contemporary life essay

50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Essay collections: Like short stories, but TRUE! When you're in the mood for fact over fiction, check out these must-read contemporary essay collections.

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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English Language Arts

From ‘Lives’ to ‘Modern Love’: Writing Personal Essays With Help From The New York Times

By Katherine Schulten

• Oct. 20, 2016

If you’re a regular Times reader, you’ve no doubt enjoyed, and maybe even taught with, some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine’s Lives column , which has run weekly for decades.

But did you know that NYTimes.com also regularly features personal writing on everything from love and family to life on campus , how we relate to animals , living with disabilities and navigating anxiety ?

In this post we suggest several ways to inspire your students’ own personal writing, using Times models as “mentor texts,” and advice from our writers on everything from avoiding “zombie nouns” to writing “dangerous” college essays.

And since we’ve linked to but a fraction of the thousands of engaging personal pieces published in the paper over the years, we also invite you to add your own suggestions in the comments.

Seven Ideas to Inspire and Improve Personal Essays

App smart | digital diaries, a look at apps that help you document your daily life, through words, pictures and social media..

1. Keep a journal.

Research suggests that recording our run-of-the-mill, daily experiences, rather than just our highs and lows, could bring us unexpected joy. And there are apps you can use to make doing that easier.

Read “ How Keeping a Diary Can Surprise You ” to learn more — and check out what other teenagers told us back in 2011 when we asked, Do You Keep a Diary or Journal?

But don’t stop at just journaling. Go back, read over what you wrote, look for patterns and think about what these “personal stories” reveal about you. A recent article on the Well blog suggests that writing and editing stories about yourself can help you see your life differently, and actually lead to behavioral changes:

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.

Read about how personal story editing helped 40 college freshman at Duke University who were struggling academically, then think about how you can use the techniques yourself.

2. Use current events and issues as a jumping-off point.

That’s what we’ve done every school day since 2009 with our Student Opinion question : we find an interesting article in The Times, pose a question about it, and invite any teenager anywhere in the world to answer it.

In fact, we’ve just published a list of 650 of those questions that ask for personal and narrative writing , on topics like sports, travel, education, gender roles, video games, fashion, family, pop culture, social media and more. Visit the collection to get ideas and to access related Times articles to help you think more about each.

Then, ask you yourself, what issues and current events do you care most about? How do they impact your life? What personal stories can you tell that relate to them in some way?

For instance, maybe the impact of technology on our lives concerns you. In our collection of prompts , you can find nearly 50 different ways we’ve taken that topic on, each linked to a Times article or essay on the topic.

For just one example, though, you might read Gary Shteyngart’s essay “ Only Disconnect ”:

With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film.

Does it surprise you to realize this essay was written in 2010? Do you think his observations are even more true today? What stories do you have to tell about life online?

Another excellent place to glean ideas is the Op-Ed page , where writers respond to the news of the day with occasional personal essays. In this one, a classic from 1999, a teenager reacts to the Columbine school shootings — then blamed in part on school cliques that made some feel like outsiders — with an essay headlined, “ Yes, I’m in a Clique .”

Or read this week’s “ How to Vote as an Immigrant and a Citizen ,” an Op-Ed by the novelist Imbolo Mbue about what it means to her to vote on November 8 and, for the first time, have “a say in America’s future.”

Other great places to look for ideas other than our daily Student Opinion question and the Op-Ed page? Check the Trending lists , or visit our monthly Teenagers in The Times series .

3. Take some tips from experts.

Our lesson plan, Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well , compiles nine guidelines from many different Times sources on everything from “listening to the voice in your head” to writing with “non-zombie nouns and verbs.”

But for one-stop shopping on the personal essay in particular, you might just read “ How to Write a Lives Essay ,” in which the author asks the magazine’s editors for a “single, succinct piece of advice” for getting an essay published in the long-running column devoted to personal stories.

