Essay Excerpts
In 2023, after a decade of ignoring the gnawing need to write for myself, I enrolled in a personal essay class. By now I’ve taken seven such classes and wanted to share a few fragments excavated from my essays.
My grandmother and my grandfather left New York City.
Slowly at first, like snow geese, thawing their feathers among the golf courses and orange groves of Boynton Beach, Florida. Where salamanders limbo under the lips of porch screens and golf club grille rooms serve BLTs on challah and on rye.
—Excerpt from “No One Stays in New York City,” an essay about the transience of the city and my familial history.
Feigning stomach aches, I would camp out at the nurse’s office and skip nearly every period of penmanship.
28 years later, my cursive is only good enough for signing a check and I have self-diagnosed IBS. (Serves me right, right?)
—Excerpt from “Ways to Unravel,” an extensive essay where lots of little vignettes about falling apart come together.
In Santa Cruz, riding back from a first date, I crashed my bike and tore my gauzy pants from Barney’s (R.I.P.).
We had watched the surfers from the cliffs while we spat out olive pits and killed a bottle of wine. It was newly dark and even though I had lights on my bike, I couldn't see the recycling bins swerving into the bike lane. A car passed by, but didn't offer to help as I flailed around the middle of West Cliff Drive.
—Excerpt from “Ways to Unravel,” an extensive essay where lots of little vignettes about falling apart come together.
Growing up, making jam was a family affair.
The five of us—that’s including the dog—would head west in the station wagon into the belly of Massachusetts. We kerplunked through the fields with plastic buckets yarned around our necks, filling the containers with fat, ripe fruit. Depending on the month, we’d pick blueberries, strawberries, or raspberries, but never blackberries because my mom would pucker her lips at the mere suggestion.
“Let’s make a baby!” my ex-boyfriend exclaims six months before we break up.
He’s wasted off open-bar whiskey when he starts grabbing at my sequined jumpsuit. And in the king-bedded hotel room, all I can think about is how he once plastered his hands against his ears when a toddler threw a tantrum in a restaurant at the table next to ours. How could this man make a baby? He barely knew how to make scrambled eggs.
—Excerpt from “I Don’t Want To Hear About Your Baby,” an essay about how a close friend’s pregnancy sends me spiraling about where I, myself, stand, as a woman pushing 37.
The most cliche thing ever to happen to me was when a cockroach dropped down from the ceiling of my yellow taxi cab, welcoming me back to New York with his six, segmented legs.
It was also the most Kafkaesque thing and the most New York thing. The second most New York thing ever to happen to me was when my super refused to fix the leak in my rent-stabilized studio and I phoned 311 until I lost it and left New York. The most original insult to ever be hurled at me on a first date was “You’re so cliche. There’s nothing original about you.”
—Excerpt from “For My Records,” an essay about sharp observations and keeping note.