someone in 1995 who told me, when he ended things, that he couldn’t work on a novel and have a boyfriend. I thought it was so stupid, and yet I was very aware when I turned 30 that I hadn’t finished a novel, so it seems I copied him, in my way, because I didn’t have a boyfriend, really, until I had a first draft [of 2001’s “Edinburgh”] in 1999. That boyfriend worked in publishing, so he gave me lots of books … though not until after we broke up. — M.S.

Sam Jay, actor and comedian, 42 , New York

2012 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2012 , and i overcame my regrets..

From left: Sam Jay joking about Boston, where she lived at 30, in a Comedy Central clip from 2016; Jay with her grandmother in an undated photo.

From left: “The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail” used with permission; courtesy of Sam Jay

It was a transitional year — I’d just moved back to Boston from Atlanta — and it started with getting right with my family. A big rift had formed between my grandmother and me after my mother died in 1998, but I’d had time to process and felt I needed to reconnect with who I was in order to move forward. I’d also been out for five years at that point, so I was more assured of myself and understood what type of gay person I wanted to be: Making amends with my grandmother was especially important. Being courageous in that way led me to the stage.

I’d always wanted to do stand-up, but I hadn’t pursued it seriously. When I got to Boston, I was working in a mailroom. I was feeling like a loser and I told myself, “Yo, you’re about to be 30, bro. Either you’re going to submit to this life in the background, or you’re going to stop being scared and go for it.” I knew that if I didn’t get onstage, I would regret it forever.

In Boston, Comedy Studio was the place to get in, and in December of that year, I got my shot. The club was in the attic of a Chinese restaurant, so it had low ceilings and was really intimate. It probably sat 120 people, and the laughs bounced right back to you. I did really well my first night, so I got to keep getting up there and grew my name around the city.

I don’t think I killed because the material was particularly brilliant. My first jokes were about the Ninja Turtles. But I was so ready. It was about stepping into my whole self and being authentic, and I still live and die by those principles. — K.G.

Phillip Lim, creative director and fashion designer, 50 , New York

2004 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2004 , and i moved across the country to begin my own line..

From left: Lim’s scrapbook featuring a picture of his first 3.1 Phillip Lim pieces in the Barneys New York window in 2004; Lim that same year; a black 3.1 Phillip Lim coat from the brand’s first collection, in 2004.

Center: courtesy of Phillip Lim; all other photos by Anthony Cotsifas

I left California, moved to New York City and started my own brand. I bought a one-way ticket and had no plan, just hopped on a plane and never looked back.

I was this kid from Huntington Beach whose life changed almost overnight. At 30, I felt both old and young. Old because I entered adulthood by starting a business, so I had all the responsibilities that came with that. At the same time, it felt like coming out again because I was in the greatest city in the world, restarting my life as a queer man, living in Chelsea and going out to clubs like Splash and the Web and all the Ladyfag parties.

I finished my first collection in the span of a few months, which included this black coat, made of Italian wool felt trimmed with nubuck leather. It’s a symbol of what I wanted 3.1 Phillip Lim to be: the idea that you can have the best, most covetable pieces while still being able to pay the rent. [The name references his age when the line officially debuted in 2004.]

This coat wound up hanging in the window at Barneys on Madison Avenue. I remember it was dusk when they told me about it, and I left work alone to [head over and] give myself a moment. It was an unreal experience, seeing my name and my clothing taking over the windows of the world’s most revered fashion epicenter. I had never seen an [Asian] surname in such a context before. — J.W.

Tourmaline, activist and artist, 40 , Miami

2013 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2013 , and our backyard banner helped change the law..

Clockwise from left: Tourmaline in a self-portrait on her 30th birthday in 2013; a clip of Tourmaline calling for trans health care at the HxRefactored conference in New York City in 2014; activists with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (Tourmaline is second from right) in 2013, carrying the banner she made.

Clockwise from bottom right: courtesy of Tourmaline (2); Luce Capco Lincoln

I first went to [New York’s] Sylvia Rivera Law Project , which provides legal support for low-income trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, around 2006, to get my name changed. I thought it was amazing, so I started working there and got involved with the campaign to end the ban on Medicaid [exclusions] for trans people in New York State in 2013. This was when the rate of violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people was really high: Leaving your home and meeting up felt like world-making.

On a sunny day in 2013, a bunch of us went to my friend’s place in Bed-Stuy and painted “NY NEEDS #transhealthcarenow” on a banner. We’d made signs before, but this time we used fabric instead of paper, which made it feel more material. We took the sign to Trans Day of Remembrance, and we brought it onstage at a tech health conference [in Manhattan], where I interrupted the New York State health commissioner to speak.

I was so nervous, but people in the audience yelled in support. The next year, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project filed a lawsuit that helped repeal the ban. Given how contentious health care is in many places, it’s beautiful to be able to point to an instance where we actually changed the policy.

Making the banner was a catalyst for what I do now that I’m an artist and a writer, and it made me part of a lineage. I’m currently writing [the trans activist] Marsha P. Johnson’s biography: She was making banners all the time! — K.G.

John Cameron Mitchell, actor and director, 61 , New York and New Orleans

1993 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1993 , and i’d just come out to the world in a larry kramer play..

Clockwise from left: John Cameron Mitchell in an autographed production photo from “The Destiny of Me” (1992); Mitchell’s first-edition copy of the “Destiny of Me” script; Mitchell (left) with friends at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights.

Clockwise from left: Martha Swope, Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library; Anthony Cotsifas; Mark Tusk

My first big starring role in a play was “ The Destiny of Me ” (1992) by Larry Kramer . “The Normal Heart,” Kramer’s seminal 1985 play, was a howl into the abyss in the face of hatred during the AIDS crisis. This was a sequel about Larry looking back in a way, taking stock through Ned Weeks, who was undergoing therapy [with experimental H.I.V. drug treatments].

This was the first time I was able to express what I felt as a young gay man — Ned was loud and unapologetically excessive when, in reality, I was a minimalist. His rage triggered my own sense of injustice and hurt, since I was coming from a don’t-talk-about-your-feelings kind of place. There was an article [referring to me as a gay man] in The New York Times, and I was only out to my [close] friends and family at that point: When it was published, people said it was the end of my career, but that role and that story were liberating: They helped me to become the person I was.

During my first years as an actor, I got a lot of pressure to be in the closet. That defined my 20s. So “The Destiny of Me” was literally the beginning of my queer writing life. When it was over, I started thinking about making “ Hedwig and the Angry Inch ” [his musical about a transgender rock singer that debuted Off Broadway in 1998 and became a film in 2001]. Sexuality, in effect, is actually boring. It’s what you do with it that’s interesting. — J.W.

Juliana Huxtable, artist and writer, 36 , New York

2017 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2017 , and i was tired of being commodified..

Clockwise from left: a 2024 video portrait made by T of Juliana Huxtable recounting her 30th year; a social media announcement of Huxtable’s second solo show in London in 2017; an installation view of Huxtable’s “A Split During Laughter at the Rally” (2017) at New York’s Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

Clockwise from left: Justin French; Juliana Huxtable; Joerg Lohse/courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art NY/LA

In the years leading up to my [debut solo] show, “ A Split During Laughter at the Rally ,” at [the New York gallery] Reena Spaulings, trans people were being presented as an analogue of progress, and I felt a bit exhausted by this peak in visibility. The show felt like an opportunity to push back on the commodification of my body.

I didn’t include any figurative representations of myself, except for in this one video where my mouth was articulating a conspiratorial narrative about appropriation in protest and the alt-right trying to control New York nightlife. The show took the premise that conspiracy can be a place of agency. If you look at the history of liberation movements in this country, they all had the mind-set that unless there is evidence to the contrary, there’s probably some sort of harm being organized against you. While that obviously lends itself to a kind of spiral logic, I think there’s something about it that’s very queer, very feminist, very Black.

That show was a big risk, but it opened up space for play and surprise for me. For the opening party, I had them order a bunch of chicken wings and some of my friends D.J.’d and everyone was making out. I hope it opened up space for others, too. Nowadays, at least in New York, I do think there’s more room for nuance and a casualness with which you can just be.

By the time I turned 30, I’d been telling people I was older for years, because I’m not the type to bemoan the loss of my youth. It was pretty easy. I’d had this show, I’d published my first book [“ Mucus in My Pineal Gland ” (2017)] and it all turned out to be so much more joyful and fun than people said it would be. — K.G.

Matt Bomer, actor, 46 , Los Angeles

2007 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2007 , and i wanted to quit acting..

Clockwise from left: Matt Bomer and one of his sons at home in Los Angeles in 2008; Bomer, his husband Simon Halls, and their three children on the actor’s 31st birthday; Bomer as Neal Caffrey in “White Collar” (2009-2014), the breakout television role he booked while 30.

Clockwise from left: courtesy of Matt Bomer (2); USA Network/Photofest

I lived in a small condo in Silver Lake [Los Angeles] and I’d go back and forth to New York to try and procure work. I wish I could say that I was at the front lines of some big sociopolitical movement, but [2007] just wasn’t that time [for me], and I was dispirited. I’d grown up [in Missouri] on the plays of Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer and Terrence McNally — all these big stories that had such resonance. I wanted to be part of that and didn’t even know how to get my foot in the door. I started to think, “How can I be a more beneficial presence to society?” I even sent out for some applications for graduate school to study psychology because I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll learn how to help people that way.”

I was fortunate to make a living as an actor — I’d done pilots and series — but I was hitting this glass ceiling. I was soul-searching. I visited a swami in the desert. I started taking classes at the [improv school] Groundlings. This group called the Art of Elysium gave me the opportunity to work with kids at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles: I’d do art projects and it was a creative endeavor that took me outside myself.

And then all these things started happening. I met my husband [the Hollywood publicist Simon Halls] and his oldest son (now our oldest son), so that turned my world upside down. And then I got the audition for “White Collar” (2009-2014), which was a dream role, and [everything] changed career-wise. I think that finding love and finding inspiration and finding different paths to creativity helped me to hold my feet to the fire.

I’m so grateful to live in a time when I’m being given the opportunity to play rich, nuanced [gay parts]. That’s become a huge part of what my career is about. You look at [my television roles in] “ The Normal Heart ” (2014) and “ The Boys in the Band ” (2020) and “Fellow Travelers” (2024) and it’s about these generations of folks whose shoulders we stand on. I’m so inspired by the younger generation — their lack of shame, their self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-expression. It’s this beautiful lineage, and I’m proud to be part of it. — M.S.

Wu Tsang, artist and filmmaker, 42 , Zurich

2012 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2012 , and a party inspired me to make art..

Clockwise from left: Wu Tsang in New York in 2012; a still from Tsang’s film “Wildness” (2012); the film’s poster; another still from “Wildness.”

Left: Neil Rasmus/BFA.com. Right: courtesy of Wu Tsang (3)

Wildness was a Tuesday-night party that friends and I hosted between 2007 and 2009 at the L.A. bar the Silver Platter , which has long been an important place for queer and trans folks, particularly those from Central and South American immigrant communities. The more I talked to people there, the more I felt there was a story to be told about the bar. So “ Wildness ” (2012) became my first film, after a four-year editing process.

Initially, I saw the film and the party as separate things, but in the end, both are about entangled relationships formed amid different issues, particularly the gentrification of [L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood]. We were all coming from different social and class backgrounds and trying to make sense of being there together, which wasn’t always easy. At the time, there weren’t so many visible trans stories — if you didn’t want to tell expected stories, the assumption was that you didn’t know how to tell a good story.

“Wildness” premiered at MoMA. I was also in the Whitney Biennial that year. Going to New York felt like this moment of emerging to a wider audience, and then I started to travel a lot. My 20s had been so much about L.A., where, in the early 2000s, there were a ton of queer bars and what seemed to be limitless possibilities for connection. That’s an increasingly fragile thing — there’s currently a campaign to save the Silver Platter from demolition — but, for a time, that was the place where I felt rooted. — K.G.

Roxane Gay, writer, 49 , Los Angeles and New York

2004 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2004 , and a cheating girlfriend taught me how to be honest..

Clockwise from bottom left: Roxane Gay at a 2018 book signing in Los Angeles for “Not That Bad” (2018), an anthology of first-person essays that she edited, and “Hunger” (2017), her memoir; an undated postcard of Mueller Tower at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she worked when she was 30; an excerpt from “Hunger,” in which she writes about her breakup.

Clockwise from top left: Alamy; HarperCollins publishers; Brandon Williams/Getty Images

Before I went to grad school [for writing] at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I had a job working in the communications department at its College of Engineering. It wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but I was writing and editing for a living, and I had a great boss who taught me to take whatever I was doing seriously.

I was in a terrible relationship with a woman who was about a decade older and [also] in academia and well-established: I allowed myself to believe she was somehow better than me. She was super critical — she didn’t like that I swung my arms when I walked, how I washed dishes. There wasn’t a lot of time for romance, because I was always trying to correct the things she found wrong with me. I think it made her feel good to have that much control over someone.

One night, she left her laptop open in bed. I recognize that you’re not supposed to look at other people’s computers, but I asked if I could use it for a second. I was looking something up on Google when she gets a GChat that says, “I wish we were back at the cabin.” I realized that, when she said she’d gone to work on her tenure portfolio, she was also working on this other woman. It was devastating. Worse than the betrayal was losing the hope that I’d found someone who actually wanted to be with me.

Eventually she broke up with me (on Valentine’s Day, via email) and then tried to walk it back. I got home one day and she had left all these beautiful letters throughout my apartment. It was so touching and it made me so angry. Back then, I would’ve taken those scraps and treated them like a feast, but something in my spirit told me, “If you do one thing in your lifetime, say no right now.”

It was the beginning of a version of myself that was less willing to eat shit all the time, and I was able to reflect that in my writing. On the page, I can say exactly what I want exactly how I want: I’m more outspoken than I ever could be in my day-to-day life, much to my wife’s chagrin. — M.S.

Donna Gottschalk, photographer, 74 , Victory, Vt.

1979 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1979 , and i needed to live alone..

From left: Donna Gottschalk’s “Selfportrait, Alphabet City, New York” (1977-79); an undated flier for a fund-raising event at the Duchess, then New York’s most popular lesbian bar.

Courtesy of Galerie Marcelle Alix; International Gay Information Center ephemera files - Bars, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

I’d just come back from San Francisco, and I was staying at my mother’s in New York’s Alphabet City on Avenue C, sleeping on a cot in the same room as my father. I wanted to get out of there. My mother heard about an apartment [while working] in the beauty parlor she rented nearby. It was across the street and about $150 a month. The people who lived there had been there for 50 years, and you could tell: They had striped wallpaper and there was carpet all over the floor; to me, that was a little classy. Once you got in the downstairs door, it was pretty safe.

In California, I had a lover who insisted on coming everywhere: She was like an anvil around my neck. She was afraid I was going to run off, and I goddamn wanted to. [But in the East Village], I was by myself for the first time in 10 years. I got a job as a waitress at a topless bar, so I was making enough money that I could behave the way I wanted to. I’d drink on the job, and then I’d hop into a cab and go down to the Duchess in the West Village — the most popular gay bar at the time. I made the tiny bedroom into a darkroom; the rest of the apartment had lots of light. I relished being alone there and not having to account for my time.

I took a self-portrait as a business card: I intended to run my name and telephone number along the bottom and have it say, “Portraits, Family Sittings,” that kind of thing. I don’t know what kind of feeling other people get when they look at the photo, but to me it’s a person who’s standing in half light, half darkness, wanting to explore. — Coco Romack

Michael R. Jackson, composer-lyricist and playwright, 43 , New York

2011 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 2011 , and people kept refusing to sing my songs..

From left: a 2024 video portrait made by T of Michael R. Jackson recounting his 30th year; two candid photographs of Jackson from 2011.

From left: Justin French: Aaron Kinney; courtesy of Michael R. Jackson

I was working a full-time job at an advertising agency, so whenever I did something that was musical theater-related, I had to scramble. I was doing a concert at Joe’s Pub [in New York] and had gotten into some trouble at work because I’d sent a provocative flier for it through my work email. I’d made this whole shtick out of funny emails: If I had to do this horrible job, I needed to make it clear to everyone that, really, I had this other thing.

At that time, everything was very buttoned-up and safe in theater. Anytime there was anything gay, it was very cute and white, and about being in love and holding hands — not counterculture. I wanted to do something that was out there [with song titles like “ Ghosts of Gay Sex (In the 70s) ”]. I had no career visibility, so I gathered a mix of people who I knew or were recommended by friends. Most people were initially down to do it, but then I lost one, and another. I was like, “Hey, this concert has lots of out-there, gay-themed songs, so if you’re not into that, you should drop out.” And they did. And then this performer who’d been in an earlier version at [the Off Broadway theater] Ars Nova reached out, asking me to take down a YouTube video of him because his agents were trying to rebrand him. They didn’t want him associated with my music. And then someone else wanted me to not include his name in any promotion because he was worried that if he got Googled, it would have the word “gay” in it.

All of this happened in the span of one week — all these people going, “Too dirty! Too gay!” This was pre-Grindr, pre- PrEP , before marriage equality [in the United States]. After that, everyone wanted to be gay in theater.

The concert was still great: It was one of my weird little shows that was fairly well-attended, and a steppingstone for the years to come. But this experience kind of radicalized me, because I said, “I’m never going to go through that again.” I gave myself a rule that, going forward, before I let anybody do any of my work, I give them all the warnings so that they can’t be surprised later. — J.A.R.

John Rechy, writer, 93 , Los Angeles

1961 " class="g-subhed svelte-zlnwsd"> it was 1961 , and pershing square was the place to be..

From left: John Rechy in Los Angeles in the 1960s; a 1965 edition of Bob Damron’s “Address Book,” listing notable gay venues in the city.

Left: courtesy of John Rechy. Right: ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries

I lived on Hope Street in Downtown Los Angeles, next door to the YMCA. There was a roof where I could sunbathe and sometimes there were men who sent signals through the windows to arrange meetings for later — part of the whole choreography. It was also blocks from the headquarters of gay activity, Pershing Square , where you’d find the really fabulous queens. At the time, drag was an arrestable offense, so it was subtle: blush, lipstick, collars up.

There was a cop — Sgt. Shirley or Sgt. Temple, I don’t remember which — who was like a nasty mayor. I’d been in the city for half an hour when I made my way to Pershing Square for the first time; within five minutes, I was in the interrogation room under the park.

Late in the day, everything would transfer a couple blocks away to Main Street. There was Harold’s Bar and the Waldorf Cellar , which was very grand, like a ’20s speakeasy, with booths and vinyl that had gone ratty and a big mural of palm trees. The Waldorf had a lot of hustlers and businessmen but had a sign that said, “No Femmes,” which was really repugnant. Next door there was a very dingy hotel to rent by the hour. Between the Waldorf and Harold’s was the no-name coffee place where there was the semi-riot [in the late 1950s]: They tried arresting a queen and everyone started throwing coffee and doughnuts.

It was a tattered city, a cauldron of humanity, and it was both exciting and very sad. I never set out to write about that world [before “ City of Night ” (1963), Rechy’s debut novel]. After, I got labeled a “gay” writer even though I write about a lot of other things. Now a lot of very good writers get separated out into a genre. Picture it: [Jean] Genet and [Marcel] Proust in the “Gay” section of the library!

The tendency is to romanticize things, but it wasn’t romantic. Go back to when I was 30? Oh, no. We lived under constant threat. The hatred is still out there. So much still remains. But there have been a lot of very heroic people. — M.S.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

Hair and makeup by Linda Gradin using MAC at L’Atelier NYC. Bookings consultant: Ian William Bauman at Studio Bauman. Director of photography: Andrew Rothschild. Second camera operator: Aaron Fenichell. Gaffer: Alexa Mignon Harris. Electric: Tim Breuer. Key grip: Monifa LaRena. Digital tech: Zach Miller. Sound: Pablo Diez. Production: Jennifer Pio. Production manager: Casilda García López. Production assistant: Jake DePinto. Hair and makeup assistant: Vika Osyhenko. Postproduction by Haste.nyc . Post supervisor: Jordan Taylor Fuller. Supervising editor: Oliver Rivard. Editor: David Castillo. Colorist: Mary Perrino. Sound mixer: Charles Van Kirk. Still life photo assistant: Karl Leitz.

Digital production and design: Danny DeBelius, Amy Fang, Mariah Kreutter, Chris Littlewood, Jamie Sims and Carla Valdivia Nakatani.

A correction was made on June 27, 2024: An earlier version of this article mistakenly transposed the picture captions for the Polaroid photographs of Avram Finkelstein and Don Yowell. The top image is of Avram Finkelstein and the bottom is of Don Yowell.

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The Best Books We Read This Week

Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. Check back every Wednesday for new fiction and nonfiction recommendations.

Fiction & Poetry

Night Flyer

Harriet Tubman’s early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled with physical torture and emotional terror. Forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand, she was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. What was never beaten out of her was a sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.” In “Night Flyer,” Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, resurrects Tubman’s spiritual life, considering her alongside not only intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass but also Black evangelists of the era. The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see.

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Cue the Sun!

Nussbaum, a staff writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, turns her acute critical eye on the history of reality television, which became popular by offering “something authentic, buried inside something fake.” From “Candid Camera” to “The Gong Show” to “The Real Housewives,” Nussbaum writes, such programs have “functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them—and if that reflection was sometimes cruel, it was also funny, riveting, outrageous, and affecting, even if—maybe especially if—you found it disturbing.” This book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Work of Art

This collection of interviews, by a former editor of  New York , aims to illuminate artists’ processes through conversation. The novelist Michael Cunningham describes writing first thing in the morning to avoid getting “lost in the realness of the real world”; the visual artist Kara Walker recounts beginning one project by drawing with her feet (“I can’t trust this hand not to make something very obvious”). Moss’s footnotes flag common themes, including tenacious work ethics, mentorship, and iterative revisions. His subjects’ accounts are enriched by color images of works in progress: the outline of a concerto (Nico Muhly), a line of poetry scribbled in a faculty meeting (Louise Glück).

Books & Fiction

Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.

The Struggle for Taiwan

As Khan observes in his rich and thoughtful book, the fraught status of Taiwan is bedecked with bad history, which muddles our understanding of what is at stake in East Asia. Start with China’s claim that Taiwan was always part of China, a cornerstone of Xi Jinping’s nationalism. In fact, for most of its history, Taiwan was no more a part of the Chinese nation than, say, Gibraltar was a part of Britain. Khan shows how politicians in Washington have often felt that they had both to defend democratic Taiwan and to reassure Beijing that Taiwanese independence would continue to be resisted. Avoiding violent conflict, he suggests, will take a great deal of diplomatic finesse guided by a profound knowledge of local history and politics.

The Coast Road

Set in a small town in northwestern Ireland in 1994, this finely wrought début novel depicts the limited options that were available to unhappily married women in that country prior to the referendum that legalized divorce there, the following year. It centers on the friendship between a poet who has returned to town as a pariah after a scandalous affair in Dublin and the discontented wife of a local politician. Murrin powerfully renders the ways that women’s freedom, individuality, and self-expression are stifled by religion, custom, and gossip, and, as one character reflects, how “bitterness could poison a life, could make you lousy with exhaustion.”

Harriet Tubman’s greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success: for more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee,” powerfully situates Tubman among her contemporaries—not only the controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics but fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.

Twilley, a frequent New Yorker contributor, studies an invention that transformed vast swaths of human life, from our nutrition to our cities to the layout of our homes. Her focus is the so-called cold chain—nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is shipped, packaged, and stored under refrigeration. And Twilley gives us a tour of the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, Missouri’s cheese caves, and the enormous vats that hold the nation’s orange-juice reserves. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Last Week’s Picks

Although most readers will turn first to the chapters about the U.S. response to COVID and Fauci’s dealings with the Trump Administration, this autobiography by the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases covers his entire life, from boyhood and medical training to retirement, and thus presents an implicit demand for us to see his career whole. The two greatest public-health crises of his career— COVID and AIDS —also form something of a diptych, the resonances between them impossible to ignore. Both involve asymptomatic infection, a scramble for tests and treatments, public-information campaigns, and the search for a vaccine. And in each Fauci is vilified—first by militant AIDS activists, later by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, populist Republicans and libertarians, and a panoply of conspiracy theorists. But the differences are as revealing as the similarities, in ways that, by the end of the book, test even Fauci’s resistance to pessimism.

Long Island

Eilis Lacey, an Irish immigrant in New York whom Tóibín introduced in his novel “Brooklyn,” returns in this deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental sequel. The book, which takes place in the nineteen-seventies, two decades after the events of the earlier installment, opens with Eilis—now a mother of two living on Long Island—learning that her Italian American husband has impregnated another woman. The news sparks Eilis’s return to her home town, Enniscorthy, where she has not been for some twenty years, and where she reconnects with a man with whom she had a dalliance early on in her marriage. Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.

Ask Me Again

This début novel, by a noted writer of short stories, begins as Eva, the self-conscious teen-age daughter of middle-class parents, befriends a boy named Jamie, an intellectual with a contrarian streak who comes from a wealthy family. In the next few years, Eva graduates from a prestigious college and gets a job at a newspaper while contending with romances, ambitions, a nascent political consciousness, and a changing relationship with her parents. Meanwhile, Jamie drops out to join a thinly veiled Occupy Wall Street. Throughout, the novel considers how a life’s trajectory takes shape, and how much it is influenced by other people: “Eva herself thought about impressions all the time. She liked picturing it literally: the mark that you left on someone or that someone left on you.”

Cusk’s latest book is not so much a novel as a study of the isolation caused by the impulse to create art. The artists here—male, female, white, Black, all named “G”—follow their inspirations and their insecurities in ways that distance and alienate the people around them. Also a look at gender roles in art and in life, “Parade” considers the ways in which being female is a social performance, one often at odds with the untethered impropriety that making art requires. The opening chapter, “ The Stuntman ,” first appeared in the magazine.

Cosmic Connections

We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, the Canadian philosopher writes, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the world that Enlightenment liberalism produced: one of fragmented belief and atomized selves. But Taylor thinks that the Romantics can tell us how this splintered realm can be mended. In his view, the arts can help us reënchant the world, restoring those resonant feelings of wholeness and of harmony—not just with “Nature” but with existence itself.

Orwell’s Ghosts

In the nearly seventy-five years since George Orwell’s death, his writing has been appropriated for various ideological ends. In this lucid, engaging study, Beers teases out its intricacies, considering, for instance, Orwell’s dual commitment to socialist revolution and “traditional” English society; his apparent dismissal of feminism; his belief in individual liberty; and why he ultimately valued truth above freedom of speech. The complexity (and sheer volume) of Orwell’s work means that he has frequently been misunderstood. Beers reaches a satisfying synthesis, writing that Orwell illuminates how “to resist the temptations of totalitarianism in favor of a more open and democratic socialism.”

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones

The author describes a magical childhood in Kashmir, which her family was forced to leave, and the many countries, cultures, and kitchens through which she has travelled since in the quest for home. Sections about the musician Ali Sethi and her mother’s Rogan Josh recipe originally appeared on newyorker.com.

