I Want More Of You In Here: A Guide to Interiority In the Personal Essay and Memoir

What To Do When They Ask For More Of You

A photo of me at the age my students are now, trying to do what they are doing now.

I have been teaching my writing students in my essay class to write about their feelings. This is a challenge for every writer, including me. I write in part to discover what I feel, and have traditionally done so since I was, well, the age of my students. I recently asked them to add a sixth question to the five questions—the five questions being Who, What, When, Where, and How, and the sixth question I suggest is How Do I Feel About This?

Rebecca Makkai recently ran an excellent series in her newsletter in which she described some approaches to the at times maddening note so many people offer when they say they want “more interiority” in a fiction draft. I’ve found it helpful for the way it articulates more of what people are asking for when they say they want ‘more interiority.’ The first of the three in the series breaks down some common weak moments in drafts, complete with her own sample text offered for examples. In the second, she wrote about what most writers will do in writing fiction, and then she pushes for what can take the text further. And in section 3, she shows people how to put this all together.

And as I read that, I was reminded of how often I felt that way while reading drafts of essays and memoirs, and pretty quickly adapted her set of terms into this guide here, taking her points and illustrating them with examples from essays by Brian Doyle, June Jordan, Anne Carson, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion and Aube Rey Lescure—personal essays I’ve been teaching from this term. I’m not quoting any writing I find objectionable, I’ll add. I’m just trying to make these ideas legible for the essay and memoir as I feel interiority goes missing not just in our fiction but in our personal writing as well.

So then.

What Most Writers Do:

Reportage 

Simple reportage has us offering from our point of view an account of what happened in the physical environment around us at the time we describe.

My first day as their camp counselor was utter chaos, in part because the boys were all wearing their names pinned to their chests on fluttering paper, and the papers flew off in the brisk early summer wind, and the pins stuck the boys, the boys stuck each other with the pins, etc. 

--Brian Doyle, “The Meteorites”

It’s an elegant sentence, and part of a longer opening paragraph that accomplishes establishing the era, the essay’s time period and subject. But here the reportage is in use to illustrate what is meant by the term “utter chaos.” There are pins and they do everything wrong and then it’s over, and we move on.

Sensory input, without further commentary

Here the writer describes events by appealing to our sensory perceptions, the time honored approach to rooting us in our own body as a way to understand the writer’s point of view. In this kind of writing, the descriptions appeal to more of five senses, not just the visual.

In the morning the hotel is dark, no sign of life, no smell of coffee. Old clock ticking in the deserted hall. Dining room empty, shutters drawn, napkins in glasses. Morning drifts on. I peer into the kitchen: still as a church. Every one has been washed away in the night. We pile money on the table in the hall, leave without breakfast, without ado! as they say in my country. Outside is silent, street dissolving, far hills running down in streaks. We filter westward. 

--Anne Carson, “Kinds of Water.”

This is a subtle example, but in describing the apparent emptiness of the hotel, it is powerfully effective. No one to see, nothing to smell, nothing to hear. We’re left with the eerie feeling that something has gone wrong without being able to tell exactly what. Even as it also feels ordinary, too.

Internal physical reactions, without further commentary

These are physical reactions to the events as felt from the inside of the writer, from inside their body as well as inside the mind—inviting the reader a little farther into your point of view.

Walking. Walking. Walking. Rocking her while her cries fill me. They rise
like water. A part of me has been formed and released and set upon the earth
to wail. Her cries are painful to me, physically hard to take. Her cries hurt my
temples, my breasts. I often cry along if I cannot comfort her. What else is there
to do? This morning she falls asleep, finally, as I rock her. Sucking her favorite
three fingers, she drifts. All of the tension leaves her small, round, tender body.
She goes heavy against me. In this old chair, woven of tough bent willow, I
keep rocking her. My chance to work has come, but I hate to put her down.

--Louise Erdrich, “A Woman's Work.”

Erdrich’s essay describes the first season with her newborn daughter, and it’s a beautiful piece of writing that stays close in this passage to what is going in her body as her daughter cries and nurses and sleeps.

All of this is beautiful writing, all of it is worth doing. But there’s more to do.

Moving Past What Everyone Does:

Reportage and sensory input with commentary and/or interpretation 

In sections like these, we’re still witnessing the events through the narrator’s eyes, but now we get commentary on those events, as well.

Joan Didion was a queen of this kind of writing. Here she is just sitting and looking at a notebook but there’s much activity all the same of the reportage with commentary and/or interpretation.

Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while. At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?), but I do remember being there. The woman in the dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper had come down from her room for a beer, and the bartender had heard before the reason why George Sharp and she were separated today. “Sure,” he said, and went on mopping the floor. “You told me.” At the other end of the bar is a girl. She is talking, pointedly, not to the man beside her but to a cat lying in the triangle of sunlight cast through the open door. She is wearing a plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down. 

 Here is what it is: The girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August (1960? 1961?). Because she must go directly from the train to lunch in New York, she wishes that she had a safety pin for the hem of the plaid silk dress, and she also wishes that she could forget about the hem and the lunch and stay in the cool bar that smells of disinfectant and malt and make friends with the woman in the crepe-de-Chine wrapper. She is afflicted by a little self-pity, and she wants to compare Estelles. That is what that was all about. 

--Joan Didion, “On Keeping A Notebook.”

Here Joan Didion walks us through her attempt to understand her motivations for writing down a scene that seems on the surface not quite worth writing down. Gradually it all unspools for her and she understands at least why she wrote the notes on the scene she witnessed and what she saw.

Internal monologue in reaction to events in scene 

These are the actual words the writer is thinking to themselves, or a paraphrasing of their thoughts into words. Here June Jordan writes of a vacation she took as an adjunct teacher in 1982, flying down to the Bahamas for a long weekend.

It's Good Friday in the Bahamas. Seventy-eight degrees in the shade. Except for Sheraton territory, everything’s closed.

It so happens that for truly secular reasons I've been fasting for three days. My hunger has now reached nearly violent proportions. In the hotel sandwich shop, the Black woman handling the counter complains about the tourists; why isn't the shop closed and why don't the tourists stop eating for once in their lives. I'm famished and I order chicken salad and cottage cheese and lettuce and tomato and a hard boiled egg and a hot cross bun and apple juice.

She eyes me with disgust.

To be sure, the timing of my stomach offends her serious religious practices. Neither one of us apologizes to the other. She seasons the chicken salad to the peppery max while I listen to the loud radio gospel she plays to console herself. It's a country Black version of "The Old Rugged Cross."

As I heave much chicken into my mouth tears start. It's not the pepper. I am, after all, a West Indian daughter. It's the Good Friday music that dominates the humid atmosphere.

Well I cherish the old rugged cross

And I am back, faster than a 747, in Brooklyn, in the home of my parents where we are wondering, as we do every year, if the sky will darken until Christ has been buried in the tomb. The sky should darken if God is in His heavens. And then, around 3 p.m., at the conclusion of our mournful church service at the neighborhood St. Phillips, and even while we dumbly stare at the black cloth covering the gold altar and the slender unlit candles, the sun should return through the high gothic windows and vindicate our waiting faith that the Lord will rise again, on Easter. How I used to bow my head at the very name of Jesus: ecstatic to abase myself in deference to His majesty.

--June Jordan, “A Report From The Bahamas, 1982”

Memory / projection into the future / association / tangent

In most of our lives, we may or may not be narrating what is happening but we are always, as Makkai puts it, “sensing and reacting to the world around us, even as we’re also thinking constantly of the past, the present, the future,” and the associations made that surprise us, here called the random. And the random matters, enormously, because it is usually the associative connections we are making in the moment, connections that surprise us.

I come here every day to work, starting while invisibly pregnant. I imagine myself somewhere else, into another skin, another person, another time. Yet simultaneously my body is constructing its own character. It requires no thought at all for me to form and fix a whole other person. First she is nothing, then she is growing and dividing at such a rate I think I'll drop. I come here in ecstasy and afraid of labor, all at once, for this is the heart of the matter. No matter what else I do, when it comes to pregnancy I am my physical self first, as are all of us women. We can pump gas, lift weights, head a corporation, tune pianos. Still, our bodies are rounded vases of skin and bones and blood that seem impossibly engineered for birth. I look down at my smooth, huge lap, feel my baby twist, and I can't figure out how l'll ever stretch wide enough. I fear I've made a ship inside a bottle. I'll have to break. I'm not·myself. I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land. I will experience pain, lose physical control, or know the uncertainty of anesthetic. I fear these things, but vaguely, for my brain buzzes in the merciful wash of endorphins that preclude any thought from occupying it too long. Most of all, I worry over what I hold. I want perfection. Each day I pray another perfect cell to form. A million of them. I fear that my tears, my moods, my wrenched weeping will imprint on the baby's psyche. I fear that repression, a stoic face shown to the world, will cause our child to hide emotions. I make too much of myself, expect too many favors, or not enough.

--Louise Erdrich, “A Women's Work.”

Self-reflection, or narrative reflection, on psychology or emotion 

To the extent that we are able to observe in ourselves what motivated us at the time of the events we describe, in order to describe ourselves as we are shaped by the story told through the events.

