Maybe it was when ‘journaling’ became a verb…” Veteran writer Meghan Daum is speculating on how the first-person literary essay lost its New Journalism luster and became the default mode of feelings-based expression for internet self-publishers. “I wonder if it comes out of self-help culture, in a way,” she says. “The ’80s was the birth of confessing on TV and Phil Donahue and Oprah, and the sort of ‘soul journey.’ I think maybe a lot of that sensibility got folded into the first-person narrative tradition and we ended up with the diary entry as literary genre, or passing something off as a personal essay when it maybe should have just been your journal.”
Not that she doesn’t have her own misgivings about the form.
“I have to say,” she has to say…
