How To Write a Personal Essay? Go Small to Reveal Life’s Large Themes

THE PERSONAL ESSAY will always be among my favorite forms of discovery. In it, one can have a little look, bounce something in the hand and gather one’s wits on the larger issues of life by reflecting on something small. And in that last phrase is the best advice on how to write the personal essay: Go small.

Granted, fewer venues run them. The New Yorker predicted the utter demise of the personal essay only a year ago. My local public radio station, long a hold-out against what appeared to be a gathering tide against the form, was still running them until recently, which is long after NPR shifted to airing far fewer than they once did.

No matter. I advise my students and clients to write them. After all, if you master the personal essay, you can master the scene. Master the scene and you can write seventy-five of them and have yourself a book. So write them. Anyway, they will be back, of course. Like high (or low) hemlines they are reflective of how much we want to show of ourselves.

How to write a personal essay? Go small. For instance, I find that considering a small object in my life can reveal large, broad themes of meaning. Want an example? I’ve got one right here. This a medium-length example of the form. For shorter shorter versions, see some of my NPR essays. For longer forms, read Longform.

Silver

by Marion Roach Smith

At Christmas in 2004, my sister, Margaret, began giving me silver. Under the tree that morning were several long, slender but heavy boxes wrapped in white satin ribbon and addressed to me. I could not imagine what was in them: matching boxes, six of them all beautifully wrapped. First of all, she never wraps. Margaret gives gifts still in their shopping bags, sometimes swiping the price tags off as she passes them to the receiver.

The big cries of my life are easily recalled by their individual sounds. When the plane lifted off the runway from China and our baby was safely in my arms, I howled with previously unheard relief. A 5-night jag while serving on a molestation trial jury was mostly gasping and hiccuppy; much earlier in life, I achieved a true keening at the Flushing, Queens, corner newsstand reading my father’s obituary. The sound I made that Christmas morning, opening the heavy boxes, was unique as well, its topnote of the pure surprise in being allowed to be so happy. There was no mistaking the gift: only one person on earth would understand the value of it – the giver; only she fully knew what it meant to me to see this silver again.

I still cannot imagine all that went into her thought process as she planned reclaiming this silver. Not just any silver, it’s our parents’ simple wedding pattern which Margaret collects a piece at a time through a dealer in midtown Manhattan. Over the years that she’s been giving it, I’ve wondered if any of the pieces are from the entire service for twelve I pulled around behind me in a suitcase through Manhattan’s diamond district and finally sold one dreadful day in 1985, or perhaps, if it’s the same dealer who finally bought the entire lot.

It had been my assignment to sell it and we had agreed, she and I: The silver – five-piece place-settings for 12 – a diamond ring of Margaret’s, one of mine, and our mother’s diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band. At the last minute, needing to hoist the dollar amount into the needed territory, right off my wrist, I unscrewed the Cartier love bracelet a man had years before given me and tossed it onto the pile, having almost forgotten I still wore it. Frighteningly, it was what had interested the jeweler the most, sweetening for him the pot as I gazed on our otherwise-beloved three rings, each with its own rich history. The sum received was shocking, a quarter perhaps of their monetary worth, and nothing near their emotional value. But it paid for two more weeks of homecare for our mother, Allene, bridging the gap until she’d go into a nursing home. At the time of the sale, our mother was a 56 years-old, late-stage Alzheimer’s patient. Selling the stuff was only one among bad days at that time, of course, but this is not about that.

It’s not that uncommon to come face-to-face with an icon of one’s youth. It can happen at a baseball stadium or at the zoo, but then there are those rare things on which you perhaps prided yourself or assumed were evergreen, or from which you organically acquired your cues toward taste. There in the Christmas wrapping were the long, flat knife handles that I gently fingered during Thanksgiving dinners, the forks I balanced on the backs of my hands as my parents told stories, the spoons from which I fed the dog under the table and ate my grandmother’s cranberry ice from her small silver tureens.

All told, they represented a tribal currency that I had once thought was securely in the bank. There was a time when I thought that people were expected to have silver and china and crystal, and that I expected to have them, choosing them at the time of my own wedding. Merely silver, perhaps, to me it had been gold bullion, a representation of the standard below which you did not slip. Then the exchange rate changed, and the flatware would have to be counted among the least of our losses during that time.

What went away with the silver was only really appraised at full value when I saw it again. I looked as best I could at Margaret over the first of the open boxes, but I remember dropping my head close to my chest, hushed except for the quiet exhalation of something long held in, recognizing in that moment that I was not only understood by her but also accepted for who I am. I had loved these things and apparently neither one of us was ashamed to admit it. It was a genuine reckoning between us.

Gifts can be like that. We know, because mostly they’re not, are they? Usually it’s another purple sweater or cellophaned supermarket flowers, inspiring a silent repetition of the mantra that it’s the thought that counts, the thought that counts. Long ago, I began buying myself a yearly birthday present, sure that a small indulgence is good preventive medicine, a fine hedge against any resentment of either being forgotten or worse, misunderstood. We want to be understood.

