The Best American Essays 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Ariel Levy

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ISSN
0888-3742

ISBN
978-0-544-56962-1

Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

e
ISBN
978-0-544-57921-7
v1.1015

“Islands” by Hilton Als. First published in
Transition
, no. 113. Copyright © 2014 by Hilton Als. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

“This Old Man” by Roger Angell. First published in
The New Yorker
, February 17 and 24, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Roger Angell. Reprinted by permission of Roger Angell.

“Charade” by Kendra Atleework. First published in
Hayden's Ferry Review
, Fall/Winter 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kendra Atleework. Reprinted by permission of Kendra Atleework.

“A Message to the Twenty-First Century” by Isaiah Berlin. First published in the
New York Review of Books
, October 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Isaiah Berlin. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust.

“Strange Days” by Sven Birkerts. First published in
Lapham's Quarterly
, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Sven Birkerts. Reprinted by permission of Sven Birkerts.

“Vision” by Tiffany Briere. First published in
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tiffany Briere. Reprinted by permission of Tiffany Briere.

“My Daughter and God” by Justin Cronin. First published in
Narrative
, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Justin Cronin. From
When I First Held You
edited by Brian Gresko, Penguin 2014. Reprinted by permission of Trident Media Group.

“Difference Maker” by Meghan Daum. First published in
The New Yorker
, September 29, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Meghan Daum. Reprinted by permission of Meghan Daum.

“Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul” by Anthony Doerr. First published in
Granta
(Issue 128), Summer 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Doerr. Reprinted by permission of Anthony Doerr.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

“The Crooked Ladder” by Malcolm Gladwell. First published in
The New Yorker
, August 11 and 18, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Malcolm Gladwell.

“65” by Mark Jacobson. First published in
New York
, April 7–20, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Mark Jacobson. Reprinted by permission of
New York.

“Scenes from a Life in Negroland” by Margo Jefferson. First published in
Guernica
, June 16, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Margo Jefferson. Reprinted by permission of Margo Jefferson.

“Smuggler” by Philip Kennicott. First published in
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Philip Kennicott. Reprinted by permission of Philip Kennicott.

“A Man and His Cat” by Tim Kreider. First published in the
New York Times
, August 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Kreider. Reprinted by permission of Tim Kreider.

“The Loudproof Room” by Kate Lebo. First published in
New England Review
, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kate Lebo. Reprinted by permission of Kate Lebo.

“My Grandma the Poisoner” by John Reed. First published in
Vice
, October 2014. Copyright © 2014 by John Reed. Reprinted by permission of John Reed.

“Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book” by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. First published in
Michigan Quarterly Review
, vol. 53, issue 2, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Ashraf Rushdy. Reprinted by permission of Ashraf Rushdy.

“Stepping Out” by David Sedaris. First published in
The New Yorker
, June 30, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by David Sedaris. Reprinted by permission of David Sedaris.

“Find Your Beach” by Zadie Smith. First published in the
New York Review of Books
, October 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Zadie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White.

“Arrival Gates” by Rebecca Solnit. First published in
Granta
, no. 127, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Solnit. Reprinted by permission of
Granta
and Trinity University Press.

“My Uniform” by Cheryl Strayed. First published in
Tin House
, vol. 15, no. 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Cheryl Strayed. Reprinted by permission of Cheryl Strayed.

“It Will Look Like a Sunset” by Kelly Sundberg. First published in
Guernica
, April 1, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kelly Sundberg. Reprinted by permission of Kelly Sundberg and
Guernica.

W
HEN
I
STARTED
to write the first “Foreword” to this series, now in its thirtieth year, I remember thinking that it would be appropriate, perhaps necessary, to define what I meant by an essay. Here was a new series of books calling attention to a genre that at the time the literary world did not take very seriously. It was hard to forget that just a few years before we launched the series, America's most renowned essayist, E. B. White, acknowledged that “the essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.” If, as White suggested, essays would not win anyone a Nobel Prize, how substandard were they? What exactly was the literary production that this new series would showcase and celebrate?

Thirty years later and I'm still asking myself that question. I think it's clear that the status of the essay has improved over that time (the longevity of this series being a part of the evidence), but a solid, tight definition of the genre featured thus far throughout thirty volumes continues to elude me. I would, of course, happily use another's definition if I could find one I thought satisfactory. With so many different types of essays being published year after year, it seems impossible to identify a few essential features that characterize the genre and encompass all its forms. But perhaps one way into the matter of definition is to ask not what essays
are
but what essayists
do
. What do they do differently from what the generally more respected writers in other genres do? And where else to begin but with Michel de Montaigne?

It's well known that the origin of the modern essay is usually traced to one writer who began composing odd prose pieces in the 1570s. At first he had no literary category to describe what he was doing, nor did he appear even to possess conventional rhetorical aims. In nearly all previous prose compositions, the act of writing remained in the background; Montaigne is perhaps the first to foreground the writing process. In his prose, he refused to adopt, as did his contemporaries, a professional, scholarly, clerical, or judicial authority. He allowed himself no authoritative posture—only that of being an author. As his pieces accumulated, Montaigne settled on the word
essai
to characterize his literary efforts.

The word was an ordinary term that at the time had no literary resonance. Like most common words, it carried a broad range of connotations. The etymology of
essai
can be traced to the late Latin
exagium
, which meant to weigh or a weight. By the fourth century the term had spread to the Romance languages with the additional and modern meaning of “to attempt” or “to try.” (For a fascinating exploration of the word, see John Jeremiah Sullivan's introduction to
Essays 2014.
) Though we normally translate the title of Montaigne's book as
Essays
, suggesting only the genre, we should remember that in his time the term suggested no literary genre and would be read as “attempts” or “trials,” or, since the verb
essayer
had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest to sample, taste, practice, take a risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out, to sound—and these are only a few ways we might understand the term. As Hugo Friedrich says in his splendid study of Montaigne's life and works, the word also implied modest beginnings and a learner's first attempts. The word
essay
, then, served as a caution not to take the work too seriously; these weren't, after all, airtight arguments or conclusive treatises but represented a unique style of prose with an apparently unfinished quality.

Montaigne deliberately pursued an anti-systematic and anti-rhetorical method of composition. He purposefully defied the formal conventions of classification, division, and logical progression that had long characterized serious prose. And he thus established an ironic authorial posture: the art of his essays would be grounded in the illusion of their artlessness. His essays would reflect the mind in process. The writer will not worry about main points and thesis statements, as digressions lead to further digressions and his thematic destination disappears. A practicing Catholic, he doesn't even try to avoid the intellectual mortal sin of inconsistency. For Montaigne, the essay essentially came to represent a compositional challenge to the established rhetorical order, as his fluid thoughts appear to be generated solely from the act of writing and not from a preconceived plan. From this brief description of Montaigne's method we can see how far first-year college writing courses, with their emphasis on clarity, coherence, and distinct rhetorical patterns, have distanced themselves from the original meaning of an essay.

Back in the 1930s, the multitalented J. B. Priestley succinctly and amusingly claimed that an essay is the kind of composition produced by an essayist. In that case, as so many writers have testified, including Virginia Woolf and E. B. White, Montaigne can be regarded as the quintessential essayist: skeptical, ironic, looking at a subject one way and then another while he forms a position that he will undoubtedly qualify, if not completely undermine. Many readers today seem to appreciate writers who aspire to be “subversive”—the word, like
disruptive
, has acquired a positive spin. But Montaigne perfected a manner of self-subversion, and therein lies much of the quality of his intellectual liveliness and enduring appeal, what Virginia Woolf called his “irrepressible vivacity.” She cites his own description of his temperament: “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal.”