Once upon a time, a writer might contact an agent and confess their desire to publish an essay collection. And once upon a time, an agent might have resisted an urge to laugh in the writer’s face. As a form, essays had fallen out of favor, hard, and finding a home for one both at a publisher and on readers’ bookshelves was an immensely difficult task, especially for a new author.
Thankfully, the tides have reversed, and essay collections like Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror now flourish in bookstores and on bestseller lists. Online publications seeking personal essays abound, providing space and readers for true stories told well. The personal essay, frankly, has never been hotter.
But the rise…