Sitting on a shelf in my library in Vermont are 39 volumes of the Best American Essays.  The series was launched in 1986 with Robert Atwan the editor of the series and Elizabeth Hardwick as the first guest editor.  The subsequent 38 years saw each volume begin with a Foreword by Atwan and an Introducton by the guest editor, an honor held by some of the best writers of the last 40 years—-Gay Talese, Annie Dillard, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Adam Gopnik, Mary Oliver—well you get the idea.

This the 39th volume is the first in the series with a new Series Editor, Kim Dana Kupperman, an essayist, anthology editor, and former managing editor of the Gettysburg Review.  She devoted her Foreword to decrying the censorship that is becoming widespread in today’s America—book banning, self-censorship by newspaper editors, etc.  I was not terribly impressed with the writing, but on the other hand, she did choose Wesley Morris as this volume’s guest editor, and Morris is incredible.

The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his criticism at first the Boston Globe and more recently the New York Times where he is the critic-at-large, Morris has chosen 22 essays which are powerfully moving and exemplars of why this writing form has emerged in recent decades as the optimal method for exploring varied topics and subjects. Whether in op-ed pieces, magazine articles, web sites, or literary journals, the personal essay is in the ascendency.

Most of these 22 essays are personal in nature, exploring life in ways that Morris describes as “…they did a little of everything to me: surprise, astound, bewtich, reframe, knock me down, crack me up, push, enlighten, inspire.”  All I can say is, “Me, too”.

If you are not a reader of essays, please read this volume.  It will undoubtedly speak to you in ways different from how it spoke to me, since each of us has such different life experiences.  For me, there were three essays that I found especially powerful and which I re-read and intend to read yet again.

The first was Sallie Tisdale’s essay about memory. In her own memoir writing she is committed to the factual, refusing to create dialogue that she could not possibly recall or situations from early childhood that would have been impossible to remember at such a young age.  However, while committed to the factual, she realizes that ‘factual’ may be a fallacy given how imperfect our memories are.  In clear and concise prose she explores the science of memory, the encoding, creation of a pattern, and consolidation that occurs in our trillions of neurons in the brain and the likelihood that autobiographical memory is ‘made up’.  She explores the human need to create a narrative of our life, but comes to understand that this story my ‘bear little resemblance to the genuine mess of actual life.”  She concludes that “This writer’s self can’t stop telling stories, but I may never write memoir again….Lived life is past and present and future all receding at once.  ..What we remember is often what we woud just as soon forget; the future is always bearing down, an endless distraction.  I know myself as a glitter of synaptic activation, a flimsy thing easily swept aside.  A ceaselessly increasing sum materializing out of nothingness, each integer instantly flung behind me.  I am persistent. I am transient.  Memory is not a fixed object, and neither am I”.  Whew!  Great piece of writing.

The second essay will stay with me for a long time (?memory enabling), the one by Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic.  In her essay, “The Ones We Sent Away”, Senior tells the story of her Aunt Adele, her mother’s sister who had been placed at the horrific state ‘school’ Willowbrook when she was 3 years old because she was ‘retarded’.  The best medical advice at the time was to remove the affected child from the home so as not to have a negative impact on the other child(ren).   Adele was eventually rescued from the nightmare that was Willowbrook and spent her last 20 years in a small group residence with loving caregivers, eventually learning to walk, talk, express simple thoughts, and recognize her family.  Senior and her mother, Adele’s sister became reinvolved with her, and by the time of her death at 72, a caring relationship had been re-established.  At the shiva, Senior’s mother spoke about how reconnecting with her sister had ‘opened her heart to Adele after shutting her out for nearly seventy years, and I found myself loving her again the same way I did as six-year old child.”

While I think that most readers would react emotionally to this story of loss, family secrets, love, and healing, for me it was an overwhelming experience.  I, too, had a sister who was severely developmentally delayed after a bout of measles encephalitis (I hate you RFK, Jr.!) when she was an infant. Beverly, like Adele, was placed in a state hospital in Illinois so as not to ‘hinder my development’, and like Senior’s story, I was not aware of her existence until I was 16 and met her for the first time when I was 25 and became her guardian.  At the time I was a medical student, and my wife, a social work student, gently prodded me to get involved for which I will be forever grateful. Like Adele, Beverly spent her last years in a community residence, attended to with love and care, but unlike Adele, she never walked, talked, or recognized us.  My mother eventually came to terms with Beverly’s exile and re-entry into the family, visiting her and sending her presents until Beverly died at 70.  Senior’s essay, like all great writing, moved me, and I think will move you, too.

The third essay which I found powerful was Yiyun Li’s story about her family and her garden. I can’t give details or it would spoil the shock of a revelation part way through the essay, a revelation that I associated with Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”, a comparison that Li herself makes several pages later.

I could go on and on about these three essays and the other 19 as well, but this is already too long. If you are not a reader of essays, you would do well to start with this volume and then move on to read the incredible work of contemporary writers like Geoff Dyer, Annie Fadiman, Rebecca Solnit, Kathryn Schulz, Adam Gopnik, and Lauren Slater before you turn to the greats of the recent past like Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, and David Foster Wallace and the greats of the more distant past, Orwell, Woolf, Levi, Baldwin.