Attachments

The inner tumult of the contemporary dad, full of unprecedented new highs, lows, and targets for neurotic speculation, is the subject of this memoir. It is an intense, poetic, and almost uncomfortably honest book about what he describes as the “mundane enormous terror of watching a child grow.” Mann, who has previously published books about minor-league baseball, reality TV, and the effects of addiction on his own family, writes with a mix of bliss and dread, all of it suffused with a relentless sense of self-scrutiny. Like many in their mid-thirties or forties, cis-het men with progressive viewpoints and vaguely middle-class leanings, he aspires for an approach to fatherhood in rough agreement with his politics. And, throughout “Attachments,” he returns to the various forces that prepared him for this moment—the signals from society, the novels or art works that once gave him pause, the examples of friends and family—until he realizes that none of it properly readied him for the work at hand.

Caledonian Road

O’Hagan is a journalist and editor-at-large at the London Review of Books , where he has written some of the publication’s best-known investigative, as well as comic, pieces. He is the toast of London society, a well-dressed and knowing presence at parties and polo matches. In his sprawling new novel, “Caledonian Road,” he skewers the scene’s hypocrisies. Campbell Flynn, the novel’s doomed protagonist, is an art historian who seems to have everything going for him. He’s married to a brilliant psychotherapist, and has two high-achieving grown children and impeccable liberal credentials. He’s written a successful book on Vermeer (“A work of mesmerising empathy”) and hosts a BBC podcast called “Civilisation and Its Malcontents.” He is also, we learn, beset by money problems and dangerously close to a breakdown. The novel follows the unravelling of his tidy life over the course of a year, as he writes an ill-conceived self-help book and becomes entangled with a promising student who upends his world view. O’Hagan calls him a “tinderbox in a Savile Row suit.”

Previous Picks

This adroit new overview by Wilford, a historian, examines how, after the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. Many of the C.I.A.’s actions, in Wilford’s telling, can be understood as desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay well beyond the agency’s grasp. Much of this work took place in former colonies. The stereotype of the Cold War milieu—upturned collars, fog-bathed checkpoints—is misleading on this score. The real action was in warmer climes, Wilford shows. It was the end of colonial empires that made the Global South central. Each newly independent state, from Washington’s vantage, represented a chance to gain (or lose) influence. Of course, countries that had just thrown off empires bristled at outside attempts to guide them. Ironically, Wilford points out, this anti-imperialism empowered the C.I.A. The stronger the norm against meddling, the more U.S. leaders felt a need to hide their work. The C.I.A. thus became a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonization, Wilford argues.

What, in our digital age, constitutes an affair? Texting? Swiping? How about buying an eight-thousand-dollar A.I. sex doll and hiding it from your wife in the garage? In this entertaining novel, the middle-aged narrator, Dolores, discovers that her husband has done just that. As Dolores’s marriage falls apart, she forms a strange bond with the doll, Zoey, who proves a better listener than her aloof husband (an aptly professioned anesthesiologist). Told in short scenes that crosscut the present with childhood memories, the story is as much about technology as it is about friendship and romance. Even if Zoey’s “aliveness” is “a ruse,” like that of an E. T. A. Hoffmann character, she offers Dolores both life-affirming companionship and a way to access her repressed soul.

The Achilles Trap

It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows just how often the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives. Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll indicates that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t.

Cull of the Wild

If people, either intentionally or accidentally, have altered the natural world to favor one species over another, do people then have an obligation to undo the damage? Warwick, a British ecologist and writer, considers a dozen recent campaigns to assist one species by “removing” its competitor. These include efforts to cull mice in favor of albatrosses, rats in favor of puffins, and pythons in favor of bobcats. Invasive species, Warwick points out, are among the main drivers of extinction today, up there with habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change. The author’s own attachment to animals runs deep; he stopped eating meat thirty-five years ago and generally avoids animal products. His particular passion is hedgehogs. One might imagine Warwick to be opposed to “killing in the name of conservation.” In fact, though, he’s conflicted. Conservation “is really complicated,” he writes. “There is an old saying that anyone who gives you a simple answer to a complicated problem is either a liar or a fool.” As Warwick observes, it’s way too late to debate whether humans have a right to intervene in the natural world, because “we have, as a species, already intervened.”

“My writing was fuelled by desperation, and madness, too,” Scanlon, a novelist, writes in this affecting memoir, which recounts her stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in her early twenties, following a suicide attempt. Dogged by a “preternatural sense of doom” after her mother’s death from cancer, she is solaced by the work of women writers, including Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath, who wrote their way through despair, and Audre Lorde, whose “Cancer Journals” feel like a “revelation.” If the hospital ward where Scanlon stayed felt at times like a “foreign country,” books served as a ballast for her fragile psyche.

More than a decade in the making, this book-length poem traces its acclaimed author’s years in exile after his expulsion from mainland China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Dotted with dates and locations of personal and historical significance—as well as encounters with friends and peers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Mahmoud Darwish—the poem combines the documentary and the elusive, finding meaning in language both when it “talks with the tanks” and when it captures the “sunshine tablecloth” in a California kitchen. Elegantly rendered into English, the poem exemplifies Bei Dao’s surprising imagery and logic while also introducing an autobiographical immediacy to his work.

The Light Eaters

The contemporary world of botany is divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But research in recent decades has prompted the question that animates Schlanger’s book: Are plants intelligent? Schlanger writes about scientists who are studying how plants change their shape and respond to sound, how they use electricity to convey information, how they send one another chemical signals. Along the way, she becomes a sort of anthropologist of botanists. The book’s focus on the researchers themselves overcomes a challenge inherent to science writing: where to find drama. “The Light Eaters” is a special piece of science writing for the way it solves the genre’s bind; it doesn’t force people or their findings into narrative engines. Instead, the field of botany itself functions like a character, one undergoing a potentially radical change, with all the excitement, discomfort, and uncertainty that transformation brings. The book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks.

Beautiful Days

In this eerie début story collection, Williams explores how easily the unknown can enter our everyday lives and change us. His work, which often teeters on the border between reality and the uncanny, asks more questions than it answers. Two stories from the collection, including “ Wood Sorrel House ,” first appeared in the magazine.

The Playbook

This perceptive history, by a Shakespeare scholar, centers on the Federal Theatre, a short-lived New Deal-era relief program that staged more than a thousand plays and employed more than twelve thousand artists before it was disbanded for allegedly disseminating “Communist propaganda.” Under the stewardship of Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor, the theatre produced plays that combined social commentary with documentary realism; its critically acclaimed shows included a voodoo-inflected “Macbeth” set in nineteenth-century Haiti. The theatre ultimately lost its funding after it was targeted by Martin Dies, the director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose tactics, Shapiro wryly notes, are still employed by culture warriors seeking to defund or censor the arts.

Louis Wain, an artist born in England in 1860, is the figure at the center of “Catland,” an entertaining and often surprising cultural history. Hughes examines a seventy-year period, stretching from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, during which, she writes, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” In alternating chapters, Hughes narrates the life of Wain—whose drawings at the height of his popularity were as familiar as those of Beatrix Potter, and who spent his later years in a mental asylum, afflicted with symptoms of what may have been schizophrenia—and provides a zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth. Hughes makes the case that the new world of cats which Wain both chronicled and helped to create is a signal instance of modernism in all its confusion and uncertainty. She writes, “When it came to ‘making it new’—that battle cry of early twentieth-century intellectuals—nothing conveyed the principle better than the transformation of the domestic cat from smudgy outlier to cultural obsession.”

I Cannot Control Everything Forever

This remarkable memoir, which takes its title from a work by Louise Bourgeois, describes the author’s fraught journey to parenthood and considers pregnancy through the lenses of science and art. Bloom, a literary scholar, interweaves the narrative of becoming the mother of a diabetic and congenitally deaf daughter with analyses of art works and brief medical histories. The sound of the voice-flattening vocoder in Laurie Anderson’s song “O Superman,” for instance, recalls cochlear-implant simulations. “I care for her and I care for her devices,” Bloom says of her child. “I am part mother, part machine.”

Matrescence

In 2015, when the journalist and science writer Lucy Jones became pregnant with her first child, she found the experience joyful but discombobulating: after a difficult birth, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. She came to feel a sense that she “had been fundamentally misinformed about the female body and the maternal experience.” Her subsequent attempt to rebuild her conception of motherhood forms the basis of this wide-ranging and hugely ambitious book. Marshalling memoir, science, sociology, and history, Jones argues that, outside of adolescence, there is no transformation as dramatic in a human’s life, in both its emotional and biological impacts. Research has found, for instance, that motherhood causes big changes in the brain’s default-mode network, an area related to what Jones calls “the perception of the self.” She relates discoveries like these alongside moving reflections on her transformed state: “I had thought that my disrupted sense of self, my notion that I’d become a new hybrid creature, must be in some way fanciful,” she notes. In fact, “it was the idea that I was ultimately an independent individual that was fanciful.”

The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

This essential volume collects more than fifty accounts of Japanese life before, during, and after the war. The title alone is a bold assertion of identity: for decades, the wartime incarceration of the Japanese was described in euphemistic terms such as “relocation” or “internment.” Abe and Cheung’s definition of “literature” is admirably broad, encompassing letters, editorials, poetry, short stories, manga, and government documents. Although there have been many books written on the history of incarceration, few have captured the kind of emotional detail that comes through in the largely first-person accounts collected by Abe and Cheung. Their selections paint a complicated picture, convening hopeful, patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics.

Impoverished nineteenth-century Londoners tend to come to us in the form of caricature or literature; this engaging history seeks to allow them to speak for themselves. Jensen delves into contemporary memoirs, trial proceedings, periodicals, and other sources to capture an “astonishingly eloquent collective.” He pays particular attention to differences not only of class but of race, country of origin, and gender (girls and young women in the streets, he notes, had to navigate “a London that is made of a thousand eyes”). As one fellow who has fallen on hard times puts it, “Hungry in a land of plenty, I began seriously for the first time in my life to enquire WHY, WHY—a dangerous question . . . isn’t it, for a poor man to ask?”

The Other Olympians

Late in 1935, a Czech track star, the winner of a bronze and a gold medal at the previous year’s Women’s World Games, revealed that he was planning to undergo surgery so that he could live openly as a man. The news made headlines around the world, and the track star, Zdeněk Koubek, was, for a while, internationally famous. He appeared on Broadway in a cabaret show; he shared top billing with Josephine Baker at the Folies-Bergère music hall, in Paris. Meanwhile, with the Berlin Olympics approaching, a Nazi sports doctor named Wilhelm Knoll used Koubek’s case as a rationale for instituting sex testing at the Games. Waters traces this history thoughtfully, and meticulously, revealing how much about this recent and relevant past we have forgotten, or never knew. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

The Invention of the Darling

“True love looks out / through death’s unswerving gaze,” proclaims the poem that opens this collection, from a writer renowned for his renderings of erotic and spiritual ecstasy, and for work that braids together dream, myth, and memory in unabashed pursuit of the sublime. For Lee, devotion is both shadowed and illuminated by a consciousness of mortality. He employs an acute surrealist sensibility connected to the experience and anticipation of exile—from one’s mother country or tongue, from childhood, from a state of unity with the beloved, and, ultimately, from life. “I wasn’t born in this country, / but I’ll likely be buried here. / Nothing mysterious about that,” he writes. “Mysterious are the myriad gates / by which light comes and goes.”

A Body Made of Glass

The author of this thought-provoking exploration of hypochondria—which counts Marcel Proust and Charles Darwin among its sufferers—describes it as a difficulty in identifying “that boundary between fictional and real illness.” Delving into the medical literature, Crampton discovers that the conception of hypochondria has shifted greatly during the millennia, from its earliest diagnoses as a liver-and-abdomen complaint to its current unofficial status as a psychological problem (“hypochondriasis” is no longer included in the  DSM ). What emerges is a portrait of a condition that, though nearly as old as recorded human history, continues to elude neat definition, even as it raises urgent questions about “who is believed when they speak of their pain, and who is not.”

“Modern economic growth began just two hundred years ago,” Susskind, an economist at King’s College London, writes. “If the sum of human history were an hour long, then this reversal in fortune took place in the last couple of seconds.” The turning point came with the Industrial Revolution, which triggered an explosion in prosperity in Europe and North America, and led to the sustained worldwide growth that humans are still enjoying today. In the past fifty years, the global economy has become twenty-six times bigger—or twelve times higher per person. In 1970, half of humanity lived in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than two dollars a day. Today, only a tenth of the global population lives in extreme poverty. But we’re also guzzling resources and belching carbon at unprecedented rates. The paradox of growth—that we suffer from both too much of it and too little of it—drives Susskind’s book. His narration properly captures the astonishing triumph of these shifts, even as he considers their dangers.

Little Seed

A family story and a natural history of the fern run in parallel through this memoir, in which chapters alternate between botanical esoterica and descriptions of Tchou’s personal life: she grew up in Appalachian Tennessee as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she has a brother who, as an adult, is beset by psychotic episodes. The two narratives initially stay on their separate paths, but eventually Tchou finds graceful moments of glancing association, especially on the vexing topic of identity. “My family is rigid about identification with one another and with the whole,” she explains. “We lack the flexibility of taxonomists, to allow things to break apart and come back together.”

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two

Ferris’s début graphic novel, “ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters ,” was a breakout hit, garnering praise for its intricately cross-hatched drawings and its marriage of gothic-pulp aesthetics and sharp social commentary. The story is presented as the diary of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl growing up in the politically volatile Chicago of the nineteen-sixties. Ferris weaves together history, comic books, and horror to echo Karen’s sense of herself as a monster. In the second volume, Karen continues to dig deeper into her own evolving sensibilities about the inhuman and the obscene. The graphic novel was excerpted on newyorker.com.

They Came for the Schools

Roughly five years ago, a racist incident prompted a Texas school district to investigate discrimination in its schools and, ultimately, to formulate a plan that included cultural-sensitivity training and the hiring of more teachers of color. The district presented its proposals not long after the murder of George Floyd sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, and it was met with fierce, well-funded resistance. A political-action committee was formed to oppose the plan; the following year, candidates endorsed by the committee swept elections for school board, city council, and mayor. As Hixenbaugh demonstrates, conservative activists across the country saw what happened in Texas as a blueprint—not only to get their preferred candidates elected but to launch an ongoing attack on public education itself.

