In her latest work, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (HarperCollins), a collection of personal essays, Ann Patchett recalls by the time she was in first grade she knew that she wanted to be a writer (page 19). “I may have been shaky about tying my shoes or telling time, but I was sure about my career, and I consider this the greatest gift of my life.”
By contrast, I was 40, newly married, and living in New York City when I published my first personal essay about the pampered existence of dogs in Our Town. The piece, which began as a class assignment, caused quite a stir. “You’ve found your voice,” said Manhattan journalism professor and author Sue Shapiro.
In her “instant gratification takes too long method of journalism” class at the New School, Shapiro, an ASJA member herself, urges students to mine their personal lives, including obsessions and idiosyncrasies, for essay-worthy content. Here are a few examples:
- When my mother, a widow, was diagnosed with cancer shortly after George and I got engaged, I wrote about my fear of losing her. The piece was published in Newsweek’s My Turn column.
“I realized that a Big Day without my mother would be no day at all. Not having my dad, who passed away three years before, to walk me down the aisle was painful, but the thought of not having Mom there was unbearable.”
- When my groom and I moved back to the Pacific Northwest two years later, I turned my apprehension about leaving New York City into an essay—a la Joan Didion—for Newsday.
“I was an Upper East Side resident for nearly a decade and I’m already suffering from Big Apple withdrawal. How will I, a former publicist, cope without white-gloved doormen and New York tabloids? In fact, celebrity sightings are so pervasive in my neighborhood that in one week I saw Sean Connery, Dan Rather and Caroline Kennedy.”
- When we’d been priced out of the red-hot Seattle real estate market, I pitched Still renting after all these years to the Seattle Post Intelligencer to try to come to terms with renting despite being in my mid-forties.
“Somewhere amid Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy, the government’s bailout of AIG and the failure of WaMu, I started growing more at peace with my status as a renter.”
- When my spouse, a pharmacist, was robbed at work for OxyContin, a wildly popular painkiller, I recalled the incident in an op-ed piece for The Seattle Times, shining a light on the city’s lenient sentencing laws.
“Bandits, meanwhile, have little incentive to abdicate their rapacious ways, especially when ‘note-jobs’—where the perpetrator hands a pharmacy employee a note or verbally demands narcotics without seemingly having a gun—are considered second-degree robbery under state law.”
Turning personal experience into prose has helped me capture some of the most resonant moments and defining events of my life. And this holiday season, with the tree trimmed and the presents wrapped, I’m grateful for my many blessings. And like Patchett, I’m thankful for the gift of writing.