The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.
The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.
Essays just aren't my thing: no matter how hard I tried, it seemed I was always a bit average.
The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.
The point of the essay is to change things.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.