Tag: Personal Essay

A family confronts its racial past along the Appalachian Trail.

Do you have an idea for a Longreads essay? Now is the time to share it.

Heather Lanier explores the pressure to perform happiness.

“I got angry, my mother cried, the addicts got high. That became a holiday theme for years to come.”

In her new book, Miranda Ward explores the unique place of almost-motherhood — an uncertain landscape characterized by waiting, wanting, hoping, and not-knowing.

An essay on growing up in the South, legacy, and a place rooted in white supremacy.

Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.

A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.

“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”

James Jung thought he rode the winding narrow roads of the Alps to memorialize his dad. He was wrong.

When your name is Osama and you’re living in post-9/11 America, you always know The Question is coming.

A reporter covering the protests in Portland reflects on fear and trauma, police violence, and her voice as a journalist.

Marcia Aldrich on why cell phones, so thin and light and little, don’t seem fitting for momentous calls, for life and death communications, or for last words.

Personal narratives are powerful. Help us support writers and artists who have these stories to tell.

Why couldn’t this ailing appendage get over itself? Diagnosing a mysterious malady.

Emily Gould reconsiders the likelihood of women’s first-person writing bringing about change.

Daisy Alioto reconsiders the nature of architecture while researching window alarms.

Envy over her success led her husband, also a writer, to become violent. She fights every day for her safety — and to avoid being relegated to obscurity like so many writers who are mothers.

Five years after her mother’s death, while still grieving and suddenly middle-aged, Abby Mims turns to beauty products to cure what ails her.

After leaving fundamentalism, Eve Ettinger grapples with the loaded theological heritage of evangelical personal finance teachings.

Today’s memoirists and personal essay writers owe a debt of gratitude to the Prozac Nation author for rewriting an inhibiting rule.

As a teen, Laura Bond went all out to meet Depeche Mode — and to hang onto her best friend.

Tega Oghenechovwen contemplates the ways in which acute childhood trauma can infect and compromise relationships later in life.

Too Japanese for Americans and too American for the Japanese, one New Jersey native traces the influence of racism on her parents’ careers and her own life.

“Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.”

Five months into her first pregnancy, one writer pursues a research project about the history of home economics, as she struggles with her own concerns about motherhood.

The electric bass chose her, but it took 44 years to heed the call.

A year after the Camp Fire, Tessa Love contemplates home, California’s undoing, and what it means to belong.

One young Ukrainian-American struggles to piece together a clear portrait of her parents’ difficult Soviet past, once they quit erasing, and began embracing, their legacy.

Catherine Texier pushes back against society’s dated ideas about older women, claiming her place among those who are determined to remain vibrant and relevant in the last decades of their lives.