The Ministry of Time

In this compelling début novel, set in the near future, the British government has created a time machine and used it to retrieve a handful of people from other periods of history, referred to as “expats.” The book’s narrator is a minder for one of them: a nineteenth-century Royal Navy commander and polar explorer. Complications ensue when the narrator, who is Cambodian English, begins to fall in love with her charge, while also closing in on the truth of the mysterious extraction program. Throughout, Bradley meditates on mortality, grief, and imperialism. “Everything that has ever been could have been prevented and none of it was,” she writes. “The only thing you can mend is the future.”

Faraway the Southern Sky

This brief but layered novel follows a nameless figure wandering around Paris searching for traces of Ho Chi Minh, who lived there as a young revolutionary, near the end of the First World War. Ho is glimpsed through police files, plaques, and publications on his unlikely path to political power, working as a cook and a photo enlarger while managing his ceaseless political agitation. During the search, scenes of contemporary Parisian life are overlaid with memories of past struggle. In Andras’s depiction, the city’s history emerges as a deep record of past disruptions—and, perhaps, the stuff of present inspiration (the  gilets jaunes  make an appearance), if an observer is able to draw connections between the eras.

Liberalism as a Way of Life

Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, writes about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of the professional pundits. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous. Lefebvre recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to our anxiety. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.”

Natural Magic

Although Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson are not known to have ever crossed paths, this study finds meaning in their shared enchantment with the natural world. In the eighteen-thirties, as “natural philosophy” began to be reframed as “natural science,” emotion and wonder were eclipsed by objectivity and mastery. Darwin and Dickinson resisted this binary: Darwin saw his theory of natural selection as an occasion for humility, relating humans to other species; Dickinson, whose poetry reflects her extensive scientific education and interest in Darwin’s ideas, depicted the natural world with both botanical specificity and attention to its splendors. Bergland links their thinking to an earlier tradition of “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) magic, which emphasized the interconnectedness of life and valued emotion as a form of understanding.

Traces of Enayat

Literary obsession and detective work merge in this biography of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer who died by suicide in 1963, at the age of twenty-six, years before the publication of her only novel. Following the threads of al-Zayyat’s life, Mersal depicts the Egypt in which she grew up and the largely vanished Cairo where she lived, while chronicling her search for the forgotten author. “To trace someone,” Mersal writes, “is a dialogue that is perforce one-sided.” Indeed, despite assiduous research and interviews with surviving friends and family, Mersal experiences “despair at the possibility of knowing” the true story of al-Zayyat, whose remnants she embroiders with photographs, speculation, and personal reflections, leaving behind a seductive mystery.

Thornton’s own breasts “made their debut on a summer’s day in the mid-1970s,” she writes. “Not yet a teenager, I imagined that my new assets might become a potent symbol of adult self-possession or a source of mesmerizing power.” That aspiration ended at fifteen, when the head chef at a local golf club groped her during her shift. Then, in her fifties, she underwent a double mastectomy after a series of biopsies revealed the presence of early-stage cancer. She soon found that she “had an overwhelming desire to understand the multifarious meanings and uses of breasts.” Here, Thornton is less interested in how breasts appear than in how they can be put to work—by sex workers, activists, milk donors, midwives and lactation specialists, surgeons, lingerie models, and swimwear designers. The broad truth that most American women “are dissatisfied with, indifferent to, or ambivalent about their breasts” is the premise of her book, one that wants to set these organs free with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of and appreciation for the people to whom they are attached.

The Art of Dying

This posthumous collection gathers the final pieces written by The New Yorker’s longtime art critic, who died in October, 2022. The forty-six essays, all of which originally appeared in the magazine, include Schjeldahl’s unparalleled exploration of his life as a critic, which he wrote in the weeks after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. The volume demonstrates how Schjeldahl’s kinetic, wry, and inimitable style remained powerfully intact until his last days.

Manod, the observant narrator of this début novel set on the cusp of the Second World War, lives on a sparsely populated Welsh island where, one night, a whale washes up on the beach and dies shortly thereafter. Soon, two researchers turn up to document the customs of the islanders. Manod agrees to assist them, translating phrases (such as “sheep farmer”) and cultural realities (the people cannot swim). In time, however, misunderstandings arise between researchers and subject, imbuing their relationship with both alienation and tenderness. Stubborn transgressions committed by the interlopers testify to the hazards of anthropology and the delusions of so-called progress.

Free and Equal

Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics, is a passionate evangelist for the great American philosopher John Rawls, using Rawls as his fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Rawls’s magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice” (1971), was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme where everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (economic inequalities have to be justified by their effect on the least advantaged). The vision Chandler extracts from this is, on the whole, a sane one of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

July’s second novel is a study of crisis—the crisis being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition. The unnamed narrator is a forty-five-year-old in L.A. with a mellow music-producer husband and a precocious seven-year-old. Less than an hour into a solo road trip to New York, she stops at a gas station, where a young man cleans her windshield. Soon the pair has succumbed to a magnetic, earth-shattering attraction, and the narrator has checked into a nearby motel, where she renovates her room in the style of an opulent Parisian hotel. The room becomes a love nest, of a kind, but a terrible deadline looms. The narrator’s putative road trip must end. What will happen when she goes home to face her life? July’s moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear-eyed about its costs.

Women and the Piano

In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century to the present, Tomes aims to correct a male-centric understanding of piano history. Women pianists have long been scrutinized—for playing in a “masculine” style, for their appearances, for not orienting themselves around family. Through short biographies, Tomes documents the cost of pursuing art. Fanny Mendelssohn allowed her compositions to be published under her brother Felix’s name; Zhu Xiao-Mei continued studying Bach even after being sent to do manual labor during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the resounding note is one of passion. As Marguerite Long told her students, “My joy in life is work, because it will never betray you.”

The dog show is a forum optimized to display the weirdness of the current human-canine relationship: our lavish expenditure on dogs, our equally outsized emotional investment in them, and the degree to which we have quite literally shaped them as a species. Tomlinson, a journalist and former mutt owner, found himself captivated by the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show when he caught it on TV. The questions that came to mind, as Shih Tzus paraded around the ring, were not very scientific, but they were very American: Are these dogs happy? Are any dogs happy? Why do dogs make me so happy? Those musings form the kernel of his new book, which approaches its subject with a pleasing mixture of conviviality and comedic distance.

This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free.

Newly installed in a house in Oxford, the protagonist of this novel savors visions of a future with her well-to-do fiancé. To her relief, they are a world away from her family in Derby, for whom she feels “a crawling embarrassment,” and from whom she received the nickname Piglet, for her prodigious appetite. Days before the wedding, however, her fiancé confesses a betrayal. Clinging to “the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared,” Piglet insists on moving forward with the marriage. But amid sensuous descriptions of her cooking and of the vast amounts of food she begins to order at restaurants, battles between self-denial and indulgence, external expectations and inner feeling, start to consume her. Each burger and croquembouche is freighted with meaning.

The main character of this warmhearted novel is Jodie Rattler, a girl who, at the age of six, accompanies her uncle to a racetrack and wins a roll of forty-three two-dollar bills. That talisman propels Rattler through life, from her upbringing in a gregarious family to a successful, if ultimately unfulfilling, career as a folk-rock singer-songwriter. As the novel wends its way from the nineteen-fifties to the near future, through multiple national crises—some historical, some speculative—Rattler contemplates the mixed blessings of her lifelong lucky streak and the contingencies inherent in “the great enigma . . . the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what a self is.”

The Invention of Prehistory

Stories about the deep human past rest on assumptions about what it means to be human in the first place, giving them normative implications for modern society. Geroulanos, a historian, notes that European intellectuals have, in the past two and a half centuries, turned to prehistory to explain things like the structure of families, the basis of states, the prevalence of war, and the contours of our nature. “Pre-history is about the present day,” he writes. “It always has been.” With careful attention to our collective accounting of our prehistoric roots, Geroulanous considers what is revealed about our present when we write about our past.

Shakespeare’s Sisters

In this thoughtful study, Targoff, a literary scholar, highlights four female contemporaries of Shakespeare, women who “weren’t encouraged” and rarely received “even a shred of acclaim,” but managed to write nonetheless. Mary Sidney (the sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) produced a noteworthy translation of the Book of Psalms. Elizabeth Cary wrote “The Tragedy of Mariam,” the first original play published by a woman in England. Aemilia Lanyer was the first published English female poet of the seventeenth century, thanks to her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” which mounted a “defense of women’s rights.” Anne Clifford, a voracious reader born to aristocrats, wrote a detailed journal; by “treating herself as a historical subject living an important life,” Targoff argues, she became the “most important female diarist” of her time.

This Strange Eventful History

Messud’s new book traces three generations of an itinerant French family with roots in North Africa. The Cassars are pieds noirs —people of European descent born in colonial Algeria—who flee their home during the Algerian revolution. Unwelcome in Paris, where they are seen as interlopers from the fringes, the Cassar children traverse the globe, seeking to assuage their lost sense of belonging through the myth of a perfect love. The novel brims with autobiographical details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled “Everything That We Believed In,” that Messud’s paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: “This Strange Eventful History” is a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it. The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact. Messud trusts her readers to bite down.

Limitarianism

This provocative consideration of extreme wealth accumulation asks how society might improve if the phenomenon were eliminated. Robeyns, a philosopher, uses the term “limitarianism” to describe an economic framework that would impose a cap on how much money any single individual can amass. Throughout the book, she outlines the concrete steps that her proposal would require, and reflects on its wider social implications, in the form of sweeping fiscal and ethical transformations. Ultimately, her account amounts to an argument for “why a world without extreme wealth concentration is better for us all.”

How to Baby

This hilarious, illustrated pregnancy and parenting how-to-ish book is for all the people who are tired of receiving useless advice on pregnancy and parenting but would like to vent about said advice. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com .

Rough Trade

The protagonist of this transgressive crime thriller, set in Tacoma, Washington, in the late nineteenth century, is Alma Rosales, an ex-detective who has constructed a new life as Jack Camp, a stevedore and an opium smuggler both beloved and feared by his crew. Alma commands this masculine world with “hard-worn knuckles and small-man’s swagger,” but when an old friend and love interest unexpectedly arrives, with a detective on her tail, their meeting sets off a series of dangers that almost cost Alma and her crew their livelihoods. At once richly atmospheric and finely paced, the novel is a potent and morally complex portrait of queer life and history.

Life Wants You Dead

In a world that seems bleaker and more treacherous than ever, it’s important to remember all the ways in which you are imperilled, and to laugh at them, right up till the bitterly funny end. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com .

This quietly compelling novel of forbidden love focusses on two characters in their sixties, Sarah (divorced) and Warren (married, not entirely happily), who dated as teen-agers and meet again by chance one evening at a performance of “Tosca.” Though its tone is muted, the book captures the aching pull of an all-consuming affair, which draws the characters away from their families and from the lives they have painstakingly built. Robinson examines the question of how difficult it is to abandon vows, even for people who came of age in the throes of the sexual revolution. Despite contemporary society’s general acceptance of divorce, the novel shows how desire can still have painful consequences.

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

An eye-opening collaboration between two great American artists, this volume is not like any ABC book or gardening manual you’ve ever seen. A longtime New Yorker contributor, Kincaid unearths the secret history of the plant world, turning up the sometimes barbarous stories behind the garden blooms that we’ve been looking at all of our lives. Walker’s arresting watercolors bring it all to life. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

Neighbors and Other Stories

In 1966, Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the civil-rights movement. In the title story, a girl observes her brother on a tense night before he is to become the first to integrate his school; in another story, a young woman joins a lunch-counter sit-in. Oliver delves into subtleties of class, focussing on characters such as a doctor’s second wife and a daydreaming maid. At their best, the stories let ideas take shape gradually, making close observation the cornerstone of their politics.

H Is for Hope

“Climate change resists narrative,” Kolbert writes, “and yet some account of what’s happening is needed.” Here, she employs the alphabet as a framing device to walk readers through an array of colorful characters, notable events, bad actors, and big ideas, to make tangible the diffuse and troubling history of a changing climate—and our relationship to it. The piece first appeared in the magazine .

In this thriller inspired by true events, a journalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and, as the two engage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse, Rika’s relationships—with her boyfriend, her colleagues, and even her own body—begin to change. The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan’s standards for women: “Whichever aspect of it you considered, Rika thought, the Kajii case was tinged by misogyny and the excessive self-pity felt by lonely men.”

All the Campus Lawyers

Commentators debate the extent to which a culture of “coddling” has taken hold of college campuses, and the degree to which offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion are responsible for it. Guard and Jacobsen outline how the systems at play are largely the creation of the federal government. Various federal statutes prohibiting discrimination protect programs and activities that receive federal funds, as most universities do. Prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin have been interpreted in recent decades to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2016, an expanded definition of “disability” was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act. For universities, these laws provide a potential cause of action at every turn. Students and employees who feel harassed, unsafe, or generally uncared for by virtue of their identities are entitled, under federal law, to make a complaint. The result is what Guard and Jacobsen call the “lawyerization of higher education,” a state of affairs where “the impact of the legal issues bearing down on institutions and their campuses has intensified to levels never before seen.”

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

The late-medieval traveller, it was said, always needed two bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is constructed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller. Pilgrimage was a common reason people left home; by 1350, travellers could book a tour to Jerusalem that included transportation, meals, and currency exchange. Yet, as Bale shows, their experience of travel was not one we would entirely recognize. As one pilgrim put it, in 1384, “No one should travel who does not desire hardship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death.”

