You’ve received questions from a second reader and me regarding your essay.
1. Address one of them to re-open your essay.
In this draft of 2 double spaced pages, you want to state the overarching problem of the essay.
The “problem” in the personal or creative essay addresses the centralizing subject of the essay. The centralizing subject gestures to answer an overarching question. The problem is a design of your own making that works to open a subject to many possibilities. Possibilities that are controllable, and most important, “writable.” This kind of writing differs from critical writing that gestures to “prove” a point, or journalistic writing which moves to report on something. You are looking to open a discussion, plant a topic—possibly one your audience has never considered—in its consciousness.
“Writablity” is key here. The problem must contain at least one aspect that can be described as a physical gesture.
For example, in the case of Didion ‘s essay “In Bed” the larger subject may be migraine, but the centralizing element is her ability to cope with pain. “Migraine” she later describes as “imagin[ed]”, “pain” is relative to the individual to the sufferer. In both cases, they cannot be made visible to a reader. The essay is immediately viable when it begins, “Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me. Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries which tell me that migraine is on its way, and I take certain drugs to avert its arrival.” She physically puts herself in bed in front of the reader because “Bed” is a place to which the reader can relate. “Migraine” too is a place, but the reader may or may not have ever been there. Even if the reader also suffers from migraine, clearly the reader’s place and the author’s place are not the same.
Getting to the centralizing element from the subject of your essay may be as easy as asking your self a series of questions that start with one of the questions that your second reader or I asked:
What are you saying about migraine?
Why is it important that an audience here about something so personal?
(Don’t kid yourself; there are no universal themes)
Continue asking yourself questions to get to affect that tells the story.
Or:
You may want to make a list of one-word associations to get to it.
To get to “bed” as a relatable gesture, Didion may have tracked her own actions from the onset of migraine to the place that she ended up, or until she got to bed.
2. Use one of the sources that you placed on your bibliography to prove your point.
Didion suffers migraines therefore she is the source at the begining of the essay.
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Galleons Lap
The third couch cushion served as a void. I always sat on the right side and he always sat on the left. He sat, slouched down with his legs parted or with his feet resting on the coffee table. I sat, my body angled towards his body, my legs crossed with my foot curling around my ankle for a second cross. In between us sat the couch cushion. I had never paid particular attention to a couch cushion before. The interwoven scratchy threads with particles of crumbs that held on with decisiveness.
At night we would lay. We would lay, legs spread, throats constricting. His voice would whisper and my voice would reply. Whispers sound like air, if air could speak. That’s the whole trouble with whispers, they are the unreliable narrator of the spoken world. I would lay my head on his chest and as my breathing slowed I would fall into sleep, my comforter soft on our bare skin. The two of us would be wrapped in it, be covered in the blue and yellow stars. Be held together by down feathers and fabric.
He would get too warm. He would have to go to work, or school, or meet up with his friends. This would be what would happen, were we to lie together. I would be left hugging the insubstantial body of my teddy bear Snuggly. His nose long having fallen off, his eyes scratched, and one ear partially disconnected. That’s the whole trouble with stuffed animals. When I was younger I would pretend they were my babies. I would place diapers and them and try to feed them from one of my younger brother’s bottles, but unlike my brother they never cried. They never reached their arms up too me or screamed if I left the room. They were passive, unassuming. As much as I pretended that Snuggly the bear or Rosie the one-eyed flowered bear were my children or my students, they just sat there. How, I often wondered, did Christopher Robin make Winnie the Pooh come to life.
Together we watched movies. An attempt of mine to find a bridge between us.
“I love that scene,” I said.
“What scene?”
“The one where he meets her at the top of the escalator. I think it is one of the most romantic scenes in any movie.”
“Someday, I will meet you at the top of the escalator.”
“But you aren’t in love with me, there’s a difference. We wouldn’t go back to your room and make love afterwards.”
“True,” he agreed.
How, do I move from one couch cushion to the other? It was not as simple as picking up my skirted bottom and sliding over. There were whispers in the way. The ones that said, “what if?” The ones that hung in space over the tortilla chip crumbs and the chocolate chip cookies crumbs. The ones that lingered beside the drop of spilled peppermint bon bon ice cream.
I hugged my pillow. I hugged my pillow until mascara lined the blue cover and wouldn’t wash out. I started going for walks. After dinner and after my parents went to bed. My mother stopped driving me to school because “if you can walk around at all times of the night, you can walk to school in the morning.” One night I paced around my room in anger, upset because my blinds were white. I got out a black permanent marker and started trying to color them in. I organized my books in alphabetical order and started counting the calories in everything that I ate. I plucked my eyebrows. I plucked my eyebrows until they were a violent shade of red and I started getting ingrown hairs. I picked at my skin until it was splotchy and swollen, and looked as if I had hives. I accumulated other stuffed animals who I usually just pushed to the end of the bed.
That couch cushion. An expanse of maroon with rocky crevices. But that is the trouble with examining something that closely. The rocky crevices are really only slight indents and one side of the couch was all I ever had.
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