Here are a few of the answers, but read the whole post to see them all:

• More action, more details, less rumination. Don’t be afraid of implicitness. And the old Thom Yorke line: “Don’t get sentimental. It always ends up drivel.” • Meaning (or humor, or interestingness) is in specific details, not in broad statements. • Write a piece in which something actually happens, even if it’s something small. • Don’t try to fit your whole life into one “Lives.” • Don’t try to tell the whole story. • Do not end with the phrase “I realized that … ” • Tell a small story — an evocative, particular moment. • Better to start from something very simple that you think is interesting (an incident, a person) and expand upon it, rather than starting from a large idea that you then have to fit into an short essay. For example, start with “the day the Santa Claus in the mall asked me on a date” rather than “the state of affairs that is dating in an older age bracket.” • Go to the outer limit of your comfort zone in revealing something about yourself. • Embrace your own strangeness.

How can you apply any, or all, of these pieces of advice to an essay you’re writing?

4. Borrow an opening line for inspiration.

Back in 2011, we ran a contest that invited students to Use Opening Lines From the Magazine’s ‘Lives’ Column as Writing Prompts . Contestants were allowed to write stories, essays, plays, memoirs or poetry, and could use lines like these:

It’s impossible to look cool when you’re part of a tour group. (From “ In Too Deep ”) Mornings are not our best family moments . (From “ Mother’s Little Helper ”) Cosmic forces have a way of turning up the heat to make us change. (From “ The Tractor Driver or the Pothead?” )

After you look at the full list of first lines, jump over to read the work of our winners , and see how they took first sentences like “I am parked in a rental car in front of the house where I grew up,” and made them their own.

Around Valentine’s Day that same year, we invited students to use first lines from the weekly Modern Love column as “passion prompts ,” and that time we showed them how to take the basic idea from the essay and adapt it for themselves:

• Times sentence, from “The Day the House Blew Up” : We went out to the house last month to celebrate Valentine’s Day. But then the house exploded. Sentence starter: We went to [place and time] to celebrate Valentine’s Day. But then… • Times sentence , from “In a Wedding Album From the City’s 5 Borough Halls, Tales as Varied as the Rooms” : It was just another Saturday night on Queens Boulevard two years ago when Eddie Ellis and Gladys Corcino pulled up beside each other at a red light near 65th Street. Sentence starter : It was just another [day/time of the week] on/in [location] when [name] and [name]…

Scroll through all our choices from these two posts, or find your own opening line from a more recent Times essay to inspire you. How can you adapt it and make it your own?

5. Use images to spur memories and ideas.

We’re all about images as inspiration on this site, and this year we even have a new daily writing feature called Picture Prompts , and a lesson plan about teaching with images to go with it.

Scroll through the feature , and either follow the prompts we suggest, or use any of the images that catch your interest to write whatever you like. What memories does it inspire? What personal connection to the content can you make? What stories from your own life does it remind you of?

Other great places to find images in The Times?

• Lens , a Times site for photography, video and photojournalism

• The Lively Morgue , a Tumblr of images from the Times archives

• Looking at Our Hometowns , a 2013 Lens project that asked, “What would happen if you asked high school students to help create a 21st-century portrait of the country by turning their cameras on their neighborhoods, families, friends and schools?”

6. Craft a great college essay.

Our lesson plan, Getting Personal: Writing College Essays for the Common Application , helps students explore the open-ended prompts on the Common Application , then analyze Times pieces that might serve as models for their own application essays.

For example, take this prompt: “ The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? ”

Here are some first-person Times essays that could serve as models for writing about the theme of failure:

• “A Rat’s Tale ”: A writer discusses her failure to be the sister her brother wanted and what she learned. • “Pancake Chronicles ”: An entertaining account of a disastrous first job. • “A Heartbroken Temp at Brides.com ”: After a groom changes his mind, his would-be bride, with “no money, no apartment, no job” takes a position at a wedding website.

The lesson also links to a number of Times articles that offer advice on everything from “ Going for the ‘Dangerous’ Essay ” to “ Treating a College Admissions Essay Like a First Date .”

Another source of inspiration is Ron Lieber’s annual contest for the best college essays that address issues of money, work and social class.

These essays, as he wrote in 2015 , are “filled with raw, decidedly mixed feelings about parents and their sacrifices; trenchant accounts of the awkwardness of straddling communities with vastly different socio-economic circumstances; and plain-spoken — yet completely affecting — descriptions of what it means to make a living and a life in America today.”