In August, 2022, more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assassin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”

Since releasing his début work of fiction, in 1983, Everett has published roughly a novel every other year in addition to dozens of short stories, essays, and articles, plus a children’s book and a half-dozen poetry collections. His fictional protagonists have included ornery cowpokes and professors of esoterica. Much of his work is narrated in the first person, yet his “I” is often a fragmentary and destabilizing affair. In “James,” he retells the story of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion Jim. Conferring interiority upon perhaps the most famous fictional emblem of American slavery after Uncle Tom , the book seems to participate in the marketable trope of “writing back” from the margins. But there is no easy way to categorize what Everett is up to with this searching account of a man’s manifold liberation. The novel’s title is the name Jim chooses for himself.

All Things Are Too Small

Rothfeld’s new collection of piquant essays eschews the contemporary predilection for minimalism in favor of indulgence, ambition, and surplus in all its forms. Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness. One essay, on the œuvre of the film director David Cronenberg and body horror as a model for a new philosophy of consent, was excerpted on newyorker.com.

What Kingdom

In this striking début novel, Gråbøl documents daily life in a psychiatric ward for young people in Denmark. Waheed blasts 50 Cent and loves junk food; Marie lives a few floors above her mother; and the narrator, who remains nameless, recounts her struggle with bipolar disorder. Alternately lucid and ecstatic, the novel touches on the welfare system’s focus on bottom lines—“benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles”—and challenges the perception of mental illness as an invisible affliction, “inaccessible to any other.” Gråbøl’s portrait of the residents’ and caretakers’ interconnected lives constructs a communal existence out of individual pain.

On Giving Up

Like many of Phillips’s previous works, this roving collection of writings fuses the lexicon of psychotherapy with literary criticism to upend conventional ideas about common emotional experiences—among them repression, longing, and loss. Phillips enlivens these explorations with examples from literature and history: Kafka and Shakespeare appear, as does the Crow Nation, whose existence was radically altered by the decimation of the animals on which its people depended. Though occasionally meandering, Phillips’s agile treatment of familiar ideas often yields compelling analyses, as when he argues, in the titular essay, that our cultural prohibition on “giving up” compels us to “think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss.”

Ian Fleming

The decolonization of the British Empire throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties brought particular attention to Ian Fleming’s famous debonair spy, James Bond. Shakespeare, a novelist and biographer, details Fleming’s own rise to stardom (his irritated wife called him the “oldest Beatle"), alert to the politics that infused his life and work. Fleming first tried journalism, then finance, faring poorly at both. In 1939 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, John Henry Godfrey, tapped Fleming to be his assistant. The usual thing to say about Fleming’s intelligence work is that he was a deskbound underling who turned his daydreams into spy novels, but Shakespeare presents evidence of Fleming’s centrality. One officer felt that it was Fleming, not Godfrey, who effectively directed naval intelligence for most of the Second World War. Fleming emerged in his spy fiction as the voice of a beleaguered empire but could never quite deal with the way America was eclipsing Britain as a world power.

Rabbit Heart

This memoir stretches across a quarter century to chart the investigation into the author’s mother’s murder, which occurred in 1986, after she was abducted from a mall parking lot in Oklahoma City. Ervin, who was eight at the time of the tragedy, follows the case with devastating rigor, shingling its developments with her memories of growing up without a mother. The adult Ervin, knowing that her mother was sexually brutalized, attempts to undo how that knowledge seems to have settled in her body—in the form of muscular dysfunction—but she also accepts the lasting nature of her grief: “Maybe I’ll always be the daughter, retracing her final footsteps to the car, seeing just how close I can get.”

The Book of Love

This novel, the first by an author celebrated for her short fiction, follows a group of teen-agers who are determined to live normal lives amid intrusions of magic. Three classmates wake up to find that they have died; confused and annoyed, they make a deal with two mysterious beings, who allow them to return home in exchange for their participation in a series of trials. A supernatural power struggle ensues, but the book devotes most of its attention to the ordinary world, slowing the action to examine the relationships between its characters, most of whom are queer. Here, a magical quest is less absorbing than the act of texting a crush.

Set partly in New York City and partly in French Polynesia, this novel follows a family through the distress of 2020. Stephen, an overworked cardiologist, resides in New York with his new wife, who is pregnant. His ex-wife, Nathalie, a scientist, lives in Tahiti, where she studies deepwater-coral bleaching. Moving between these two worlds is their teen-age daughter, Pia, who has become attached to a Tahitian expert diver who works with her mother, and to his mission: to prevent mining companies from destroying the reefs, even if it might require violence. The novel’s evocation of contemporary troubles—Trump,  COVID , ecological devastation—endows it with a sense of chaos that is at once limiting and liberating.

Cocktails with George and Martha

When Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway, in 1962, it marked a watershed in American theatre, simultaneously enthralling and appalling audiences with its excruciatingly intimate portrait of a dysfunctional marriage. Tracing the life of the play from its first draft through the film version, adapted by Mike Nichols in 1966, Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip to probe the story’s appeal. At the heart of his inquiry are three real-life relationships—between Albee and his longtime boyfriend, William Flanagan; between Nichols and Ernest Lehman, the film’s producer; and between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s stars—that illustrate the universality of Albee’s themes.

Cahokia Jazz

In this stylishly drawn mystery novel, the tropes of noir—among them a hardboiled detective with an artist’s soul, a powerful woman with a terrible secret, and a journalist chasing the story of a lifetime—appear in an alternative Jazz Age. Here, Native Americans did not succumb to smallpox, and the powerful and ancient Cahokia nation has joined the United States. This imagined America is studded with names borrowed from the real one: St. Louis might be a mere backwater, but T. S. Eliot is still among its locals. So, unfortunately, is the Klan, which is intent on wresting control of the city from its people and putting it under white, capitalist authority.

The Wide Wide Sea

This new biography undertakes the hazardous enterprise of revisiting the life of Captain James Cook, who, at the time of his death in 1779 was Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the course of three epic voyages—the last one, admittedly, unfinished—he mapped the east coast of Australia, circumnavigated New Zealand, made the first documented crossing of the Antarctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands, and paid the first known visit to South Georgia Island. His admirers believed that he deserved the “gratitude of posterity.” Posterity, however, has a mind of its own. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, entitlement, toxic masculinity,” are, Sides writes, just a few of the charged issues raised by Cook’s legacy. It’s precisely the risks, the author adds, that drew him to the subject.

Based on true events, this richly detailed novel takes place over the course of a year, in the late fifteen-sixties, on an island in Scotland. Mary, Queen of Scots, has been imprisoned by rebels and forced to leave her son, the future King James, with her enemies. She is pregnant with twins, having been raped by the man who became her third husband. After a miscarriage, she directs her remaining energy toward escape. Schemes ensue: could she jump from a tower window, seduce a visiting lord, or pose as a laundress? Her attending ladies, who are also imprisoned, are devoted to helping her reclaim the throne. Through her tale, Carr depicts the ways in which women can care for and exert power over one another.

My Beloved Life

Jadu Kunwar, Kumar writes of his novel’s gentle hero, “had passed unnoticed through much of his life.” His experiences “would not fill a book: they had been so light and inconsequential, like a brief ripple on a lake’s surface.” Kunwar is born in 1935 in rural India. Eventually, he becomes a lecturer in history at a local college; gets married and has a daughter; and wins a scholarship to study at Berkeley, in the late nineteen-eighties, before returning to India. Kunwar’s life is told twice over in this book—the first large section recounts it in the third person, and then the second large section recounts it in the first-person voice of Kunwar’s daughter, Jugnu, bringing us to the present day. The realization that Kumar might be writing a fictionalized version of his own late father’s life breaks like a wave over the sad and joyful ground of this story. The novel’s astonishing details are pointedly revealed but not overpoweringly unpacked, having the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real. Above all, the tale is always deeply human, that of a son grappling with his father’s legacy by inhabiting his point of view.

In this ambitious début novel, a Harriet Tubman figure possessed of supernatural abilities founds a town in Missouri, whose first inhabitants she has rescued from slavery. Magically concealed from the outside world, the community is ostensibly a haven, yet the weight of its inhabitants’ pasts and the confines of safety prove to be difficult burdens. In lush, ornamental prose, Williams, who is also a poet, traces many characters’ entwined journeys as they seek to understand the forces that assemble and separate them. The novel is an inventive ode to self-determination and also a surrealistic vision of Black life as forged within the crucible of American history.

This dryly witty novel centers on Jules, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring novelist turned study-guide editor living in Brooklyn, and her younger sister, who has just moved in with her. Jules swings between irritation and compassion toward her sibling; she notes that “having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.” Jules is just self-aware enough to admit that chief among her joys in life is feeling superior to others. She spins a fixation on her Instagram feed as research for “a book-length hybrid essay” on feminism, capitalism, antisemitism, and the Internet. As Tanner’s novel explores these topics, its depiction of Jules’s relationships also highlights absurdities of contemporary culture and the consequences of self-absorption.

Whiskey Tender

This vibrant memoir recalls the author’s childhood on the traditional lands of the Quechan (Yuma) people on a reservation in California, and in a Navajo Nation border town in New Mexico. The move to New Mexico, in 1976, reflected Taffa’s parents’ desire for their children to “be mainstream Americans.” As a young woman, however, Taffa sought to link her identity to figures from her ancestral past, such as a great-grandmother who lectured and performed for white society. In her account, Taffa regards the broad tapestry of history and picks at its smallest threads: individual choices shaped by violent social forces, and by the sometimes erratic powers of love.

Out of the Darkness

Germany’s postwar transformation into Europe’s political conscience is often cast as a triumphant story of moral rehabilitation. This book points to the limitations of that narrative, arguing that, in the past eight decades, German society has been “preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to terms with the Nazi past” rather than with confronting its obligations to the broader world. Trentmann draws from a wide range of sources, including amateur plays and essays by schoolchildren. These lend intimacy to his portrait of a citizenry engaged in the continuous process of formulating its own views of right and wrong as it debates issues from rearmament to environmentalism.

I Heard Her Call My Name

In early 2021, the writer Lucy Sante sent an e-mail to her closest friends. Its subject was “A Bombshell,” which Sante later joked was an unintentional pun. In the text she attached, she explained that at the age of sixty-six she was accepting her long-suppressed identity as a transgender woman. This announcement, which runs several pages, opens Sante’s memoir of transition, “ I Heard Her Call My Name ,” in which she attempts to understand the process by which she ignored her own longings for decades. In her young adulthood, she writes, her longing to live as a woman was closer to the surface but got buried as she grew older, and suppressed fantasies she told herself were “perversions.” The danger of revelation was particularly acute for Sante in areas where a person longs to be most open: in intimate relationships, in sexuality, in drug use. After losing friends to AIDS and addiction, and the downtown New York she loved to corporate interests, she married multiple times, had a child, wrote, and taught—but, she says, “I spent middle age behind a wall.” Her difficulty accepting her gender was compounded by a sense that it was too late in life to indulge in what she still thought of as fantasies. “I’m lucky to have survived my own repression,” Sante concludes. Now, she says, “I am the person I feared most of my life. I have, as they say, gone there.”

Bitter Water Opera

Gia, the narrator of this début novella, is disenchanted with the modern world. She’s a film scholar whose long-term relationship is crumbling; in the rubble, she finds a new obsession, a dancer and recluse named Marta, who retreated to the desert in order to perform on her own terms, and who mysteriously appears after Gia writes to her. Of Marta, Gia thinks, “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.” With Marta’s help, Gia can find transcendence in everyday life again—in “miry water” and “wiry greenery, coiling”; in a beetle’s “thin, metallic sounds”; even in the taste of “strawberry-flavored melatonin.” Polek elegantly fashions an ode to small and privately felt moments of beauty, and to art’s capacity to reach through time.

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution

Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, was an adult-movie actress turned feminist-porn pioneer. Few have tried with as much ardent, self-serious determination to remake the industry from the inside. With her production company, Femme, Royalle sought to make hardcore movies that would appeal to women and could be watched by couples. She was intent on “letting men see what many women actually want in bed.” In this assiduously researched, elegantly written new biography, the historian Jane Kamensky mines the depths of Royalle’s personal archive, at the core of which were the diaries she had kept almost continuously from the age of twelve. (There were also photos, videos, clippings, costumes, and correspondence.) Kamensky makes a strong case for her subject’s story as both unique and representative. Royalle, she writes, “was a product of the sexual revolution, her persona made possible, if not inevitable, by the era’s upheavals in demography, law, technology, and ideology.”

In this thoughtful and thorough new book, Ryback, a historian, has assembled an intensely specific chronicle of a single year: 1932. He details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to Adolf Hitler, someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. The book is a mordant accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers, from the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg to General Kurt von Schleicher, two of many characters who schemed to use him as a stalking horse for their own ambitions. Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a keen sense for the black comedy of the period as he makes clear that Hitler didn’t seize power; he was given it.

This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka, who ruled a vast swath of the Indian subcontinent in the third century B.C., from the one of legend. Ashoka is commonly described as “the Buddhist ruler of India,” but in Olivelle’s rendering he is a ruler “who happened to be a Buddhist,” and whose devoutness was only a single aspect of a “unique and unprecedented” system of governance. Ashoka sought to unite a religiously diverse, polyglot people; his most radical innovation, Olivelle shows, was the “dharma community,” a top-down effort to give his subjects “a sense of belonging to the same moral empire.”

Pax Economica

A comprehensive account of the modern free-trade movement and a timely act of historical reclamation, this book illuminates the forgotten legacy of left-wing advocacy for liberalized markets. Palen, a historian, reveals the movement’s origins to be internationalist and cosmopolitan, led by socialists, pacifists, and feminists, who viewed expanded trade as the only practical way to achieve lasting peace in a newly globalized world. This fresh perspective complicates contemporary political archetypes of neoliberal free marketeers and “Made in America” populists, adding valuable context to our often overly simplistic economic discourse.

