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A review by juliechristinejohnson
The Best American Essays 2015 by Kelly Sundberg, Robert Atwan, Mark Jacobson, Kate Lebo, Ariel Levy, Anthony Doerr, Rebecca Solnit, John Reed, Zadie Smith, David Sedaris, Tiffany Briere, Isaiah Berlin, Philip Kennicott, Margo Jefferson, Cheryl Strayed, Kendra Atleework, Roger Angell, Tim Kreider, Meghan Daum
4.0
My first BAE! A trusted reader recommended the anthology and upon finishing I thought, "What took me so long to read one of these?" It's like having access to all those wonderful literary journals and magazines I can't afford, just there, on my nightstand, for my usual 3 a.m. open eyes.
So many of the names in this collection are familiar: Justin Cronin, Anthony Doerr, Malcolm Gladwell, Margo Jefferson, Kate Lebo, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed that I wondered, "Did these marquee names really write the best American essays of 2015?, or do they remain marquee names because their writing is just that good?" In a couple instances, I felt the writer's inclusion had more to do with attracting a certain demographic into reaching for an anthology of essays than it did with the actual quality of the work.
But let's not worry about the few pieces I found forgettable. Because I've forgotten them already. Let's talk about the ones that made me tremble, laugh, cry, shake in outrage or wonder.
Aging seemed to be the only theme uniting some of these essays, and editor Ariel Levy cites the prevalence of essays on growing old published in the American essay canon this past year. Roger Angell wrote This Old Man at the remarkable milestone of ninety-three (I say "milestone" because I reckon each year over ninety deserves to be lauded). Sven Birkerts convalesces in Strange Days. Mark Jacobson looks at 65 and realizes he's reached a true milestone when the world deems him "old".
But the one that got to me, the one I could read over and over, the one I'd read at a slumber party, if I wasn't too old for slumber parties, is John Reed's ohmygodohmygodohmygod My Grandma the Poisoner/ Yeah, it's about an old woman, but she wasn't always old. Question is, why didn't anyone notice she was always evil? Brrr... chilling. Unputdownable.
Despite the emphasis on aging and bodies broken down by time, it is the work of two younger writers that stopped me in my tracks. Kendra Atleework's Charade cries out to be a full-length work. Her writing is stunning. Raw. This is a true story, but I ache to read the rest, either as a novel, or in memoir form. Watch this writer. You will see her again. Kelly Sundberg's essay about her perfect marriage-turned-horror-show of abuse, It Will Look Like a Sunset is a perfect example of how the most intelligent, perceptive, strong people can lose their way, can be detoured by fear, manipulation, shame, and guilt. It is an exceptional piece of writing from yet another rising voice in creative non-fiction.
Anthony Doerr's meditation on one of the founding families of Boise, Idaho, Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul, is poignant and beautiful, as is most everything he writes. And then there is David Sedaris being utterly true to character, his usual unusual laugh-out-loud self, in Stepping Out.
Scenes for a Life in Negroland is one of my favorite pieces of this collection. Jefferson opens a window into her childhood, growing up in a upper-class Chicago neighborhood, the child of highly-educated, well-off parents.
Philip Kennicott and Kate Lebo explore a different type of identity, in Smuggler and The Loudproof Room, respectively. Kennicott recalls encountering same-sex desire in literature and finding at last a common narrative to help shape and define his own feelings; Lebo's compromised hearing allows her to experience the world in ways she's not certain she's ready to give up to corrective surgery.
I end with the two pieces that took my breath away: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book and Rebecca Solnit's Arrival Gates. Rushdy's piece speaks of past anguish that has caught up to our present, except that today we do not speak of lynchings, we hear instead the oft-repeated phrase, "police shooting of an unarmed black man", we see the statistics behind mass incarceration, we have to point out that Black Lives Matter, because Jim Crow still walks amongst us. Rushdy writes of his index, a listing of names—the names of the murdered, the murderers, those who fought to change the system and the culture; place names, dates—an alphabetical history of lynching in the United States.
I saved Solnit's essay for last, even though it is not the last in the BAE 2015, because: Rebecca Solnit. She does not disappoint. Solnit writes of traveling to Japan to see first-hand how the 2011 disaster trifecta has affected the country one year later and, in Solnit-style, this objective leads her into a journey of a different sort. She wanders through a park outside Kyoto and contemplates the representation of time, what we mean when we say "arrival" and how to be present with our own past and future. It's an essay I will return to, one that make this particular volume a keeper in my personal library.