You can find them all, by year, here:

2016: Memories and Hopes: The Top Essays

2015: Essays About Work and Class That Caught a College’s Eye

2014: Four Stand-Out College Essays About Money

2013: Standing Out From the Crowd

7. Learn from more Times models on popular themes.

What we’ve compiled below is just a very, very small taste of the thousands of essays you can find in The Times on these topics.

Please preview any that you assign to students to make sure they are appropriate.

Love, Romance and Relationships

Most of the selections below are from the long-running Modern Love column , and begin with some winners of their college essay contest. You might also want to read some observations from the editor on “ How We Write About Love ” and his selection of “ The 10 Best Modern Love Columns Ever .”

” Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define ”

“ Let’s Not Get to Know Each Other Better ”

“ No Labels, No Drama, Right? ”

“ The Perils of Not Dying for Love ”

“ Swearing Off the Modern Man ”

“ Swiping Right on Tinder, but Staying Put ”

“GPS on a Path to the Heart”

“Alone When the Bedbugs Bite”

“Drowning in Dishes, but Finding a Home”

“ The Ballad of Tribute Steve ”

“Geekdom Revisited”

“ The Summer I Discovered Suburbia ”

“ Safe on the Southbank ”

“Advice; Teen Angst? Nah!”

“ My High-School Hoax ”

“ My New Look ”

“ How Ramen Got Me Through Adolescence ”

“ Forbidden Nonfruit ”

“ Familiar Dish, Familiar Friend ”

“ Memories of Meals Past ”

“We Found Our Son in the Subway”

“ Disco Papa ”

“Nice Girls”

“ Skinny-Dipping With Grandma ”

“ Dive Nights ”

“ Praying for Common Ground at the Christmas-Dinner Table ”

“ A Nanny’s Love ”

“The Subject of the Sibling”

“Montana Soccer-Mom Moment”

Race, Religion, Gender and Sexuality

“ Milwaukee’s Divide Runs Right Through Me ”

“ An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China ”

“ I’m Ghanaian-American. Am I Black? ”

“ Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight ”

“ Intolerance and Love in Jamaica ”

“ What I Learned in the Locker Room ”

“ The Boy of Summer ”

“ Track Changes ”

“ Learning to Embrace Sexuality’s Gray Areas ”

“ The Undress Code ”

“ My Gymnastics Feminism ”

And a Few Extras that Don’t Fit Neatly Into Any of the Previous Categories ...

”The Monkey Suit”

“ Who’s the Jerk Now, Jerk? ”

“Finding That Song”

“ Scanning the Pandas ”

“ Eternal Bragging Rights ”

Places to Find Personal Essays in The New York Times

Lives: A place for true personal essays, this column has been running weekly in the Magazine for decades.

Modern Love : A series of weekly reader-submitted essays that explore the joys and tribulations of love.

On Campus : Dispatches from college students, professors and administrators on higher education and university life.

Ties : Essays on parenting and family from Well .

Essay series from The Opinionator (some no longer taking submissions):

• The Couch: A series about psychotherapy • Private Lives : Personal essays from writers around the globe, on the news of the world and the news of individual lives. • The Stone : A forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. • Draft : Essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age. • Townies: A series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there. • Disability : Essays, art and opinion exploring the lives of people living with disabilities. • Anxiety : This series explores how we navigate the worried mind, through essay, art and memoir. • Menagerie : Explores the strange and diverse ways the human and animal worlds intersect.

Metropolitan Diary : Short anecdotes about life in New York City

Complaint Box : Discontinued in 2013, this column was part of the City Room blog and simply asked New Yorkers, “What Annoys You?”

More of Our Lesson Plans on Writing Personal Pieces

I Remember: Teaching About the Role of Memory Across the Curriculum

Creative State of Mind: Focusing on the Writing Process

Reading and Responding: Holding Writing Workshops

Reader Idea | Personal Writing Based on The Times’s Sunday Routine Series

Can’t Complain? Writing About Pet Peeves

Thank You, Thesaurus: Experimenting With the Right Word vs. the Almost-Right Word

Skills Practice | Writing Effective Openings

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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Where Americans find meaning in life has changed over the past four years

Many things have changed in the United States in the past four years, from a new administration in Washington to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted work, financial security, family structures and even the ability to move around freely – to say nothing of its impact on public health.

