The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  The poet Robert Frost spent a great deal of time doing what essayists often do—thinking about thinking. In a magazine interview, he once famously pointed out something about the process: “Thinking isn’t to agree or disagree. That’s voting.” To my mind, his remark when unpacked goes to the core of the essay as writers continually search for creative ways to engage and assess a multitude of polarizing current affairs.

  The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

  To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgments and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the Notable list in the back of the volume. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

  Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to:

  The Best American Essays

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  125 High Street, 5th Floor

  Boston, MA 02110

  Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions from print magazines must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note: due to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) will no longer be considered.

  The American essay lost one of its most impressive and beloved figures with the passing of Brian Doyle on May 27, 2017. His work appeared often in these pages. Fortunately, Brian’s genius enabled him to transfer his magnetic presence to the printed word, and his inquisitive, beneficent, and essaying spirit will long survive: “And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—”

  As always, I’m indebted to Nicole Angeloro for her keen editorial skills and her ability, given our tight schedule, to keep so many moving parts in smooth working order. And for their expertise, a heartfelt thanks to other publishing people with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Larry Cooper, Melissa Dobson, Carla Gray, and Megan Wilson. I also want to thank my son, Gregory Atwan, for all of his help in identifying the astonishing number of journals that publish online only. When we launched this series in 1985 such publications were unimaginable; they now comprise an enormous percentage of the material I encounter annually. It was a special pleasure to work with one of the nation’s most talented young essayists, Leslie Jamison, whose remarkable essay “The Devil’s Bait” was selected for the 2014 volume. Her introduction to this extraordinarily diverse collection explores dimensions of the contemporary essay that the series thus far has only sporadically covered. It is an indispensable contribution to the art of the essay in a worrisome time.

  R.A.

  Introduction

  In my tenth-grade English class, we read a short piece about America that was just a catalogue of comparisons: America is the man sleeping off his bender on the street. America is the cart of fruit, overturned. It was metonymy I misunderstood as metaphor. America is . . . America is . . . America is . . . Back then, I only knew I loved the swell and soar of its prose, the prerogative of rebooting and reimagining, the surprise of following the same phrase to a different place each time.

  We were supposed to write our own imitations, and they were supposed to be about high school. I wrote: High school is a clown holding a gun to his temple. High school is all the children gathered around him, laughing. I wasn’t much for subtlety. My loneliness, then, was not a subtle feeling. I wanted to express what it was like to be young, how it lived in the sudden knot in my gut when a popular girl came up to me in the locker room and asked if I could smell my own body odor. How it lived in the breathless surge of getting into my best friend’s car on a Friday night, rolling down the windows and rounding the bend, through a tunnel, where the I-10 became the Pacific Coast Highway, with ocean beyond, its sharp salt wind and dark waves rustling under moonlight. So I wrote: High school is a clown holding a gun to his temple. High school is carbonation and twilight. Juxtaposing sad clowns and highways was a way of saying: Sometimes I have someone to eat lunch with, and sometimes I don’t.

  This was my first taste of the mind as curator, plucking what it needed from the world and finding vessels for feelings without shapes. Being young is a clown. It’s a gun. It’s fizz. It’s dusk. This was better than the five-paragraph model. It was better than argument. It was freedom. It was a tunnel opening onto ocean. It was an essay, my first.

  I wrote those first three paragraphs in a moment of inspired reverie, during the weeks immediately preceding a presidential election I felt optimistic about. I’m writing this next paragraph on the morning of an inauguration whose prospect has made me sick to my stomach ever since November. In a few hours, I will head to Washington, DC, to march with hundreds of thousands of people so that our bodies can collectively pronounce the basic tenets of the country we believe in. That kind of articulation feels right and necessary in this moment: collective, embodied, populated, unambivalent. Sometimes it feels like the only kind of articulation that matters.

  I have been thinking for many months about why the essay matters, too. I have been thinking about what the second adjective of this volume’s title might mean for us right now. “American.” Is nimble talk about the aesthetics of association and juxtaposition—finding ways to talk about eating alone in high school—is that simply self-indulgent and irrelevant? Talking about aesthetics in the midst of political crisis can feel like surveying the wreckage of a nuclear blast and then treating the charred skeletons of buildings as jungle gyms to play on.