So many of the names in this collection are familiar: Justin Cronin, Anthony Doerr, Malcolm Gladwell, Margo Jefferson, Kate Lebo, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed that I wondered, "Did these marquee names really write the best American essays of 2015?, or do they remain marquee names because their writing is just that good?" In a couple instances, I felt the writer's inclusion had more to do with attracting a certain demographic into reaching for an anthology of essays than it did with the actual quality of the work.
But let's not worry about the few pieces I found forgettable. Because I've forgotten them already. Let's talk about the ones that made me tremble, laugh, cry, shake in outrage or wonder.
Aging seemed to be the only theme uniting some of these essays, and editor Ariel Levy cites the prevalence of essays on growing old published in the American essay canon this past year. Roger Angell wrote This Old Man at the remarkable milestone of ninety-three (I say "milestone" because I reckon each year over ninety deserves to be lauded). Sven Birkerts convalesces in Strange Days. Mark Jacobson looks at 65 and realizes he's reached a true milestone when the world deems him "old".
But the one that got to me, the one I could read over and over, the one I'd read at a slumber party, if I wasn't too old for slumber parties, is John Reed's ohmygodohmygodohmygod My Grandma the Poisoner/ Yeah, it's about an old woman, but she wasn't always old. Question is, why didn't anyone notice she was always evil? Brrr... chilling. Unputdownable.
Despite the emphasis on aging and bodies broken down by time, it is the work of two younger writers that stopped me in my tracks. Kendra Atleework's Charade cries out to be a full-length work. Her writing is stunning. Raw. This is a true story, but I ache to read the rest, either as a novel, or in memoir form. Watch this writer. You will see her again. Kelly Sundberg's essay about her perfect marriage-turned-horror-show of abuse, It Will Look Like a Sunset is a perfect example of how the most intelligent, perceptive, strong people can lose their way, can be detoured by fear, manipulation, shame, and guilt. It is an exceptional piece of writing from yet another rising voice in creative non-fiction.
Anthony Doerr's meditation on one of the founding families of Boise, Idaho, Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul, is poignant and beautiful, as is most everything he writes. And then there is David Sedaris being utterly true to character, his usual unusual laugh-out-loud self, in Stepping Out.
Scenes for a Life in Negroland is one of my favorite pieces of this collection. Jefferson opens a window into her childhood, growing up in a upper-class Chicago neighborhood, the child of highly-educated, well-off parents.
We thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all class of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked.It's at first a fascinating, then a shattering, look at racial culture and racism in years leading up the Civil Rights movement of the early 60s.
Philip Kennicott and Kate Lebo explore a different type of identity, in Smuggler and The Loudproof Room, respectively. Kennicott recalls encountering same-sex desire in literature and finding at last a common narrative to help shape and define his own feelings; Lebo's compromised hearing allows her to experience the world in ways she's not certain she's ready to give up to corrective surgery.
I end with the two pieces that took my breath away: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book and Rebecca Solnit's Arrival Gates. Rushdy's piece speaks of past anguish that has caught up to our present, except that today we do not speak of lynchings, we hear instead the oft-repeated phrase, "police shooting of an unarmed black man", we see the statistics behind mass incarceration, we have to point out that Black Lives Matter, because Jim Crow still walks amongst us. Rushdy writes of his index, a listing of names—the names of the murdered, the murderers, those who fought to change the system and the culture; place names, dates—an alphabetical history of lynching in the United States.
... the index, the part with the least imaginative input ... contain a great deal of emotional energy that is probably no readily apparent to the reader.It is a profound piece of writing.
I saved Solnit's essay for last, even though it is not the last in the BAE 2015, because: Rebecca Solnit. She does not disappoint. Solnit writes of traveling to Japan to see first-hand how the 2011 disaster trifecta has affected the country one year later and, in Solnit-style, this objective leads her into a journey of a different sort. She wanders through a park outside Kyoto and contemplates the representation of time, what we mean when we say "arrival" and how to be present with our own past and future. It's an essay I will return to, one that make this particular volume a keeper in my personal library.