Alongside these shifts, Americans have evolved in where they find meaning in their lives, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted in September 2017 and February 2021. In both years, the Center asked a representative sample of U.S. adults to answer the following question in their own words: “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?”

Based on these surveys, here are six facts about where Americans find meaning in life and how those responses have shifted over the past four years. The analysis also examines how attitudes in the U.S. compare with those in 16 other advanced economies surveyed by the Center in 2021 .

This Pew Research Center analysis examines Americans’ responses to an open-ended question about what gives them meaning in life and explores how responses in the United States have changed over time as well as how they differ from those elsewhere in the world. Details about the over-time analysis can be found in the Methodology for comparing 2017 and 2021 U.S. surveys on the meaning of life.

For this analysis, we conducted nationally representative surveys of 4,867 U.S. adults from Sept. 14 to 28, 2017, and 2,596 U.S. adults from Feb. 1 to 7, 2021. Everyone who took part in both surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all adults have a chance of selection. The surveys were weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.

In both surveys, respondents were asked to answer the following open-ended question: “We’re interested in exploring what it means to live a satisfying life. Please take a moment to reflect on your life and what makes it feel worthwhile – then answer the question below as thoughtfully as you can. What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?”

We also conducted nationally representative surveys of 16,254 adults from March 12 to May 26, 2021, in 16 advanced economies. All surveys were conducted over the phone with adults in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Responses are weighted to be representative of the adult population in each public. Respondents in these publics were asked a shorter version of the question asked in the U.S.: “We’re interested in exploring what it means to live a satisfying life. What aspects of your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying?” Responses were transcribed by interviewers in the language in which the interviews were conducted.

Researchers examined random samples of English responses, machine-translated non-English responses and responses translated by a professional translation firm to inductively develop a codebook for the main sources of meaning mentioned across the 17 publics. The codebook was iteratively improved via practice coding and calculations of intercoder reliability until a final selection of 20 codes was formally adopted ( read Appendix C of the full report ).

To apply the codebook to the full collection of 18,850 responses, a team of Pew Research Center coders and professional translators were trained to code English and non-English responses, respectively. Coders in both groups coded random samples and were evaluated for consistency and accuracy. They were asked to independently code responses only after reaching an acceptable threshold for intercoder reliability. (For more on this, read Appendix A of the full report .)

Here is the question used for this analysis, along with the coded responses for each public. Open-ended responses included in the analysis and in the accompanying interactive have been lightly edited for clarity (and, in some cases, translated into English by a professional firm). Here are more details about our international survey methodology and country-specific sample designs. For respondents in the U.S., read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Americans have become more likely to mention society as a source of meaning in life, but much of this emphasis is negative. The share of Americans who mention society, places and institutions – which includes references to one’s local area, as well as to broader notions of the U.S., the government and social services – grew from 8% in 2017 to 14% in 2021. The increase was especially pronounced among those ages 65 and older (24% this year, up from 10%) and those without full-time jobs (17%, up from 8%).

As was the case in 2017, about half of adults who mention society (49%) bring up something negative, such as personal frustrations or difficulties. The nature of these complaints ranges widely, from economic concerns, distrust of government and partisan animosity to more general fears about the direction of the country. As one woman put it while reflecting on what she views as growing political extremism in America, “My hope is dimming because I see no light at the end of the tunnel.”

The U.S. stands out as one of only three publics surveyed in 2021 where mentions of society significantly coincide with greater negativity. The other two are Italy and Spain, but in neither of them is the relationship between society and negativity as strong as it is in the U.S.

Americans – especially Republicans – have become more likely to mention freedom and independence as a source of meaning in life. Among Americans overall, 9% now mention issues such as freedom, independence and their ability to do what they want to do, including financial independence, having free time or a good work-life balance, or political freedoms like freedom of speech. This is up from 5% in 2017.

Much of this increase has occurred among Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party. This year, 12% of Republicans mention freedom or independence, up from 5% in 2017. There has been no significant change among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents during this period (6% this year vs. 5% in 2017).

While Republicans in the U.S. are much more likely than Democrats to mention freedom or independence as a source of meaning in life, similar ideological divides are not evident elsewhere in the world. Mentions of freedom are not associated with right-leaning ideological views in any of the other 16 publics surveyed in 2021; in fact, in two other publics (Italy and Spain), such mentions are more common among those on the ideological left .

