UC Santa Cruz

Personal Statement“Personal Statement,” is a book of short essays in the vein of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock, and Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests. The spare, poetic essays, loosely based on the form of the 650-word personal statement prospective students must write to gain admittance to college, aims to subvert and interrogate the form while also interrogating the ways we construct—and are asked to construct—a coherent self. The essays meditate on time and aging, sex and marriage, friendship and loneliness, art and ambition—all while circling the question of what it means to be female in the 21st century.

Supplemental EssaysThe critical essays in this section historicize and contextualize the work I am doing with the personal essay in my creative manuscript.

In the first essay, “‘I am not a melodramatic person’: Defining the lyric diary,” I propose and define a new genre in contemporary literature: the lyric diary—a slender volume in which a depressed female first-person narrator, usually a mother, records the mundane and trivial experiences of her everyday life alongside facts, ideas, and quotations in flat, affectless “shreds” of prose. Blending elements of the confessional poem with the diary and other non-literary modes of historical women’s writing (the scrapbook, the date book, the account book, the family Bible), the lyric diary rejects plot and the narrative arc for the lyric’s associative logic (“tell all the Truth but tell it slant”) and the diary’s serial, episodic movement—frustrating many readers in the process. Where the confessional poets possess what could be characterized as an excess of feeling, the lyric diarists display a lack where the usual full-to-bursting expressive lyric “I” would be. Their narrators do not narrate: they record.

The second essay “An Interlude—“A Lovely Woman Tapers Off Into a Fish”: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais” explores similar themes as the prior chapter—birth, gender, femininity, the body—in the context of Montaigne’s work. In it, I discuss the monstrous nature of Montaigne’s essays, both in terms of the material book and their form, and argue that, throughout the book, the Essais are fashioned as a kind of “enfant monstrueux”—a male child, a son, born unnaturally, of one man, alone. The third essay “It’s Not Personal: Understanding the Personal Statement” serves as a critical introduction to “Personal Statement.” In it, I examine the social and cultural implications of the form of the application essay and discuss the ways that writing into the form resonates with the manuscript’s themes and goals.