Here in Avalon

Dreams of escaping the mundane animate this fairy-tale-inflected thriller set in contemporary New York. The novel’s action centers on Cecilia, a flighty “seeker” whose mercurial bent leads her to abandon a new marriage, ditch her sister, Rose, and take up with a cultish, seafaring cabaret troupe that recruits lonely souls with the promise “Another life is possible.” Soon, Rose embarks on a mission to find Cecilia, blowing up her own relationship and career to follow her sister into a world of “time travelers” who tell “elegantly anachronistic riddles,” lionize unrequited love, and live to “preserve the magic.” Exploring the bond between the markedly different siblings, Burton examines their life styles—the bourgeois and the bohemian, the materialistic and the artistic—through a whimsical lens.

The Age of Revolutions

Perl-Rosenthal, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, offers what he calls an “anti-exceptionalist history of the age of revolution.” In his view, there is an alternative way to understand why the great transatlantic revolutions that straddled the turn of the nineteenth century—in the United States, France, Haiti, and Latin America—are often said to have “failed.” The degree to which these revolutions met (or did not meet) their egalitarian aims should be understood in the light of processes that took a full generation to unfold. Perl-Rosenthal’s book, which follows several members of what he calls the first generation of “gentlemen revolutionaries,” is a persuasive and inspired contribution to perennial historical debates. Was the American Revolution a project of radical egalitarianism, or was it simply a transfer of élite power? Was the French Revolution stymied by external forces of reaction, or was it fundamentally illiberal to begin with? He writes that we should not limit our gaze to “supposedly sharp turning points and dramatic transformations” but instead narrate the past as a series of successive and intertwined campaigns to improve our estate.

Help Wanted

Adelle Waldman is an expert at marshalling small details to conjure a particular milieu. Her first novel, “ The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. ,” caught the mores and signifiers of literary Brooklyn circa 2013 with the unflinching precision of a tattoo artist. In “ Help Wanted ,” her second novel, she uses detailed descriptions to animate the daily lives of a group of employees at Town Square, a superstore in the Hudson Valley. As her characters move through their routines, Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive. That the prose doesn’t soar is the point: thick with explication, the sentences are sandbags, loaded onto the page to drive home the cumulative weight of work. Town Square emerges as a complex social milieu with its own rules, and its own consequential choices. At the beginning of the book, a team chart occupies the space where readers of nineteenth-century novels might expect to see a family tree. It is simultaneously a joke, a homage, and a provocation for our unequal age: To what extent has work really usurped ancestry as a shaping force in people’s lives?

Wild Houses

In the opening chapter of this short, deftly written novel, two roughnecks in the employ of an Irish drug dealer abduct a teen-age boy named Doll English, hoping to extract repayment of a debt owed by Doll’s older brother. Doll is held at a remote safe house owned by a man who is mourning his deceased mother, while Doll’s girlfriend frantically searches for him. The kidnapping serves as a binding device, bringing together a small, carefully drawn cast of characters under unusual, high-pressure circumstances. The release of that pressure is sometimes violent, but it is also revelatory: Barrett is less concerned with suspense than with the ways in which people negotiate “that razor-thin border separating the possible from the actual.”

No Judgment

In “ No Judgment ,” Lauren Oyler, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker , collects a series of spry, wide-ranging essays that take on gossip, Goodreads, autofiction, Berlin, and more. Her essay on anxiety was excerpted on newyorker.com .

The Road from Belhaven

This novel follows Lizzie Craig, a young clairvoyant who lives on a farm with her grandparents in nineteenth-century Scotland. At first, Lizzie prays to be free of her “pictures,” as she foretells traumatic incidents that she has no power to change, but later she tries to harness her talent to see her own future. When Lizzie becomes enraptured by a young man from Glasgow, her grandmother warns that Lizzie’s choice of partner could alter her “road in life,” and Lizzie’s navigation of the boundary between girlhood and adulthood becomes more urgent. Inspired by the author’s mother, the novel gracefully evokes the magic and mystery of the rural world and the vitality and harshness of city life.

The Freaks Came Out to Write

In the opening pages of Romano’s raucous oral history of the  Village Voice , Howard Blum, a former staff writer, declares the paper “a precursor to the internet.” The Voice was founded in 1955, when the persistence of silence and constraint were more plausibly imagined than a world awash in personal truths; in its coverage of everything from City Hall to CBGB to the odd foreign revolution, the _Voice _demonstrated a radical embrace of the subjective, of lived experience over expertise. In Romano’s book, writers dish on their favorite editors, the paper’s peak era, and when and why it all seemed to go wrong. The story unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts.

The person exclaiming “martyr” in Kaveh Akbar’s novel “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a poet and former alcoholic, who was also formerly addicted to drugs. Cyrus is in his late twenties. He’s anguished and ardent about the world and his place in it, and recovery has left him newly and painfully obsessed with his deficiencies. Desperate for purpose, he fixates on the idea of a death that retroactively splashes meaning back onto a life. He starts to collect stories about historical martyrs, such as Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc, for a book project, a suite of “elegies for people I’ve never met.” Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom arises partly from the circumstances of his parents’ deaths. His mother, Roya, was a passenger on an Iranian plane that the United States Navy mistakenly shot out of the sky—an event based on the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. In “Martyr!,” Cyrus contrasts his mother’s humanity with the statistic that she became in the U.S. Her fate was “actuarial,” he says, “a rounding error.” Although Akbar, an acclaimed Iranian American poet, has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom, and how it might be made to matter more.

Errand into the Maze

This astute biography, by a veteran  Village Voice  critic, traces the long career of Martha Graham, a choreographer who became one of the major figures of twentieth-century modernism. Born in 1894 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Graham came of age in an era when Americans mainly thought of dance as entertainment, a conception that she helped change through such groundbreaking pieces as “Primitive Mysteries” and “Appalachian Spring.” While detailing many of Graham’s romantic and artistic collaborations, Jowitt focusses on how Graham approached her work—as a performer, a choreographer, and a teacher—with a philosophical rigor that expanded the expressive possibilities of movement and established a uniquely American idiom.

A Map of Future Ruins

In 2020, a fire broke out at a refugee camp in the town of Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, displacing thousands. In this finely woven meditation on “belonging, exclusion, and whiteness,” Markham, a Greek American journalist, travels to Greece to investigate the fire and its aftermath, including the conviction of six young Afghan asylum seekers. Her thoughts on the case—she ultimately finds it to be specious—mingle with gleanings from visits to locales central to her family’s history. “Every map is the product of a cartographer with allegiances,” she writes, eventually concluding that confronting the contemporary migration system’s injustices requires critically evaluating migrations of the past and the historical narratives about them.

Goodbye Russia

This biography of Sergei Rachmaninoff focusses on the quarter century that he spent in exile in the United States, after the Russian Revolution, when he established himself across the West as a highly sought-after concert pianist. In place of extensive compositional analyses (during this time, the composer wrote only six new pieces), Maddocks offers a character study punctuated by colorful source material, including acerbic diary entries by Prokofiev, which betray both envy of and affection for his competitor. Maddocks notes such idiosyncrasies as Rachmaninoff’s infatuation with fast cars, but she also captures his sense of otherness; he never became fluent in English, and his yearning for a lost Russia shadowed his monumental success.

The Fetishist

The blooming and dissolution of a romance forms the core of this wistful, often funny, posthumously published novel. “Once Asian, never again Caucasian,” jokes Alma, a Korean American concert cellist, to Daniel, a white violinist, the first night they sleep together. Eventually, Alma will break off their engagement after discovering that Daniel, the book’s titular fetishist, has been having an affair with another Asian American woman. When that woman dies by suicide, her daughter seeks revenge. The resulting series of escalating high jinks, which includes the use of blowfish poison, verges on the farcical, but the novel’s major chord is one of rueful longing.

The Survivors of the Clotilda

The last known slave ship to reach U.S. soil, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860, more than fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade was federally outlawed. This history details the lives of the people it carried, from their kidnappings in West Africa to their deaths in the twentieth century. Durkin, a scholar of slavery and the African diaspora, traces them to communities in Alabama established by the formerly enslaved, such as Africatown and Gee’s Bend, and finds in their stories antecedents for the Harlem Renaissance and the civil-rights movement. Amid descriptions of child trafficking, sexual abuse, and racial violence, Durkin also celebrates the resilience and resistance of the Clotilda’s survivors. “Their lives were so much richer than the countless crimes committed against them,” she writes.

This episodic, philosophical novel orbits a group of loosely connected characters living between 1917 and 2025. It begins in France, during the First World War, with a British soldier lying on the ground after an explosion. We follow him home to North Yorkshire, where he works as a portrait photographer in whose images spirits begin to appear. Later, we meet his granddaughter, who provides medical care in war zones. Throughout, characters ponder the boundaries between the physical and the ineffable, the mortal and the spiritual. Sometimes they reach epigrammatic epiphanies, as when one realizes that “everything she had thought of as loss was something found.”

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters

Should one wish to tackle the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, there is no denying that his collected works loom like a fortress in your path. Even the recent Oxford edition of his work, which omits great swathes of it, runs to some eleven hundred pages; his letters and journals fill thirteen volumes in all. Luckily, there is an alternative: Stauffer’s compact biography, which is elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from Byron’s correspondence. Each letter affords Stauffer a chance to ruminate on whatever facet of the poet’s history and character happened to be glittering most brightly at the time, from his devotion to the cause of Greek independence in the fight against Ottoman rule to the libertinism for which he is famed. We are presented, for instance, with a jammed and breathless letter almost three thousand words long centered on a tempestuous baker’s wife with whom Byron had been involved in Venice. Stauffer comments, “One gets the sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with more juicy details, except he runs out of room.”

Remembering Peasants

In this elegiac history, Joyce presents a painstaking account of a way of life to which, until recently, the vast majority of humanity was bound. Delving into the rhythms and rituals of peasant existence, Joyce shows how different our land-working ancestors were from us in their understanding of time, nature, and the body. “We have bodies, which we carry about in our minds, whereas they  were  their bodies,” he writes. The relative absence of peasants from the historical record, and the blinding speed with which they seem to have disappeared, prompt a moving final essay on the urgency of preserving our collective past. “Almost all of us are in one way or another the children of peasants,” Joyce writes. “If we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves.”

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers rose to fame when she was only twenty-three, after her début novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” wowed critics, who crowned her Faulkner’s successor. Precocity would both define and stifle her career. In her work, she probed the twilit zone between adolescence and adulthood, when impulse reigns. In her life, she often acted the child herself, relying on friends and family members to cook her meals, pour her drinks, listen to her self-flattery, and care for her through a series of illnesses. Dearborn’s biography is a marvel: admiring of the fiction and its startling imagination, but clear-eyed about how McCullers’s behavior hurt her work, herself, and those who loved her. In one sense, the same indulgent atmosphere that stunted her growth kept the link to late childhood alive.

In Ascension

In this capacious, broody work of speculative fiction, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, a Dutch microbiologist who had a turbulent childhood joins expeditions to the center of the earth and to the far reaches of space: first to a hydrothermal vent deep in the Atlantic Ocean, then to the rim of the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy objects surrounding our solar system. As her narration toggles between chronicles of her voyages and reflections on her personal life, each of these “two zones” is revealed to be a wonder of inscrutability. “So many times I had identified errors,” she thinks, “stemming from the original mistake of . . . predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.”

Smoke and Ashes

A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, each of which enhanced its potency in different ways—but he dwells on its use by Western colonizers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British began a campaign to get the Chinese population hooked on opium produced in India, in the hope of correcting a trade imbalance. Ghosh details the illegal business that arose as a result—opium imports were banned in China—ultimately arguing that the British “racket” was “utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.”

The Riddles of the Sphinx

Fusing original historical research and memoir, this book is at once a feminist history of the crossword puzzle and an account of the author’s anorexia. Shechtman began to suffer from an eating disorder at the same time she became an avid constructor of crosswords; interrogating both through the lenses of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, she comes to see them as attempts at “reaching for sublimity—to become a boundless mind, to defeat matter.” Along the way, she unearths the legacies of the women—such as the New York Times’ first crossword editor—who shaped the crossword into the lively art form it is now. Two portions of the book were published on newyorker.com: one in the form of a memoir about the relationship between disordered eating and crossword construction, and another as an essay about how the field of crossword construction came to be dominated by men.

Reading Genesis

Robinson, a novelist, is in many ways an ideal reader of Genesis and its rich human stories: Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright, or the long tale of Joseph and his envious brothers. Genesis was written by human beings, she begins; this needn’t be a concession, as the Bible itself names the authorship of many of its books. The episodes that follow God’s creation of the world dramatize how “a flawed and alienated creature at the center of it all” made a mess of things, Robinson writes. As she sorts through the Genesis stories, Robinson notes how often God chooses the younger son over the natural heir: Abel over Cain, Joseph over his brothers—or the prodigal over the righteous—and Jacob, with his ignoble behavior, over Esau. She isn’t especially interested in the historical actuality of events like the expulsion from Eden, the flood, or the Tower of Babel, considering them closer to a set of allegories about the nature of reality. In Robinson’s reading, the Bible is “a meditation on the problem of evil,” constantly trying to reconcile the darker sides of humanity with God’s goodness, and the original goodness of being.

Fourteen Days

This round-robin novel was written by many illustrious hands—including Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Ishmael Reed, and Meg Wolitzer—all left cozily anonymous in the linked storytelling. With a wink at Boccaccio’s Florentine narrators, filling their time with stories as a plague rages, these modern storytellers gather amid the COVID pandemic, on the roof of a run-down building on the Lower East Side. Each storyteller is identified by a single signifier—Eurovision, the Lady with the Rings—and the stories that the speakers unwind leap wildly about. An apron sewn in a suburban home-economics class becomes the subject of one narrative. Another storyteller recalls an art appraiser’s trip to the country and a scarring revelation about the wealthy collectors he is visiting: they keep the lid of their dead son’s coffin visible as a memento of their pain. The evasion of the central subject, the turn to subtext over text, the backward blessing of being “off the news”—all this rings true to the time, when symbolic experience overlayed all the other kinds.

