For the last seven months, I’ve been actively tinkering with an essay that I recently decided won’t see the light of day—at least for now.
The essay actually originated as a long, unwieldy draft I first wrote back in 2019. I was fresh out of MFA school, and the last thing I wanted to do was look at my thesis. The essay was one of the first I wrote with the idea that I’d put together a book of long, “baggy” essays, similar to the book Jia Tolentino had just published.
I wrote the first draft quickly. I shared it with friends and my agent. But eventually, I got seduced back into my novel.
I returned to the draft again in 2021. For some reason, I got the idea that it wasn’t all that bad and decided to pitch it to literary magazines. It was roundly rejected. I put it aside once more.
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