Every few years, someone writes a eulogy for the personal essay. The form is too self-indulgent, too navel-gazing, too saturated with first-person confessions about divorce and disease and the writer's relationship with their mother. And yet here we are, in an era when the essay has colonized nearly every corner of nonfiction publishing, from newsletters commanding six-figure subscriber bases to literary journals that once prided themselves on keeping the "I" at arm's length.
The personal essay's resilience isn't accidental. It's the natural response to a media environment drowning in aggregated information and algorithmic sameness. When anyone can access the same facts, the only scarce commodity is perspective — the particular slant of light through one consciousness.
The Montaigne problem
Michel de Montaigne didn't invent the essay in sixteenth-century France so much as he gave permission for a certain kind of intellectual wandering. His Essais — the word means "attempts" or "trials" — established the form's essential bargain: the reader tolerates the writer's self-regard in exchange for genuine thinking happening on the page. Not conclusions delivered from on high, but a mind in motion.
This bargain has always made critics uncomfortable. The essay seems to promise insight but delivers something slipperier: intimacy with uncertainty. Samuel Johnson complained about essays that "teach nothing." Modern critics echo the sentiment when they dismiss personal writing as therapy masquerading as literature.
But the form's supposed weakness is its actual strength. The essay doesn't pretend to objectivity. It announces its subjectivity and then, paradoxically, earns trust through that honesty.
The newsletter resurrection
The past decade has witnessed something remarkable: the essay's migration from prestige magazines to individual publishing platforms. Writers who once competed for a handful of slots in legacy publications now build direct relationships with readers, often writing more personally and more frequently than traditional outlets ever permitted.
This shift has changed the essay's economics and its aesthetics. Without editors demanding universal appeal, writers can pursue narrower obsessions. A newsletter about grief, or competitive baking, or the semiotics of suburban architecture can find its precise audience. The form has splintered into a thousand niches, each with its own conventions and community.
The result is a golden age for readers who know what they want and a bewildering marketplace for everyone else. Quality varies wildly. Some newsletter essayists produce work that rivals anything in the literary canon; others mistake confession for craft.
Why the form persists
The personal essay endures because it answers a need that no other form quite satisfies. Journalism promises facts but struggles with meaning. Fiction offers meaning but asks us to suspend our knowledge that it's invented. The essay says: here is one person, trying to make sense of experience, in real time, with no guarantee of success.
In an age of synthetic media and institutional distrust, that rawness has become valuable again. Readers exhausted by optimized content crave writing that feels human — not in a performed, algorithmic way, but in its willingness to be uncertain, contradictory, incomplete.
Our take
The personal essay will be declared dead again, probably within the year. Some publication will run a contrarian piece arguing that the form has exhausted itself, that we've reached peak memoir, that readers are hungry for something more objective. And then another writer will publish something so precise about their particular corner of experience that thousands of strangers will recognize themselves in it. The essay survives because self-examination never goes out of style — it just periodically goes out of fashion.