In Lina Mounzer’s “The Gamble,” she does this brilliantly at the beginning.

I remember the first night my father came to us and said: tomorrow we will be millionaires. We believed him. That was back when we still believed most of the things my father said.

We must have been in Montreal only a few days at that point, in that furnished apartment where the kitchen was not so much a kitchen but a counter overhanging one of the couches in the living room, and the living room was barely big enough to sit all five of us at once. The carpet in the apartment was an overcooked pea green and the curtains had large ugly flowers on them and the view was of a redbrick wall, though I didn’t mind that part because it reminded me of the buildings on Sesame Street. My younger brother and I were still zinging off the furniture into the wee hours, sleepless with excitement and jet lag. Why do I immediately think of tiger stripes when I remember that night? We may have asked him if we’d be rich enough to afford a tiger. He may have said yes.

—Lina Mounzer, “The Gamble.”

She opens with the investigation of an association and what might possibly be at the root of it. Why do I think of this when I think of this is a great simple prompt.

Subconscious

The subconscious is the psychological stuff the writer doesn’t understand about herself at the time, perhaps unknown to herself at the time, more visible through the writing. It is an attempt to account for that which we could not have described at the time.

Here, Aube Rey Lescure is on a trip, the Pilgrimate to Santiago de Compostela, and she sees a flyer for a missing woman, an Asian woman who she immediately sees could be herself. She rejects the connection at first, or she tries:

Nine hundred kilometers of road, a horizontal line drawn across the Iberian peninsula, is a long way to walk. In the desert-like mezeta, the stretch between Burgos and Léon seems to consist of nothing but interminable wheat fields, there is little for eyes to rest on but the wavelets of heat distorting the horizon, the occasional utility pole, the flyers. I look away from the missing woman. No, I have not seen her, and my first instinct is to unsee her. Instead, I listen to the winds rustling through the wheat, like waves rippling an inland sea. This flyer cannot, must not, intrude on this landscape, of golden grass rising to the skyline, abandoned mud houses with shattered windows. Before I saw the flyer, the mezeta had the parched romanticism of an old Western movie set. Now it begins to thrum with something sinister.

I put the flyer out of my head and pick up my pace, heading toward a village where blocky red buildings line the main street, where the cheap metal chairs left out in the sun will sear red marks into my thighs. I unbuckle my backpack, its blue fabric soaked through with sweat, and order a calamari sandwich, defrosted squid rings on a baguette slathered with mayo. I check my phone’s battery. Then I hoist my backpack onto my aching shoulders again, and pause to watch a herd of goats being shaved on the outskirts of town. The animals writhe and groan weakly among mounds of wool, disconcerted, but not altogether disturbed. The other goats just watch, waiting their turn.

I imagine innocent explanations for Denise’s disappearance. Perhaps she’s gotten lost, or had a spiritual epiphany that dictated she should unplug, fall off the map. Perhaps she just wanted some time to herself. I myself am a loner pilgrim, and proud of it. I don’t stop at churches for communal masses, or start the day’s trek with a pack of new friends, like many others do. Being a pilgrim, to me, has come to mean a one-on-one relationship with the road, a private contemplation of its beauty and its difficulty. I walk in solitude. Later in the day, I may drink a cold beer with other pilgrims, trading news of albergues with plentiful cots, but every morning I set off on my own. I can stop for a tortilla or a coffee whenever I like, speed down a hill as fast as I want, call an end to the day at whatever medieval village I choose, dress my feet wounds however I please. One afternoon, sitting on some concrete steps, I rip out an entire toenail that had blackened and begun to smell foul, like something that had died in its bed. No one bears witness. I can handle it all, all on my own. But every time I see Denise on the flyers, I feel something pierce the carapace of perfect solitude. Something that makes me turn and look over my shoulder. Something like fear.

--Aube Rey Lescure, “At The Bend In The Road.”

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I would like meanwhile to apologize for falling behind. I had even turned off billing but I’m not sure that it worked. Between taxes, a family health crisis, a family crisis back in Korea and the assault on the Dartmouth Campus by riot police, unleashed by the president of my college against peaceful protesters, I kept finding myself barely able to hold up some basic work responsibilities as I stayed present for those affected, including myself. I apologize.

This is an example of the paid posts going forward for paid subscribers, by the way. Next up on paid subscriber posts: writing prompts made from the five works of fiction I read with my advance fiction class this term: Sarah Thankam Mathews All This Could Be Different, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane, Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, and Clare Sestanovich’s Objects of Desire.

And of course, a new episode of American Letters this Friday as well as a long Activity Report.

Thanks for sticking with me.