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A review by e333mily
Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon
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?”