Mentions of freedom in the U.S. have become more common among other demographic groups, too. For example, while just 4% of parents mentioned the topic in 2017, 9% do so in 2021, matching the share of non-parents who currently mention freedom or independence as a source of meaning in life. Similarly, Americans without a college degree have become more likely to refer to the subject, now mentioning it at roughly the same rate as those with a college degree (9%).

Compared with 2017, fewer Americans now mention spouses or romantic partners as a source of meaning in life. Around one-in-ten U.S. adults (9%) now mention their spouse or romantic partner or their romantic or dating life, down from 20% in 2017. This represents one of the largest decreases across all of the sources of meaning coded as part of this project. While both married and unmarried people are now less likely to mention partners or romance, the decline has been greatest among married adults. Just 13% of married adults mention their spouse in 2021, down from nearly a third (31%) in 2017.

Despite the decline, Americans are among the most likely to mention their spouse or partner among all 17 places surveyed. Outside of the U.S., mentions of romantic partners are most common in the Netherlands (8%) and Italy (7%). But no more than 5% of adults in most other places mention their spouse or partner.

Fewer Americans now mention finances, jobs or travel as a source of meaning in life than in 2017. The share of U.S. adults who bring up their material well-being – including references to feeling safe, secure, able to cover the basics, living comfortably or being well-off – has dropped from 29% to 18% over the past four years. This decline has been concentrated among two groups in particular: married adults and White Americans. In 2017, both groups were among the most likely to point to material well-being as a source of meaning.

The share of adults who mention their job, occupation or career as a source of meaning has declined from 24% to 17% since 2017, perhaps reflecting the fact that many Americans’ working lives have been upended during the coronavirus pandemic. While Americans with higher incomes and those with a college degree remain the most likely to bring up their jobs, both groups have become less likely to do so, with a decline from 37% to 27% among those in the upper-income tier and a decline from 39% to 26% among the college-educated.

The widespread travel restrictions in response to the pandemic may have also affected the share of Americans who derive meaning from travel, which declined from 6% in 2017 to 3% in 2021. But the topic of travel remains more common among college graduates and those with a total family income of $100,000 or more per year.

Older Americans have grown less likely to mention their physical or mental health as a source of meaning in life. The overall share of Americans who mention their physical or mental health or wellness fell from 19% in 2017 to 11% in 2021. And this shift has been especially pronounced among older Americans. This year, only 12% of those ages 65 and older mention their health as a source of meaning, down from 30% in 2017.

The emphasis on health has also fallen significantly among White Americans, who now mention the topic at a similar rate as Black and Hispanic Americans. In 2017, by contrast, White adults were more likely than Black and Hispanic adults to mention their health.

Most Americans are no more likely to mention difficulties or challenges than they were four years ago, although older adults are an exception. Between 2017 and 2021, the share of Americans who mention some sort of negative circumstance or difficulty when describing where they find meaning in life has remained stable – 17% of all adults. But older Americans have become more likely to mention difficulties or challenges when answering this question. Roughly a quarter of those 65 and older (27%) mention a difficulty or challenge in 2021 – more than any other age group and more than the 20% who did so in 2017. This pattern does not appear to be unique to the U.S.: In many of the other publics where the Center asked the same question in 2021, older people are also more likely to mention these kinds of difficulties.

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Patrick van Kessel is a former senior data former scientist at Pew Research Center .

Laura Silver is an associate director focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

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Life’s stages are changing – we need new terms and new ideas to describe how adults develop and grow

Senior Research Scholar, Department of Psychology, Clark University

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Jeffrey Arnett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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What image comes to mind when you think of a person in their 20s?

Do you imagine an adult stressed out by the weight of many new responsibilities in family and work roles?

Or do you envision someone who is bursting with hope and undeveloped potential, still more of a kid than an adult, struggling to define a life and making little or no money but managing to find occasional joy nevertheless? Perhaps your soundtrack here is Taylor Swift’s radiant “22” : “We’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time. It’s miserable and magical.”

How about when you think of someone in their 60s?

Do you envision someone – or maybe a happy couple – enjoying life, living well, still vigorous but now freer than before from daily work and family duties?

