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e333mily's review against another edition
5.0
Every now and then I’m drawn back to the opening line of Emily Skilling’s ‘Bay’— “I feel a nessness”. That’s how I want to describe all my favourite pieces of writing—I feel a nessness while reading them. Because there’s no particular feeling or style or topic that joins them together in my heart, it’s just a certain ineffable quality that sinks in and touches something, though I’m not sure exactly what.
Which is really just to say: I loved this book! And I am so grateful to my dear friend Alexandra for lending it to me (and also: there is a nessness about the temporality of a loaned book. I have been taking pictures of my favourite passages instead of underlining, which feels like a sort of agreement between me and this copy, a promise that l will keep some part of it, some fragments, with me).
- - -
“What exactly do I mean, even, by "style"? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. […] "I like your style" means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I'm a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.”
“I started with a list —well, here is one more, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: […] Parataxis says: this happened, and then that happened, followed by this other. And so on, on, on.”
“As if I were packing my suitcase like Didion, I list all the things I want to put in an essay. I treat the essay as a container, because I want to smother the anxiety that comes with writing, because if I have a plan (and my plans are always lists, not diagrams) then I will not have to face the blank page or screen without a word or thought in my head. I can simply follow the entries in the list in their turn-A to Z, one to infinity. Except: the list, if it's doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making.”
“(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one's reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)”
“But how else to write? How else to be? And always the question, bound up with being, of who to read, what books and especially what essays might change things—change me.”
“Its a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure or acutest expression. […] But, but, but: what if the cliché has been there all the time, what if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? What then?”

Which is really just to say: I loved this book! And I am so grateful to my dear friend Alexandra for lending it to me (and also: there is a nessness about the temporality of a loaned book. I have been taking pictures of my favourite passages instead of underlining, which feels like a sort of agreement between me and this copy, a promise that l will keep some part of it, some fragments, with me).
- - -
“What exactly do I mean, even, by "style"? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. […] "I like your style" means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I'm a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.”
“I started with a list —well, here is one more, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: […] Parataxis says: this happened, and then that happened, followed by this other. And so on, on, on.”
“As if I were packing my suitcase like Didion, I list all the things I want to put in an essay. I treat the essay as a container, because I want to smother the anxiety that comes with writing, because if I have a plan (and my plans are always lists, not diagrams) then I will not have to face the blank page or screen without a word or thought in my head. I can simply follow the entries in the list in their turn-A to Z, one to infinity. Except: the list, if it's doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making.”
“(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one's reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)”
“But how else to write? How else to be? And always the question, bound up with being, of who to read, what books and especially what essays might change things—change me.”
“Its a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure or acutest expression. […] But, but, but: what if the cliché has been there all the time, what if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? What then?”

keight's review against another edition
4.0
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at "therefore") at the level of thought. Not to mention feeling. Picture if you can its profile on the page: from a solid spate of argument or narrative to isolated promontories of text, these composing in their sum the archipelago of a work, or a body of work. The page an estuary, dotted at intervals with typographical buoys or markers. And all the currents or sediments in between: sermons, dialogues, lists and surveys, small eddies of print or whole books construed as single essays. A shoal or school made of these. Listen for possible cadences this thing might create: orotund and authoritative; ardent and fizzing; slow and exacting to the point of pain or pleasure; halting, vulnerable, tentative; brutal and peremptory; a shuffling or amalgam of all such actions or qualities. An uncharted tract or plain. And yet certain ancient routes allow us to pilot our way through to the source, then out again, adventuring.
A love letter to the essay and its writers, Brian Dillon doesn't analyze the form or detail its history, but rather waxes lyrical. The book is, of course, essentially a collection of essays itself, and while it may ostensibly focus on different techniques — as "On Lists" examines Joan Didion's use of that format in The White Album — it's not trying to be instructive either. Over the course of Essayism, Dillon provides increasingly personal context for why he loves this particular type of writing, in the recurring "On Consolation" entries in particular.
Read more on my booklog
A love letter to the essay and its writers, Brian Dillon doesn't analyze the form or detail its history, but rather waxes lyrical. The book is, of course, essentially a collection of essays itself, and while it may ostensibly focus on different techniques — as "On Lists" examines Joan Didion's use of that format in The White Album — it's not trying to be instructive either. Over the course of Essayism, Dillon provides increasingly personal context for why he loves this particular type of writing, in the recurring "On Consolation" entries in particular.
Read more on my booklog
honest_soupe's review
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Loved this book. It made me reflect on elements of myself and I loved how much the book showed you through its own existence the methodology of essays.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Suicide, Chronic illness, Grief, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, and Death of parent
lifeinpoetry's review against another edition
4.0
Went from somewhat interesting to fascinating once the author dedicated themselves to writing on depression and essays.
katie_bookey's review
DNF at page 53. I thought this book was going to be practical or, at the very least, inspirational in my own writing of short-form work. It's more of a memoir/book of random thoughts. I was willing to give it a chance until he started quoting authors who repeatedly used the f-bomb and made gross sexual innuendos. Just not for me.
emilyrowanstudio's review
4.0
I preferred the chapters(?) on his experience with depression, but can't deny these go hand in hand with the ones about essayism itself. A very strange book, and one that needs to be read as a whole to be understood. The beginning is surely pretentious and difficult to read, but it's well worth sticking with for the moving and insightful way he writes about depression, and how reading and writing brought/bring him back to himself. As another reviewer said, a great book for those who enjoy reading about reading.