When we were kids, Margaret made herself well understood on the topic of gifts. One Christmas in Douglaston, our hometown, she simply made two piles: The keepers and the take-backs, stacking the boxes in their respective columns right there, under the Christmas tree and in front of the givers. She was 15. I was as amazed as I was appalled, but remained inclined to thank my parents and grandparents and shove the gift in some drawer. Not Margaret, who was honest to a fault as soon as she could speak.

Me, I still own a terrycloth bathrobe whose huge turquoise and cerulean blocks make me look like an enormous stained-glass door. It’s one of the yearly gifts my father insisted on buying all by himself, and he’s been dead for 30 years. It hangs in my bathroom to this day, having survived so long from such little use. When she was probably 25, Margaret’s boyfriend asked me to help him with a gift, which I did, buying her the prettiest Tiffany pin, of a single gingko leaf on its stem. She had just begun her serious study of botany and I thought the simplicity as well as the image suited her. She opened the box, looked right at him and said, “You didn’t pick this out, did you?” And back it went.

I may be the loud one, but she’s the tough one, hands down. And never tougher than on gifts. Perhaps the best example is the sweater I knit her that I have never seen her wear. And this is after I let her pick out the yarn, the color, and the pattern: Wool, grey with no flecks of color, no cables, bobbles or anything to break up the boredom of the knitter. Made to spec, I have never once seen it on the woman.

Of course, true to pecking order, when she’s around, I’m always either wearing or using at least one thing she’s given me. But that’s easy to do since her gifts are always exquisite. There’s the string of perfect pearls and the duvet cover, the opal ring, the garnet necklace, two sets of dishes of the bought-new, and then, among the recent hand-me-downs are two black jackets, some formal wear, and two leather couches. To me, she has perfect – if eccentric – taste. I also use the moisturizer she recommends, the shampoo she started me on, as well as the lip balm she does.

Whenever I read those social-science pieces about birth order I always laugh, so heavy are they on language and clinical observation and so utterly naked of the illustration that any sister can provide. This is what the adult big-sister/little sister relationship looks like: one handing off stuff to the other, the other nodding enthusiastically, shucking her shirt right then and there, and putting the new one right on her body. Reversed, the little sister as giver, the big sister screws in her jeweler’s eye and may or may not deign to actually wear the gift, but in accepting it, accepts the giver. And on they go.

These quirky roles irk husbands and lovers, but sisters know that these are the proscribed roles that keep the engine moving forward. Any deviation from these and things start to break down like they did when we were younger and we didn’t value balance. Envisioning families, I see a mobile, and balance as being in the very best interest to those who hang within them. Suspicion, that great heavyweight, throws off the balance, when we ask ourselves why someone did something – why, for instance, she gave me this Godawful thing. From my sister’s point of view, I would be choosing her clothing only were she horribly disabled, while she is expected to choose mine on any given day. Any deviation from that, questions of the heart get asked: Does she really think that of all the things I need, I need this most of all? Doesn’t she know me at all? Another cotton sweater can only make a sister feel like little more than an afterthought.

When these questions start to brew it’s the balance that takes the hit and we struggle in our ways to get it back, overcorrecting as we do on a seesaw or a beam, usually throwing ourselves wildly off course in the effort. In my case, when threatened by Margaret, I usually make the mistake of getting tough with her. Big mistake. Big, since the balance actually depends on the difference between us, and the differing roles being enacted. Balance forbids that we play the same role at the same moment – that I, for instance, get tough, when that’s her role most every time. When she’s needed me to get tough – when she’s been sick or exhausted, I jump like a crazed tiger – but not unless cued by her behavior to do so. Counterweights, we are not bookends. We are sisters.

By the time the silver began to arrive there had been an extended period of balance between us. In several succeeding years a piece or two from the pattern was under the tree. Several people asked about it as it was used at dinner parties, and I found that when I spoke of the silver there was a distinct lack of longing in my voice. It was almost as if the precious metal had become demagnetized and had instead acquired a new charge; shifting away from being about them, it was now about us, this family right now. Having been lost for so long must have abetted that response, but it was more than that. Quite simply, I loved it differently. No longer a currency, it was now a decoration, a pure delight to behold.

As I spied the most recent Christmas box, I quickly did an inventory in my head: I had everything; complete place settings for eight, as well as serving spoons, polished and safely tucked away in silver cloth to be unwrapped later in the day for the Christmas feast.

Tearing open the box, I laughed right out loud as soon as I saw it, spitting my tea right down my pajama front as I did. Margaret shook her head and rolled her eyes, taking me in over her half-rimmed glasses as I waved my new acquisition over my head.

My husband looked at us, and then at what I had in my hand, and asked, “What is that?”

In unison came the reply, “A tomato fork! Of course!” Two sisters, one voice.

It’s my favorite piece. She knew it would be. So damn odd, its sharp little pixie peak and drainage holes make it look like something Dr. Seuss would give the Whos. A frippery, a bibelot it is utterly, absolutely unnecessary to anyone’s life.

It’s perfect.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash