The Best American Essays 2014

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ISSN
0888-3742

ISBN
978-0-544-30990-6

e
ISBN
978-0-544-30932-6
v1.0914

“A Matter of Life and Death” by Timothy Aubry. First published in
The Point,
#I Fall 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Timothy Aubry. Reprinted by permission of
The Point
and Timothy Aubry.

“Strange Beads” by Wendy Brenner. First published in
Oxford American,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Wendy Brenner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Final Day in Rome” by John H. Culver. First published in
The Gettysburg Review,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2014 by John H. Culver. Reprinted by permission of John H. Culver.

“Letter from Williamsburg” by Kristin Dombek. First published in
The Paris Review,
#205, Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by
The Paris Review.
Reprinted by permission of
The Paris Review
and Kristin Dombek. Excerpt from “Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World” from
Things of This World
by Richard Wilbur. Copyright Â© 1956 and renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“The Man at the River” by Dave Eggers. First published in
Granta,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2014 by Dave Eggers. Reprinted by permission of
Granta
and the author.

“At Sixty-Five” by Emily Fox Gordon. First published in
The American Scholar,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Emily Fox Gordon. Reprinted by permission of Emily Fox Gordon.

“On Enmity” by Mary Gordon. First published in
Salmagundi,
Winter 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Mary Gordon. Reprinted by permission of the author and
Salmagundi.

“Letter from Greenwich Village” by Vivian Gornick. First published in
The Paris Review,
#204, Spring 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by
The Paris Review.
Reprinted by permission of
The Paris Review
and Vivian Gornick.

“Slickheads” by Lawrence Jackson. First published in
n+
1
,
Winter 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Lawrence Jackson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Devil's Bait” by Leslie Jamison. First published in
Harper's Magazine,
September 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Leslie Jamison. Reprinted by permission of Leslie Jamison.

“Thanksgiving in Mongolia” by Ariel Levy. First published in
The New Yorker,
November 18, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Ariel Levy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” by Yiyun Li. First published in
A Public Space,
#19, Fall 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Yiyun Li. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Sliver of Sky” by Barry Lopez. First published in
Harper's Magazine,
January 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Barry Lopez. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic.

“Someone Else” by Chris Offutt. First published in
River Teeth,
Fall 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Chris Offutt. Reprinted by permission of Chris Offutt.

“Becoming Them” by James Wood. First published in
The New Yorker,
January 21, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by James Wood. Reprinted by permission of James Wood. Excerpt from “How Shall I Mourn Them?” by Lydia Davis from
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
Copyright Â© 2009 by Lydia Davis. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Foreword

In recent years we've heard a lot about the issue of truth in nonfiction, the impetus for this topic deriving mainly from a stream of disingenuous memoirs. By truthâand I'll avoid the customary nervous quote marksâwe generally mean how honestly and accurately the writing represents the actions and events the writer depicts. Is the writer telling us exactly what happened? Is he embellishing, fabricating, making things up, in an attempt to tell a compelling story (ah, that potentially deceitful narrative arc!) or to characterize himself as attractively virtuous or appealingly naughty? Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars.

I've addressed the topic of truth in nonfiction in several talks and essays (including the foreword to the 2008 edition of
The Best American Essays
), maintaining essentially that unless the incidents or factual references are in some ways verifiable, we usuallyâshort of confession or recantationâhave no way of knowing whether a nonfiction writer is telling the truth, especially when details remain unconfirmed, utterly private, or trivial. No one has ever verified the now famous deaths of George Orwell's elephant or Virginia Woolf's moth, though the passing of E.Â B. White's poor pig can actually be documented.

But truth in nonfiction involves more than accuracy, sincerity, documentation, or verifiability. Not all essays take the form of personal narratives that recount a string of events in a candid tone of voice; many offer personal opinions on various topics, whether general (growing old) or topical (health care). Most such nonnarrative essays pose a different set of criteria for assessing truth. In the territory of argument and exposition, we look at claims, evidence, consistency, and logical coherence. If all we can hope for in nonfiction narrative is verifiability, in opinion essays we demand validity. We want to see at the minimum that conclusions follow from premises. But testing the premises is another matter. Three essays, all demonstrating dramatically different opinions, can all be grounded in valid arguments.

So, as useful as they are in establishing degrees of truth and truthfulness, verifiability and validity do not always take us very far. And, of course, they have little to do with the literary value of essays and creative nonfiction in general. I remember in college courses we made a rough distinction between the essay as a literary genre (whether belletristic or experimental) and the essay as
functional
prose that explained, proposed, persuaded, or argued. In my writing class we were asked to write both. I distinctly recall one assignment requiring a stylistic imitation of Addison and Steele's
Spectator
papers, and another asking us to express an opinion about whether teachers should unionize. One instructor along the way called the later type “purposeful prose.” To appreciate the literary essay required the application of aesthetic criteria similar to those used for works of the imagination; to appreciate the purposeful essay it helped to know the rules of rhetoric.

A useful rough distinction, but it's not that simple. Too many essays emerge out of a blend of rhetoric and poetics, and the line between aesthetics and purpose can be blurry at best. When purposefully engaged in a topic, a talented essayist will still offer fresh observations and even surprising conclusions, and do so while attending closely to style and voice. The problem with most topical essaysâespecially those caught up in current controversiesâis that from a literary standpoint they are usually predictable: the conclusions predictable, the prose predictable, the perspective predictable. By a stretch, we may still call these “essays,” but they don't behave like essays that want to engage in the struggle of ideas, attack stale thought, or suggest new insights.

I've come to think that one reason for the oppressive predictability of polemical essays can be found in today's polarized social and political climate. To paraphrase Emerson: “If I know your party, I anticipate your argument.” Not merely about politics but about everything. Clearly this acrimonious state of affairs is not conducive to writing essays that display independent thought and complex perspectives. Most of us open magazines, newspapers, and websites knowing precisely what to expect. Many readers apparently enjoy being members of the choir. In our rancorously partisan environment, conclusions don't follow from premises and evidence but precede them. Some classical fallacies I once learned and respectedâad hominem, hasty generalization, either-or reasoning, slippery slope, guilt by associationâappear to be no longer flimsy fallacies but fundamental strategies of argument. It's worrisome to think that we may be approaching a writing situation that worried Robert Frost: that thinking would become equivalent to voting.

Such an opinionated, partisan atmosphere makes essaying a risky and endangered method of communication. The essay genre, as Montaigne invented and nurtured it, thrives on the attempt to see the multiple sides of issues and conflicts, to suspend judgments and conclusions, to entertain opposing opinions. That's why he modestly called the work he was doing “essays,” that is, attempts, trials, thought experiments (but see John Jeremiah Sullivan's introduction for a brilliant in-depth examination of Montaigne's tricky term). For Montaigne, truth was essential, but it lived only in its quest. He perfectly describes his project in a late essay, “Of the Art of Discussion”: “I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds in me a bad soil to penetrate and take deep roots in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.” He goes on in the same essay (I'm relying on the Donald Frame translation) to condemn the self-satisfied “stupidity” of those who cling stubbornly and happily to their beliefs and opinions: “Nothing vexes me so much in stupidity as the fact that it is better pleased with itself than any reason can reasonably be. It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance.”

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