The Essay Club (coming soon)

a new club for essay reading and thoughts on Haley Mlotlek's latest book.

I’ve been thinking about starting an essay reading club for several months. An essay that changes the way I think about something—or better, changes my brain chemistry, even if only briefly—is a needle in a haystack. I cherish the ones that have managed to do so: CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife” from The Paris Review, Joan Didion’s “On Self Respect” from Vogue, Jay Z’s 2017 profile in The New York Times by Dean Baquet, to name a few. I reread them when I need a compass. I thank the writers who labored over them (if not directly, telepathically). They remind me to keep writing. If one sentence could possibly strike anyone in such a way, then it’s worth it, right?

Curious about what essays moved others, I posted on my IG stories last year asking for people to share their own favorite essays and was surprised to receive almost 100—a ton of reading material. One of my favorites was Colson Whitehead’s “The Way We Live Now” in The New York Times. The opening sentence reads, “I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you. Maybe you're from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn't even know it.” Whew. I’ve since added this one to my list of essays to keep coming back to.

So! I’ll get to the point: I’m *finally* starting The Essay Club. There are too many good ones to read and I think I need a curriculum to get through them. It will be very casual. Members can submit the essays they continue to revisit in life, and we’ll read one at a time. There will be a monthly IRL opportunity to discuss the essay in person and connect with other essay lovers, if you wish to do that! So… do you want to join?

Here’s how!

1. Subscribe to this newsletter/substack if you haven’t already. I’ll continue to designate a portion of it to The Essay Club, sharing which we’re reading and meet-up opportunities.

2. Fill out your information here. This way I can also start compiling the essays that we’ll read.

Otherwise… I’m currently on the train to D.C. and reading Haley Mlotlek’s new book, No Fault: A Memoir on Divorce. With a fine tooth comb, Mlotlek unpacks the context and history of marriage and divorce, and considers where it stands today. She manages to weave her own experience into a thorough consideration of why we get married and, as a result, why we get divorced. She even makes the point, about halfway through the book, that through all of her research she has found only one culprit behind divorce: marriage.

It’s always a gamble to guess whether a non-fiction author is going to lean more heavily into their personal anecdotes or into making sweeping, general statements. But Mlotlek does neither. She approaches the topic with a tone of curiosity and lets history and her own experience fill in the blanks. For me, her writing is somewhat of a north star. It’s not muddied by biases nor is it made boring by research. She also does what is possibly the most daunting thing for any writer when approaching a hefty topic, which is grasping the nuance of it all.

I’ve always been tempted to write on this subject and felt wary of how to do it without being cynical or overly swayed by a lived experience, and Mlotlek does all of that and more. So, there’s the book review no one asked for! I’m only halfway through the book, so I’ve yet to discover where Mlotlek lands on the subject, but I am soooo eager to find out.

That’s all for now. And yes, I did rewrite this post bc the substack app deleted the first one I drafted there, so maybe don’t try that at home.