Jess Zimmerman is the author of Women and Other Monsters and an editor at Quirk Books. Her essays and opinion writing have appeared in the Guardian, the New Republic, Slate, Hazlitt, Catapult, and others.
A personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs the interior experience, the exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its magic.
The thing that’s so difficult about personal essays is that they’re awfully personal. There’s an answer to this conundrum, and it has to do with cows.
Is it strange, in a vortex of absence, to cherish endings? Only if loss and endings are the same.
What if we thought of emotional trauma the way we do physical: as a wide class of wounds whose healing is unpredictable, whose scars take different forms?
“Our anger exists to scourge the world, and to save it. Not everyone wants it saved.”
“Most cultures have a female monster who preys on pregnant women and children. In ancient Greece, her name was Lamia.”
“When you’ve spent all your life smothering your contradictions, their eruption can undo you.”
“Medusa’s ugliness grew and grew, becoming something greater than herself but still part of her legend.”
“It’s not that we don’t remember what it was like before the sound. If you asked us, we could tell you.”
