Domesticity has been a challenge for me but painful as it's been, engaging with family has been a school for reducing solipsism and increasing my understanding of people's different reactions to stress.

A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

Contradictory strands create an essay that's richly ambivalent.

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.