Laptop Nonfiction

In late August, The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter asked whether the braided essay form—creative nonfiction that blends disparate topics and weaves memoir in with criticism, reporting, theory, etc.—still “hit the same,” sending virtual molotov cocktails into the southern France sublets and Long Island houseshares inhabited by publishing professionals who’d made a bag off the personal essay boom. (The author of a recent essay collection remunerated a freelance PR maven with access to her parents’ Hamptons home for one summer; another nonfiction author paid the same publicist via Chanel purse.)