Laptop nonfiction

Greta Rainbow on the state of the braided essay.

In late August, The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter asked whether the braided essay form—creative nonfiction that blends disparate topics and weaves memoir in with criticism, reporting, theory, etc.—still “hit the same,” sending virtual molotov cocktails into the southern France sublets and Long Island houseshares inhabited by publishing professionals who’d made a bag off the personal essay boom. (The author of a recent essay collection remunerated a freelance PR maven with access to her parents’ Hamptons home for one summer; another nonfiction author paid the same publicist via Chanel purse.)

At the risk of signal-boosting some incredibly boring information about New York, I have not stopped thinking about the question editor Jasmine Vojdani posed, nor her colleagues’ responses—especially the declaration of Emily Gould, a media personality whom, after years of reading about her life, I feel that I know intimately: “Personal narrative on its own is not enough. I obviously think that’s a bummer.” 

I’m defensive of the braided essays I love and the ones I’ve written and will write. I’m clinging to the hair tie. But I agree with No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce author Haley Mlotek, I’m “just as aware as anybody else is of the cliches and the shortcuts that fragments or braided essay structures allow people to take.” I am also aware of the gendered element of the form; Rayne Fisher-Quann, author of forthcoming essay collection Complex Female Character, notes, “People read a lot of confession into women’s writing, or identify a diaristic quality where there maybe isn’t.” Maybe they’re just writing about life. Men, of course, can write braided essays too. Who among us didn’t read Daniel Kolitz’s viral Harper’s reported essay and ask themselves, “So when is this guy going to goon?”

I spoke with a dozen writers whose work has been classed by themselves or by publishers as braided and found that the challenges facing the braided essay are inextricable from the issues facing creative nonfiction in general. As the writer Leah Abrams summarized, “I guess you could say I write braided essays in the sense that I write essays.”

These terms are admittedly murky, constructed, and in service of marketing managers’ desires more than the author’s. Lynne Tillman told me she hates the term “creative nonfiction” because even grocery lists and legal briefs require making something up. Anne Boyer thinks that “what the term ‘lyric essay’ does, despite the best intentions of the many who use it, is loud-signal the neoliberal creative writing program’s attempted rationalization of literary production.” In The Yale Review, critic Brian Dillon shudders at all these qualifiers—like the “personal” in “personal essay” or “poetic” in “poetic criticism”—because if you have to add the adjective then you misunderstand the capabilities of the noun. “A kind of snobbery turns me right off ‘braided’ or ‘hybrid’ forms and makes me think: your form is hybrid because you have failed to inte­grate its elements—in the end, failed to write.” 

This may be harsh, but not writing is actually the endeavor of a lot of amateur work. A writer sets out to be impressionistic, but moving away from the painting does not make the haystacks any clearer. What do all the fragments add up to, beyond fulfillment of the fantasy of publication? “Every essay is an argument, even if it's just arguing to be worth your time,” says Abrams. If writing feels like detangling your hair in the shower and throwing the clump away, you can’t leave the strands on the wall. Author Lilly Dancyger, who offers an independent study course on braided essays, shares the most common mistake: “It's not enough to put little nuggets of research next to scenes of your personal story—you have to do the work of making connections between the threads.” Ariella Garmaise, a writer and an editor at The Walrus, says “you can always tell when someone is interested in one thread more than another. Just kill the crane.”

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