This chronicle of our planet’s “silvery sister” begins with the explosive interaction, four and a half billion years ago, that split the moon from the Earth, and eventually encompasses the climatic chaos that is likely to ensue when it ultimately escapes our gravitational pull. Boyle inventories the ways in which the moon’s presence affects life on Earth—influencing menstrual cycles, dictating the timing of D Day—and how humans’ conception of it has evolved, changing from a deity to the basis for an astronomical calendar to a natural-resource bank. Throughout, the author orbits a central idea: that understanding the science and the history of the moon may help to unlock mysteries elsewhere in the universe.

In Klinenberg’s excellent book, we are given both micro-incident—closely reported scenes from the lives of representative New Yorkers struggling through the plague year—and macro-comment: cross-cultural, overarching chapters assess broader social forces. We meet, among others, an elementary-school principal and a Staten Island bar owner who exemplify the local experience of the pandemic; we’re also told of the history, complicated medical evaluation, and cultural consequences of such things as social distancing and masking. We meet many people who make convincing case studies because of the very contradictions of their experience. Sophia Zayas, a community organizer in the Bronx who worked “like a soldier on the front lines,” was nonetheless resistant to getting vaccinated, a decision that caused her, and her family, considerable suffering. Klinenberg sorts through her surprising mix of motives with a delicate feeling for the way that community folk wisdom—can the vaccines be trusted?—clashed with her trained public-service sensibility. Throughout his narrative, his engrossing mixture of closeup witness and broad-view sociology calls to mind the late Howard S. Becker’s insistence that the best sociology is always, in the first instance, wide-angle reporting.

Bitter Crop

This ambitious biography of the jazz singer Billie Holiday uses 1959, the tumultuous final year of her life, as a prism through which to view her career. Drawing its title from “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that was Holiday’s best-selling recording, the book focusses on her experiences of racism and exploitation, and on her anxiety about government surveillance. In tracing Holiday’s longtime drug and alcohol use, which damaged her health and led to her spending nearly a year in prison for narcotics possession, Alexander also delves into the unwarranted sensationalism with which the press often covered these matters at the time. Holiday died at forty-four. Toward the end, she was frail—at one point weighing only ninety-nine pounds—but, as one concertgoer noted, “She still had her voice.”

To Be a Jew Today

Noah Feldman, a polymath and public intellectual at Harvard Law School, opens his new book, “To Be a Jew Today,” with two questions: “What’s the point of being a Jew? And, really, aside from Jews, who cares?” Feldman spends the first third of the book reviewing the major strains of contemporary Jewish belief: Traditionalists, for example, for whom the study of Torah is self-justifying; “Godless Jews,” who take pride in Jewish accomplishment and kvetching without much else. For Feldman, what’s characteristically Jewish about these camps is their ongoing struggle—with God, with Torah, with the rabbis, with each other—to determine for themselves the parameters of an authentically Jewish life. Jews are people who argue, ideally with quotes from sources, about what it means to be Jewish. For Feldman, the establishment of Israel has become the metanarrative that binds many contemporary Jews together. It has also turned Jews away from struggle and toward dogmatism. Feldman asks us to see criticism of the country as a deep expression of one’s relationship to tradition, and perhaps even an inevitable one. He aspires to return the notion of diaspora to the center of the tradition—to propose that Jewish life can be more vigorous, more sustainable, and more Jewish when it pitches its tents on the periphery.

Life on Earth

“If we are fractured / we are fractured / like stars / bred to shine / in every direction,” begins this small marvel of a poetry collection. Laux’s deft, muscular verse illuminates the sharp facets of everyday existence, rendering humble things—Bisquick, a sewing machine, waitressing, watching a neighbor look at porn—into opportunities to project memory and imagination. Beautifully constructed exercises in tender yet fierce attention, these poems bear witness to deaths in the family, to climate destruction, and to the ravages of U.S. history, even as they insist on intimacy and wonder.

The Adversary

An all-consuming, mutually destructive sibling rivalry propels this vibrant historical novel, set in a provincial port in nineteenth-century Newfoundland—“the backwoods of a backwards colony.” The antagonists are the inheritor of the largest business in the region and his older sister, who, through marriage, takes control of a competing enterprise. Amid their attempts to undermine and overtake each other, the community around them suffers “a spiralling accretion of chaos”: murder, pandemics, a cataclysmic storm, an attack by privateers, and a riot. By turns bawdy, violent, comic, and gruesome, Crummey’s novel presents a bleak portrait of colonial life and a potent rendering of the ways in which the “vicious, hateful helplessness” of a grudge can corrupt everything it touches.

In this memoir, two life-altering events—the birth of a daughter and the end of a marriage—are intertwined. When Jamison meets her ex-husband, a fellow-writer whom she calls C, she is newly thirty; he is a widower more than ten years older. At the time, she writes, “I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.” As the book progresses, that ambition is realized—not just through the arrival of their child but also by transformations in her own being that are precipitated by her marriage and its eventual dissolution. Throughout, Jamison dwells on marital competitiveness, working motherhood, and the inheritances of love. The book was excerpted in the magazine.

This sweeping biography represents the first effort at a comprehensive account of the life of the civil-rights icon John Lewis. Lewis’s “almost surreal trajectory” begins with his childhood in a “static rural society seemingly impervious to change.” Arsenault frames what followed in terms of Lewis’s attempt to cultivate the spirit of “Beloved Community”—a term, coined by the theologian Josiah Royce, for a community “based on love.” As a boy, Lewis disapproved of the vengeful sermons at his home-town church; as a youthful protest leader, he adhered to nonviolence, even while being assaulted by bigots; in Congress, he rose above a culture of self-promotion and petty rivalries. Lewis, in Arsenault’s account, was unfailingly modest: watching a documentary about his life, he was “embarrassed by its hagiographical portrayal.”

Alphabetical Diaries

This unconventional text comprises diary-entry excerpts that are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their first letters. The sections derive their meaning not from chronology but from unexpected juxtapositions: “Dream of me yelling at my mother,  nothing I did was ever good enough for you!  Dresden. Drinking a lot.” The text is clotted with provocative rhetorical questions: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp in the front and the other in the back?” Rich with intimacies and disclosures, these fragments show an artist searching for the right way to arrange her life.

Twilight Territory

Set during the Japanese occupation of Indochina and its bloody aftermath, this novel of war is nimbly embroidered with a marriage story. In 1942, a Japanese major who is posted to the fishing town of Phan Thiet falls for a Viet shopkeeper when he witnesses her excoriating a corrupt official. The shopkeeper, despite her wariness of being viewed as a sympathizer, accedes to a courtship with the major, recognizing their shared “language of loss and loneliness,” and the two eventually marry. Soon, the major’s involvement with the resistance imperils his family, but his wife remains resolute, having long understood fate to be a force as pitiless as war: “Destiny was imprinted deeply. She saw it the way a river sensed the distant sea.”

To the Letter: Poems

In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details: “that half-drunk cup of tea, the mirror / filled up with want, the strand of hair curling toward / the drain like the Silk Road through the Karakum / known as Tartary, the wall that defends the void.”

The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays

In these twenty-four essays, Acocella, a much loved staff writer from 1995 until her death, earlier this year, brings her inimitable verve to subjects as varied as Andy Warhol, swearing, the destruction of Pompeii, and Elena Ferrante. Throughout, she illuminates the ways in which her subjects’ personal lives, and the “moral experience” they came to encompass, fused with their artistic sensibilities. In an essay about Francis Bacon, the Irish-born English painter best known for his menacing paintings of human figures, she writes, “He wanted to make us bleed, and in order to do so, he had to show us the thing that bleeds, the body.” Twenty-two of the essays were originally written for the magazine.

For Buruma, a writer and historian, and a former editor of The New York Review of Books , the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s dedication to freedom of thought makes him a thinker for our moment. In this short biography, he highlights how Spinoza’s radical conjectures repeatedly put him at odds with religious and secular authorities. As a young man, he was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his heretical views on God and the Bible. When his book “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” was published, in 1670, its views on religion—specifically, the benefits of “allowing every man to think what he likes, and say what he thinks”—were so uncompromising that both author and publisher had to remain anonymous. Buruma observes that “intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue, even in countries, such as the United States, that pride themselves on being uniquely free.” In calling Spinoza a “messiah,” Buruma follows Heinrich Heine, the nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, who compared the philosopher to “his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, he suffered for his teachings. Like him, he wore the crown of thorns.”

If Love Could Kill

From the Furies to “Kill Bill,” the figure of the avenging woman, evening the scales, has long entranced the public. But, as Anna Motz shows in this wrenching study, many women who turn to violence are not hurting their abusers, though often they have endured terrible abuse. They tend to hurt the people closest to them: their partners, their children, or themselves. Motz, a forensic psychotherapist, presents the stories of ten patients, managing the conflict between her feminist beliefs and the ghastly facts of the women’s crimes. Although she’s interested in the lore of female vengeance, she punctures its appeal. Such violence may look like an expression of agency, but it is the opposite, a reaction and a repetition.

Filterworld

The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka chronicles the homogenization of digital culture and the quest to cultivate one’s own taste in an increasingly automated online world. An excerpt from the book appeared on newyorker.com, in the form of an essay on coming of age at the dawn of the social Internet.

Melancholy Wedgwood

In this unorthodox history, Moon, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, casts aside the traditional, heroic portrait of the English ceramicist and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood and envisions the potter as a symbol of Britain’s post-colonial melancholia. Touching lightly on the well-trodden terrain of Wedgwood’s biography, Moon focusses on the story’s “leftovers,” among them the amputation of Wedgwood’s leg; his wayward son, Tom; the figure of the Black man in his famous antislavery medallion; and the overworked laborers in his factory. Moon’s overarching thesis—that destructiveness is inherent in colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism—is nothing groundbreaking, but her mode of attack, at once bold and surreptitious, succeeds in challenging the established, too-cozy narrative about her subject.

The Taft Court

“Taft’s presidential perspective forever changed both the role of the chief justice and the institution of the Court,” Post argues in his landmark two-volume study. The book is an attempt to rescue the Taft years from oblivion, since, as Post points out, most of its jurisprudence had been “utterly effaced” within a decade of Taft’s death. But, if John Marshall’s Chief Justiceship established what the Court would be in the nineteenth century, Taft’s established what it would be in the twentieth, and even the twenty-first. Post, a professor of constitutional law who has a Ph.D. in American Civilization, searches for the origins of the Court’s current divisions. His book is rich with close readings of cases that rely on sources scarcely ever used before and benefits from deep and fruitful quantitative analysis absent in most studies of the Court. It restores the nineteen-twenties as a turning point in the Court’s history.

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South. If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

Wrong Norma

In a new collection of poems, short prose pieces, and even visual art, Carson explores various ideas and subjects, including Joseph Conrad, the act of swimming, foxes, Roget’s Thesaurus, the New Testament, and white bread. No matter the form, her language is what Alice Munro called “marvellously disturbing”—elliptical, evocative, electric with meaning. Several pieces, including “ 1 = 1 ,” appeared first in The New Yorker .

You Dreamed of Empires

This incantatory novel takes place in 1519, on the day when Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors arrived at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. As they await an audience with the mercurial, mushroom-addled emperor, Moctezuma, the conquistadors navigate his labyrinthine palace, stumble upon sacrificial temples, and tend to their horses, all the while wondering if they are truly guests or, in fact, prisoners. Enrigue conjures both court intrigue and city life with grace. In metafictional flashes to present-day Mexico City, which sits atop Tenochtitlan’s ruins, and a startling counter-historical turn, the novel becomes a meditation on the early colonizers, their legacy, and the culture that they subsumed.

You Glow in the Dark

The short stories of Colanzi, a Bolivian writer, blend horror, fantasy, reporting, and history. One of the stories, “The Narrow Way,” first appeared in the magazine.

Why We Read

In this charming collection of essays, Reed digs into the many pleasures of reading, interweaving poignant and amusing stories from her life as a bibliophile and teacher to advocate for the many joys of a life spent between the pages. This piece was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Come and Get It

Agatha Paul, the narrator of this fizzy campus novel, is the acclaimed author of a book on “physical mourning.” During a visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas, she intends to conduct research on weddings. Yet the subject prickles—she is still reeling from a painful separation—and she soon pivots to a new topic: “How students navigate money.” Paul herself quickly becomes an object of fascination for many of the students, and the stakes are raised when one of them offers Paul the use of her room to eavesdrop on conversations between the undergraduates. Almost on a whim, Paul accepts, and small transgressions soon give way to larger ones.

This handsomely produced anthology of twin representations depicts vaudeville performers, subjects of torture, and the blue dresses with the puffed sleeves worn by the “Shining” twins. Viney collaborates with his identical twin, who contributes a foreword. Many of the book’s images of twins tend to show them shoulder to shoulder, facing the viewer, presenting themselves for our inspection. Only a handful show twins looking at each other. And how different those tender images of mutual regard feel—they lack the charge of the conventional twin pose, underscoring the tension Viney remarks between the actual “mundane” nature of being a twin and the titillated fascination it inspires. He invites readers to contemplate, and to learn from, the fractal nature of twin identity.

This novel follows a sixteen-year-old-girl named Margaret and her attempts to reckon with the death of her best friend in childhood, for which she was partly responsible. In time, Margaret’s role in the tragedy was relegated to rumor; when she confessed, her mother told her, “Never repeat that awful lie again.” Now, in adolescence, Margaret attempts to document the incident honestly, accompanied by Poor Deer, the physical embodiment of her guilt, who intervenes whenever Margaret begins to gloss over the truth. The author renders the four-year-old Margaret’s inner life with sensitive complexity, depicting an alert child logic that defies adults’ view of her as slow and unfeeling. In the present day, the novel considers whether its narrator’s tendency to reimagine the past might be repurposed to envision her future.

Disillusioned

This intrepid inquiry into the unfulfilled promise of America’s suburbs posits that a “deep-seated history of white control, racial exclusion, and systematic forgetting” has poisoned the great postwar residential experiment. It anatomizes a geographically scattered handful of failing public schools, incorporating the author’s conversations with five affected families. Herold, a white journalist raised in Penn Hills, a Pittsburgh suburb, peels back layers of structural racism, granting that “the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.”

The narrator of this raw-nerved and plangent novel, a fiction writer who goes unnamed, addresses much of the book to her drug-addicted and intermittently violent adolescent daughter. Woven throughout her ruminations on her daughter’s struggles are the writer’s cascading reminiscences of her own fragmented childhood and the romance she rekindled with a married ex-lover when her daughter was young. Set in and around a muted London, the novel is a sustained meditation on the trials of family, marriage, and creativity. Writing is an act “of insane self-belief,” the narrator says. “The moment you listen to the opinions of others . . . you risk breaking the spell and, if you’re not careful, sanity creeps in.”

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

Blitzer weaves together a series of deeply personal portraits to trace the history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a complicated tale, spanning the lives of multiple generations of migrants and lawmakers, in both Central America and Washington, D.C. Blitzer doesn’t pretend to offer easy policy solutions; instead, he devotedly and eloquently documents the undeniable cause of what has become a regional quagmire: the individual right and unfailing will to survive. The book was excerpted on newyorker.com.

Tripping on Utopia

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman’s televised trip seem less incongruous than it might have been, if no less fascinating. He has an eye for the telling detail, and a gift for introducing even walk-on characters with brio. In Breen’s telling, the buttoned-down nineteen-fifties, not the freewheeling nineteen-sixties, brought together the ingredients for the first large-scale cultural experiment with consciousness-expanding substances. He depicts a rich and partly forgotten chapter before the hippie movement and before the war on drugs, encompassing not only the now notorious C.I.A. research into mind-altering drugs but also a lighter, brighter, more public dimension of better living through chemistry. “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They ended it.”

Gibson, a professor of Renaissance and magical literature at the University of Exeter, has written eight books on the subject of witches. In her latest, she traverses seven centuries and several continents. There’s the trial of a Sámi woman, Kari, in seventeenth-century Finnmark; of a young religious zealot named Marie-Catherine Cadière, in eighteenth-century France; and of a twentieth-century politician, Bereng Lerotholi, in Basutoland, in present-day Lesotho. The experiences of the accused women (and a few accused men) are foregrounded, through novelistic descriptions of their lives before and after their persecution. The inevitable charisma of villainy makes the accusers vivid as well. But the most interesting character in the book is also its through line: the trial. Depicting a wide variety of legal codes and procedures, from poisonings and drownings to modern imprisonment, Gibson provides a robust examination of the judicial systems in which witch-hunting has thrived—and those in which, bit by bit, it has been stopped.

Forgottenness

This thoughtful novel connects two characters separated by a century: a present-day Ukrainian writer and the twentieth-century Polish Ukrainian nationalist Viacheslav Lypynskyi. In one thread, Maljartschuk plumbs Lypynskyi’s incendiary biography: born a Polish aristocrat, he served as a diplomat for the nascent Ukrainian state before living in exile when the Soviets took over. In another, the contemporary writer revisits her failed love affairs, and her grandparents’ experiences in the famine of 1932-33. As Maljartschuk makes the characters’ common history apparent, she compares it to a blue whale consuming plankton, “milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance.”

Behind You Is the Sea

Composed of linked stories, this novel explores the lives of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. At a young man’s wedding to a white woman, his father agonizes over the gradual loss of the family’s cultural identity. A student finds that her objections to her high school’s production of “Aladdin” fall on willfully deaf ears. Elsewhere, girls and women are shunned for getting pregnant, or for being unable to bear children. Darraj writes with great emotional resonance about hope and disappointment. “His mouth opens in an O, like America has shocked him at last,” a girl says of her Palestinian-born father’s dying breath. “It’s like he finally understood he was never meant to win here.”

This hypnotic novella, written in the nineteen-sixties but appearing only now in the U.S., takes place after a nuclear cataclysm, and is narrated by a man living in a luxury resort that has been converted into a sanctuary for the rich. “We bought the commodity called survival,” he dryly notes, but, as the story unfolds and refugees stricken by radiation sickness pour in, the delusional nature of that notion becomes clear. Despite its brevity, the book is richly textured with insights about how money shapes one’s conception of safety, and how grasping the interconnectedness of the physical world is also to grasp one’s mortality. A resort guest imagines the radiation as light that “streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones . . . suddenly to reveal the innermost, vulnerable marrow.”

Who Owns This Sentence?

Virtually every song that Bruce Springsteen has ever written is now owned by Sony, which is reported to have paid five hundred and fifty million dollars for the catalogue. For Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, the story of Sony’s big Springsteen buy epitomizes a troubling trend: the rights to a vast amount of created material—music, movies, books, art, games, computer software, scholarly articles, just about any cultural product people will pay to consume—are increasingly owned by a small number of large corporations and are not due to expire for a long time. The problem, they write, is that corporate control of cultural capital robs the commons. While warning against the overreach of contemporary copyright law, this lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely book also raises the alarm about the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence, a technology that threatens to bring the whole legal structure of copyright down.

American Zion

Park, a historian, traces Mormonism from its inception in New York, in 1830, to its struggle amid persecution in the mid-nineteenth century, to its present status as a global empire of more than seventeen million adherents. He posits that changes in the decade of Mormonism’s emergence—such as the vibrant growth of the American marketplace—eliminated élite education as a requirement for divine calling, creating an opportunity for a man like Joseph Smith, Jr., to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout, Park delves into Mormon history and lore to produce a picture of the institution as one that is both marginalized and marginalizing.

In April of 1984, a demonstration outside the Libyan Embassy in St. James’s Square, in London, brought supporters of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his “popular revolution” up against protesters in opposition. The demonstration had barely begun when shots were fired from the Embassy’s windows. Eleven protesters were injured, and a policewoman was killed: all the spokes of Matar’s lingering, melancholy new novel connect to this transforming event. “My Friends” is narrated by a Libyan exile named Khaled Abd al Hady, who has lived in London for thirty-two years. One evening, in 2016, Khaled decides to walk home from St. Pancras station, where he has seen off an old friend who is heading for Paris, and he is drawn to return to the square because he was one of the demonstrators outside the Embassy back in 1984, alongside two Libyan men who would become his closest friends. As he walks, Khaled reprises the history of their intense triangular friendship, the undulations of their lives, and the shape and weight of their exile. Khaled himself maintains a mysterious inertia that turns Matar’s narrative into a deep and detailed exploration not so much of abandonment as of self-abandonment: the story of a man split in two, one who cannot quite tell the story that would make the parts cohere again.

Unshrinking

Fatphobia, as defined by the author of this polemic, a Cornell philosophy professor, is a “set of false beliefs and inflated theories” about fat people which inform both health care and culture at large. Manne’s argument draws on personal experiences—she relates having gone on drastic diets and engaging in “dangerous, exploitative” relationships as a teen-ager—and on trenchant analyses of the ways in which fatness has been regarded throughout history. She proposes, for instance, that hatred of fatness is a consequence of racist ideas embedded in American culture in the era of slavery. Manne identifies “beauty and diet culture” as an additional culprit, and argues, “We are wronged bodies, not wrong ones.”

The Rebel’s Clinic

Frantz Fanon, the biographical subject of Shatz’s striking new book, saw the end of empire as a wrenching psychological event. Looking back on his Francophilic upbringing in Martinique, Fanon recognized an inferiority complex induced by empire. He saw worse when he took a post in a hospital in Algeria, in 1953. Unlike Martinique, Algeria had recently been scarred by violence, most notably in 1945, when, after a clash with nationalists, the French massacred thousands of Algerians. Individual traumas could be handled clinically, but what about societal ones? Fanon believed that the act of defying empire could cure Algerian neuroses. Shatz describes Fanon’s extremism as the “zeal of a convert”—just as Fanon spoke better French than the French, he became, as a revolutionary, “more Algerian than the Algerians.”

Erotic Vagrancy

The idea of the celebrity couple really began with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a larger-than-life pairing whose every diamond and every dispute would become the subject of insatiable public interest. “Biography is historical fiction,” Lewis, the author of several biographies that read like novels of manners, writes. In the end, the saga of Taylor and Burton is about extra-human obsession. During the Cold War, the two managed to launch a whole industry of self-magnification, based on their personal ups and downs. “Taylor and Burton’s is a Pop Art story,” Lewis writes. “Their abundance and violent greed belong with comic books and bubble-gum machines—with Roy Lichtenstein’s enlarged comic strips of lovers kissing.”

Leaving Cert English Personal Essay: Irishness #625Lab

“the shoes of irishness fit me well.”, write a personal essay in which you explore your sense of what it means to be irish. (2001).

This is a good essay from a current Leaving Cert student. It’s published under our #625Lab section that reviews the strengths and weaknesses of students’ essays. Note the corrections and comments: these will point you to common mistakes to avoid and help you increase your grade.

Being Irish is a thought playing on everyone’s mind recently. It’s been called into question who we are and what we stand for now in comparison to the ideals of the rebel leaders in the GPO 100 years ago. In the political scheme of things, the general consensus seems to be that we have let them down. The homelessness crisis is deteriorating daily, our health system is woeful and we currently do not even have a government to blame it all on. It’s a far cry from the “romantic Ireland” they envisioned and fought for. Having said that, national pride is at an all time high. The 1916 centenary celebrations have made history buffs of us all as we celebrate this milestone event of our past. Whilst not everyone is in agreement that the Rising was the best way to gain our freedom, it has to be admired as the catalyst for a small nation to break free from seven hundred years of oppression exacted upon us by one of the biggest empires in the world. It beat all the odds. We should not have survived the war of independence and the subsequent civil war, in theory, should have brought the country to its knees, but we were too stubborn to give up, too determined to have our independence and too proud to give up on our country. Our history is the symbol of who we are as a people and we wear these shoes with pride.

Many of our customs have evolved from deeply spiritual and sacred practices from hundreds of years ago. It is a fantastic tribute to our culture that these old traditions are not dying out, but constantly being brought back to life by the younger generations. The session in the pub, the sing song on the way home, the stereotypical “craic agus ceol’” can only be found in Ireland and are appreciated by every generation and nationality who are fortunate enough to experience them first hand. (Hmm, in the introduction the author seemed a little dismissive of the auld craic agus ceol and now all of a sudden it’s a good thing? It would be better to stay consistent throughout the essay.) Every family has that one member who can always be counted on to regale all in attendance with their go to song, usually “Rattling Bog”, or the Gran Aunt who sits by the fire, just waiting to recite “Oh to have a little house…”. Some will need a few drinks up their sleeves, before they launch into a murderous rendition of Ellis Isle, but others, from years of childhood cajoling, know they have a talent and are all too eager to remind everyone of that. The trick is finding the balance between the good, the bad, and the American cousin. (This paragraph is clearly about culture, so it’s a huge improvement on the formless previous paragraph.)

The Irish wake, is one of the best ways to deal with the loss of a loved one. The whole family gathers and grieves together. The best part of the wake is that it truly is a celebration of the person’s life: stories are told, their favourite songs sung, you laugh until your stomach aches and cry until your eyes sting, but it is so wonderfully cathartic to, metaphorically, bring the person back to life, surrounded by family, before it is time to say goodbye for once and for all. The video that recently went viral sums this tradition up. Ger “farmer” Foley passed away in the village of Killorglin, after a long battle with CF. On the night of his funeral, a friend decided to dedicate his version of “Mr Brightside” to the young man. The pub lit up with a huge out pouring of emotion for their friend. Crucially, there were no tears. The song was a celebration of his life, a celebration of the contribution he made to a local festival, a celebration of his life and how he lived it. That’s what a funeral should be and that’s what an Irish funeral is. It’s a unique part of our culture that can’t be appreciated fully until you are grieving through it. The video was shared hundreds of times across social media, often accompanied by the quote: “Being Irish you know that a good funeral is better than a bad wedding.” The international reaction was one of shock and admiration. It seemed to confirm that the Irish, even in death, are always enjoying themselves. (This is an improvement on the previous paragraph as it illustrates that there indeed isn’t a party like an Irish party.)

The Irish hospitality is something we are famed for and perhaps why family pubs are so popular with tourists. The Irish will go out of their way to be as welcoming as possible to guests. I am reminded again of another of my Granddad’s anecdotes. His house was overflowing one Christmas, as all his sons had decided this was the year they would introduce their girlfriends to the family. Twenty one people were booked in to stay at the Murphy Inn that night, spread between four rooms. Kevin, the eldest son, had recently moved to Cork and had become well-known after the impression he left on the football pitch. According to my aunt’s account, he made a very good impression on the local parish priest there. Some girl from the parish was stuck in Kerry for the night and the priest directed her back to “Kevin Murphy’s house.” Just like that, she was invited to stay for the night, even though none of the twenty one people had ever laid eyes on her before. That is only one of hundreds of examples of Grandad’s excessive hospitality. He was also known to invite a travelling gypsy to move in whilst Nanny was in hospital one week or to open up the back garden to twenty Kilkenny nurses looking for a place to camp during the “Rose of Tralee” festival.

Leaving Cert English Papers are marked using “PCLM”

Clarity of purpose:, coherence of delivery, accuracy of mechanics.