Or do you see someone who is stooped over from a lifetime of carrying burdens, their health diminished, now shuffling toward no particular destination? Here the soundtrack might be the doleful Beatles song “ When I’m 64 ”: “Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m 64?”

The whole arc of adult development has changed over the past several decades, in ways that our psychological theories are still catching up with. In the 21st century, does it still make sense to refer to “young adulthood,” “midlife” and “late adulthood,” as psychologists have been doing for so long? If not, what are more accurate concepts?

Most of my career as a developmental psychologist has been devoted to answering these questions. My theory of emerging adulthood recognizes that the lives of younger adults have changed vastly since the 1960s. As the father of 22-year-old twins, I’m keenly aware of their journey through the new life stage I have been researching and writing about for so long. As a 64-year-old, I’m also turning my attention to how the 60s have changed from what they used to be.

A longer-than-ever journey to adulthood

In my research over the past two decades, I’ve found that people ages 19 to 29 are neither fully adult nor in an “extended adolescence” – as this time of life was viewed over the course of the 20th century. In the early 21st century, these years had become a time of gradually and often erratically making one’s way toward a more established adulthood .

I invited scholars from all over the world to contribute to a special issue of American Psychologist, one of the top journals in psychology, on the theme of “Rethinking Adult Development: New Ideas for New Times.” The recently published results are a wonderfully diverse set of papers that go a long way toward reconceptualizing what adult development looks like now and where it might be going.

Most of the authors were developmental psychologists. About half were Americans and half were Europeans, although Shinobu Kitayama and his colleagues offered a refreshingly different Asian cultural perspective.

Here are some of the highlights:

– Ages 30 to 45 are now “the rush hour of life.” Today people around the world wait later than ever to marry and have kids, and most have only one or two. But then couples typically have the dual challenge of trying to move ahead in their careers while also handling the intense responsibilities of caring for young children. Women have vastly greater opportunities in education and work than they did in 1960, which is welcome but also presents new challenges and stresses.

In their contribution to the special issue, Clare Mehta and her colleagues propose the term “established adulthood” to distinguish these years as the most intense and demanding years of adult life, characterized by the “career-and-care-crunch,” when obligations are high in both work and family roles.

– In midlife – ages 45-60 – the crunch years of caring for young children abate. Adults reach their peak career earnings and status in their late 40s and 50s. But life can become complicated, as new responsibilities may arise with grandchildren and with aging parents who need more assistance.

Overall, as Frank Infurna and colleagues detail in their contribution, mental health declines in midlife. Reports of depression and anxiety increase. Seeking professional help for mental health issues reaches a lifetime peak.

Furthermore, midlife well-being, health and life expectancy have declined notably in the U.S. since 2000, especially among working-class adults who have been left behind by the information-and-technology economy. This has led to an epidemic of “deaths of despair” from suicide, opioid overdoses or alchoholism.

– Adults in later life, ages 60-75, are thriving like never before. Although life after age 60 is traditionally regarded as a time of inevitable decline, the reality of it has become sharply different –and better – in recent decades.

Life expectancy at birth is higher now than it has ever been, worldwide, and adults are smarter and healthier for longer than ever. Denis Gerstorf and his colleagues show how these positive trends have taken place across many countries over the past century because of improvements in education, nutrition and health care.

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Physical health issues do arise with age for most people, but more people than ever before stay healthy through their 60s and early 70s by maintaining healthy diet and physical exercise practices. One of the exciting recent findings highlighted in Ursula Staudinger’s article is that regular exercise promotes mental health as well as physical well-being, helping to maintain mental sharpness and prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Life satisfaction also seems to rise in later life, as we gain a new freedom to choose the kind of work we do – or stop working altogether and spend more time with the people we care about most. According to Phillip Ackerman and Ruth Kanfer , more people are working into their late 60s and early 70s than ever before, but they have more freedom to choose how they do it, whether it’s working part time, starting a small business or trying something they have always wanted to do.

Adulthood’s new arc requires new concepts and ideas

Over my decades of writing about emerging adulthood, I’ve learned that it matters how people think about the stages of human development. Thinking shapes expectations and how experiences are interpreted. Lots of compelling and exciting new findings about adult development point to the importance of rethinking previous theories, assumptions and stereotypes about the course of adult life.

• Early adulthood
• early career
• Cultural change

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