Ep 54: The End of the Personal Essay

Monocycle with Leandra Medine

Monocycle

Arts

4.9 • 779 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There was an article that ran in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago called "The Personal Essay Boom is Over." In it, writer Jia Tolentino reflected on the writing genre's heyday -- citing sites that no longer exist, like xoJane and Gawker as having heralded the uncomfortably intimate or conversely curiously insignificant style of storytelling. The headline alone, of course, scared the shit out of me given that I don't think I even know how to have a thought about a third-party without somehow bringing it back to me. So much of what I write rides on the events of my life -- I wear my guts on my sleeve. I can't help it. I'm not even sure I want to help it. And when it comes to the writers who are enlisted to represent the Man Repeller ethos, it is my belief the best kind of editorial leader is willing to let her writer explore their identities -- to express what's on their minds within a controlled environment. This week on Monocycle, our editorial director, Leslie Price and I talk about the personal essay boom. Is it over? Perhaps. What does that mean for properties who thrive on it, who believe their best content is personal. Good content, of course, can't ever be "over." So what makes it good? How are we serving it? Are there ways we can do it better. Listen in and share a thought and if you're curious... This episode of Monocycle is edited by Nicholas "Quazzy" Herd. Logo illustration by Kelly Shami. Photo by Mel Finkelstein/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, hey, hi. Welcome back to Monocycle, a weekly 10-minute podcast brought to you by
0:08.5	Man Repeller, hosted by me, Leandra Medine. I'm sitting here with Leslie, our editorial director.
0:14.2	You might remember her from an episode that we aired earlier this year about the backlash to the
0:20.0	Mark Jacobs show and the cultural
0:21.5	appropriation pertaining to the dreadlocks that were used in the September show.
0:27.1	You also might recognize her name from the site.
0:29.8	She often writes about wellness being over and the rules of sweet green, which is a very
0:34.2	fancy and famous salad shop down the block from our office.
0:38.2	Anyway, we've been having a lot of conversations in our daily one-on-ones
0:42.1	about the way in which content and edit is changing.
0:46.5	And Leslie obviously has more experience than I do
0:49.8	because she's been doing this for how long?
0:54.4	She's been doing edit mostly, well, not really mostly on the internet,
0:57.4	but for the last like eight, nine years.
0:59.6	On the internet.
1:00.2	Has been working on the internet.
1:01.6	And the way in which content is changing right now is remarkable because it's happening
1:07.4	so quickly and there's no, there's really no time to, to grab the rug that's
1:13.3	underneath you. It's like constantly being pulled out from under us. Yeah, we were talking about
1:17.7	this after the election because it felt like we were watching in real time as people processed
1:23.6	emotions and we were watching in real time the evolution of how people were
1:29.3	responding online with content and I think that's a great example of what we're
	...

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