![]() ![]() The films and TV shows of the 80s and 90s-cultural touchstones that practically raised a generation-hardly ever featured larger women on screen. “The Trash Heap Has Spoken” by Carmen Maria Machado In a few sentences, we get a clear picture of Warren's fun-loving, gregarious personality and how he fits in with the rest of the group.Ĥ. ![]() What Warren really loved was cocktail hour.” He could not do most of the physical activities required by the trip, but had been on ninety-five Earthwatch expeditions, including this one once before. Each of the volunteer researchers on Hauser’s expedition are distinct and recognizable though Hauser is economical in her descriptions.įor example, Hauser describes one researcher as “an eighty-four-year-old bachelor from Minnesota. With short personal narratives, there isn’t as much room to develop characters as you might have in a memoir so the details you do provide need to be clear and specific. ![]() In her attempts to make herself smaller, less needy, to please her fiance, she lost sight of herself and almost signed up to live someone else’s life, but among the whooping cranes of Texas, she takes the first step in reconnecting with herself. Hauser’s interactions with the other volunteer researchers expand the scope of the narrative from her own mind, reminding her of the compassion she lacked in her relationship. She pulls together many seemingly disparate threads, using the expedition and the Japanese myth of the crane wife as a metaphor for her struggles. In this new environment, she reflects on the toxic relationship she left and how she found herself in this situation. “The Crane Wife” by CJ Hauserĭays after breaking off her engagement with her fiance, CJ Hauser joins a scientific expedition on the Texas coast r esearching whooping cranes. This detail, however small, invites the reader into her private life and frames this essay as a story about her-and not just an exercise in being contrary. ![]() While some might point out that this is merely an opinion piece, Lamott cannily starts the essay by grounding it in the personal, revealing how she did not raise her son to celebrate Mother’s Day. In a personal narrative essay, lived experience can be almost as valid as peer-reviewed research-so long as you avoid making unfounded assumptions. While it isn’t anchored to a single story or event (like many classic personal narratives), Lamott’s exploration of her opinions creates a story about a culture that puts mothers on an impossible pedestal. More importantly, she notes how this Hallmark holiday erases all the people who helped raise a woman, a long chain of mothers and fathers, friends and found family, who enable her to become a mother. Lamott points out that not all mothers are good, not everyone has a living mother to celebrate, and some mothers have lost their children, so have no one to celebrate with them. At once a personal narrative and a cultural commentary, Lamott explores the harmful effects that Mother’s Day may have on society-how its blind reverence to the concept of motherhood erases women’s agency and freedom to be flawed human beings. The author of the classic writing text Bird by Bird digs into her views on motherhood in this piece from Salon. From this, we can see how a certain amount of dramatization can increase the impact of your message-even if that wasn’t exactly the way something happened.Ģ. Shteyngart imagines a Manhattan that physically changes around him when he’s using his iPhone, becoming an almost unrecognizable world. Just because a piece of writing is technically nonfiction, that doesn’t mean that the narrative needs to be literal. The downfalls of technology is hardly a new topic, but Shteyngart’s story remains evergreen because of how our culture has only spiraled further down the rabbit hole of technology addiction in the intervening years. But once he leaves for the country, and abandons the convenience of a cell phone connection, the real world comes rushing back in and he remembers what he’s been missing out on. He’s completely lost to the magical happenstance of the city as he “follow the arrow taco-ward”. In this narrative, Shteyngart navigates Manhattan using his new iPhone-or more accurately, is led by his iPhone, completely oblivious to the world around him. Published in 2010, just as smartphones were becoming a ubiquitous part of modern life, this piece echoes many of our fears surrounding technology and how it often distances us from reality. Personal narratives don’t have to be long to be effective, as this thousand-word gem from the NYT book review proves. ![]()
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