  That first morning after the election, I thought maybe nothing mattered but policy op-eds and marching. Maybe nothing mattered but articles about politics with a capital P. That first morning, belief in art as a cultural value in its own right felt intellectually correct but deeply abstract, far removed, like an object under water—no answer for what felt sick and broken in my gut when I thought of millions of deportations and the families these deportations would break open, when I thought of years of stop-and-frisk policing, a national Fuck you to the idea of police accountability; when I thought of a Muslim registry, or girls driving for days across state lines to get abortions they couldn’t afford.

  But of course, what had the election changed? I knew it wasn’t a glitch in some hypothetical song of American justice but another track in a record of ongoing inequality. I knew our political crisis was ongoing. So what did it mean to sit down and write my essay-anthology introduction in the face of all that? Put more crudely: Why does the essay matter at all?

  If you’ve ever read an essay about essays, then you’ve read the root of
the word: from the French essayer, to try. Etymology arrives as show pony and absolution, along with its attendant permissions: The essay doesn’t offer seamless narrative or watertight argument. It investigates its own seams. It traces what leaks. But doesn’t this endless permission—the fluttering Monopoly money of attempt, its endless currency—ever get a little tiresome? If anything counts as attempt, what could possibly count as failure?

  Essays aren’t immune to failure. They can fail in a thousand ways—by failing to offer insight, by offering insights that feel too easy, too tidy, too shopworn. They can fail to enchant. They can fail to cast a spell or build a world. They can fail to interrogate their own conclusions. They can fail to render their subjects with sufficient complexity. They can declare themselves done too soon. An essay is not an attempt captured in its first iteration, but in its ninth, or tenth, or fifteenth—honed, interrogated, reimagined. Another word for this is “revision.”

  But if essays aren’t immune from failure, they are singularly equipped to metabolize their own failures, to follow the smoke signals of these failures toward better versions of themselves, to take what might feel like an obstacle—shame, confusion, contradiction, muddled memory—and confess it, investigate it, probe it. This is failure as a trampoline rather than a straitjacket. My beloved essayist mentor put it more succinctly, as beloved essayist mentors are wont to do. He told me once: “The problem with an essay can become its subject.”

  When Guns N’ Roses was recording a demo of “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” a track that emerged unplanned from one of Slash’s guitar riffs during a jam session, the band couldn’t think of lyrics to accompany the musical breakdown at the end. Axl Rose started muttering: “Where do we go now? Where do we go now?” and those muttered words became the lyrics. The wondering became the song.

  When I started writing this introduction in the wake of the inauguration, I realized that my problem had once again become my subject. Why does the essay matter? A few months after the election, a friend of mine was teaching a class called Writing After the Election at a writing program in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where everyone was holed up in an old hotel while the snow came down. By mysterious (and probably illegal) means, one of his students had brought a lynx pelt and skull to the hotel, from an animal he had accidentally struck with his car, and my friend decided he would use this lynx skull as a prop in Writing After the Election. He would set the skull in the middle of his desk—at the front of the room—and begin to speak about the role of creative writing in our time. At a certain point, he would say that writing without letting politics into your work was like trying to describe this room without ever mentioning there was a bloody lynx skull in the middle of it.

  This introduction is my way of saying: There is a bloody lynx skull in the middle of the room. There has always been a bloody lynx skull in the middle of the room. We write our essays not despite that bloody lynx skull but because of it. The essay isn’t a retreat from the world but a way of encountering it.

  After the election, when my students asked me if their “unpolitical” essays even mattered anymore—their essays about friendship and fly-fishing—my first reaction wasn’t yes or no. It was: Those essays are probably more political than you think. There are politics in everything. My answer wasn’t: Go looking for politics to put in your work. It was: Find the politics that are already in there.

  That November, I was in the weeds of an essay that I’d been working on for several years, about a photographer who had spent more than two decades photographing the same Mexican family—traveling back and forth across the border, finding ways to document the evolving and frictional humanity of a particular cluster of people. I’d been assuming the essay was about devotion or obsession, but now I saw it was also about borders, and the fact that our president wanted to build a wall along the length of ours. It was about twenty-five years of entanglement as the ethical opposite of that wall. It was about encounter. Had there ever been an essay about anything else?

