Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

My presence isn't simply about "character" - I'm present in every part and particle of the thing, in the sound and rhythm of the sentences, in the shifting tones and the selection of details, in the comedy, the sadness, and the confusion. For the space of an essay, I'm the air you breathe, everywhere and nowhere. With a personal essay, I don't think you'd want it any other way. You ought to have the sense of an encounter, the impression of having met someone. In my essays, for better or worse, that someone is me.

Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more like a perspective, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, a questioning presence. I don't sit on the sidelines or pretend to objectivity; and I'm not afraid to stick my neck out or to be revealing and vulnerable.

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.

My instinct tells me "purpose" is maybe the enemy of a good personal essay. In my own experience, I'm always lost and wandering and searching - where am I? how'd I get in this mess? what's the point? - right through to the final draft, and sometimes even beyond that - baffled and defeated still, confused as to purpose long after the thing's in print. I never really have a guiding purpose or a point, not at the outset, anyway. It's like life: It's all discovered en route.

In the short stories - if I can make a very lumpy contrast - in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.

Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.