  The essay has always courted a reputation as a solipsistic genre; a mind fondling itself on the page. But to me the defining trait of the essay is the situation and problem of encounter. The essays I like are full of the kind of humility and curiosity that make these encounters electric—whether you are regarding the self, the world, the past, the other, the other’s mother, the vacant lot next door, the transatlantic flight, the suburb, the city block, the dry cleaners, the burlesque. The essay inherently stages an encounter between an “I” and the world in which that “I” resides; just as politics is a way of examining the relationship between an “I” and whatever communities she finds herself a part of. If one definition of politics is “the total complex of relations between people living in society,” the essay doesn’t just describe these relations. It unsettles them. It models a certain way of paying attention: awestruck and humble and suspicious all at once, taking as premise—as promise—the limits of its own vision.

  The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA. Essays are political not just when they take up the kinds of content we call political with a capital P—social injustice, civic life, the rule of law and government—but because they are committed to instability. They are full of self-interrogation, suspicious of received narratives, and hospitable to contradiction. They thrill toward complexity. Essays bear witness, and they confess the subjectivity of their witnessing. They need some motivating urgency. Like? Wonder. Trauma. Mystery. Injustice. The essay insists that every consciousness yields infinite complexity upon close scrutiny. This is something close to the precise ethical opposite of xenophobia or scapegoating. Essays take abstractions and make them particular.

  How do I make that abstraction particular? I could tell you about Kenneth A. McClane’s “Sparrow Needy.” It’s an essay about McClane’s brother, Paul, who died young from drinking hard; who was never fully at home in his own family, or in the world; who moved with his “bones sidling against themselves.” It’s also an essay about visiting a neighborhood bully at Sing Sing, among tables blistered by ancient gum, and finding this bully so thin it was difficult to summon the memory of how fearsome he had been. To say that “Sparrow Needy” is about urban violence or police accountability or being black in America wouldn’t be incorrect, it would just be a refusal to speak the language the essay itself makes gloriously available—which is the language of specificity and precision. If I’m going to tell you about “Sparrow Needy,” it’s better to toss topical keywords into the trash bin and say that it’s an essay about a sinkhole at Riverside Park, at Seventy-Seventh Street, “brimming with bottles, potato chips bags, broken dolls,” with the Hudson River running underneath like blood pulsing through a vein under the skin. It’s about the possibility of a lost girl swirling in those waters. It’s better to say it’s an essay about a particular brother, who collapsed on a particular day when he was four years old, at the unmarked heap of stones marking the slave quarters at Mount Vernon, and died in a particular hospital decades later, creating a particular rift in the world.

  Particularity is the native tongue of the essay—at least, the essays I like most—and particularity isn’t just an aesthetic code (be vivid! ) but an ethical imperative that reads more like invitation: Approach the sinkhole. Look closer. Get dizzy. Every human life is infinite. You will never know the half of it. Here’s a half, and then another half, and then another half, that’s three—there’s more! No life is a thesis statement. No life is as simple as a threat. Everyone hurts about something. Everyone has feelings about breakfast. Every person is a fucking miracle. These statements might not sound political, but if you really believe them they make political demands. Essays take the political and make it something that lives in a body, that needs to sleep and sta
y hydrated, that might—for example—drink water as hot as a locker-room shower twenty klicks north of Fallujah.

  When I was reading the essays in this anthology—each and every one of them—I found nothing like a retreat from the world. I found the world itself, waiting. I found startling white sneakers in an East Jerusalem refugee camp. I found the names of dead West Virginia tunnel-diggers and the faces of their living relatives. I found rape lurking in a footnote, the possibility of a homeless man called a “body,” the possibility of facing a weeping Iraqi bomb-maker and feeling nothing. I found the generative energy of refusal: refusing to stay silent, refusing to call that man a “body,” refusing to feel nothing or to pretend it was easy to feel something, refusing to leave the homeless or the dead unnamed.

  Many of the essays in this anthology are about things that we’d readily call political: police violence, our national heroin epidemic, the toll of our wars, the brutality of corporate greed and negligence, the unacknowledged rallying cries of class warfare. But all of these essays are examples of the essay itself as a singularly capable instrument of political imagination. The essay asks us to encounter the world as questioning creatures, wary of precooked narratives, attentive to humanity in all its strangeness and variety. The politics of the essay don’t just live in content but in form—in narrators willing to question themselves, to admit the “I” as something multiple and contradictory, indefinite, ambivalent, uncertain.