Long Form Essays Make Me Crazy

[lydy]

So, there was a link in my Twitter Feed to this article about child abuse at Catholic Orphanages. Here's the link, in case you care: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs

I tried to read it. I could not make it all the way through. Not because it's long, but because of the way it's structured, and because of the graphic abuse described. To be clear, I do not have PTSD, and I do not have flash-backs when reading graphic accounts of abuse and torture. But at some point, my brain just nopes out. It does this before I get traumatized (thank you, brain).

As these pieces are wont to do, it starts with a graphic, personal vignette. Then the piece weaves together other people's stories, the account of at least two different law suits against the orphanage, brief tangents about other orphanages, all of it punctuated by stories of graphic abuse, and with an underlying theme that maybe some of this didn't happen. The one thing I know about human memory is that it is profoundly malleable. False memories are a thing. I am less clear on recovered and repressed memories, but it wouldn't surprise me. People lie, and people attempting to tell the truth get it utterly wrong. The article kept on holding out the promise of sorting all this out. But the structure of it, the constant interweaving of graphic stories of abuse with other bits of personal history from one of the nuns, one of the lawyers, some of the children remembering abuse... And the structure made it such that trying to skip the really graphic bits made the whole article become incoherent. The story was written so the that the through-line was not uncovering the truth, but the stories of abuse.

Dear reader, I do not need this in my life. I just don't.

This style of writing is pretty common. Start with an intriguing personal anecdote. Pull back, suggest a wider context and big themes. State a question or thesis. Pull in close to the personal, pull back to the general, rinse, repeat. Even when the detail isn't about terrible horror, I find this structure really hard to read. The personal details often strike me as irrelevant, or derailing. There's a real lack of causality in this structure that just makes me crazy. If the totality of the story actually answers the question or supports the thesis, I am often unable to tell by the end, even if I get there. It often seems to seems to me that the detailing of the subjective experiences is used to undermine rather than support an objective conclusion. And this shit just makes me crazy.

Possibly, I am just a bad reader. But I really hate this style of reportage/essay.

P.S. If anybody can tell me if the story that I cite above actually comes to a conclusion about how supported the claims of abuse are, I'd be interested. After the mass grave in Ireland and the stories of the Magdelen laundries, I'm inclined to believe almost anything about Catholic run orphanages and charities, but that doesn't mean that every story is true.

Comments

[lydy]

And, it would appear I did not nope out fast enough. Now feel disconnected and depressed. Sigh. Brains.

[pameladean]

Ugh, sorry.

I don't like that form of essay either. I mean, sometimes it's the right choice, but it always feels to me as if either the writer or the editor fears people won't just read analysis without a lot of juicy anecdotes carefully placed to drag the reader back in when they start to get bored.

P.

[lydy]

I have cleaned several kitchen counters and made apple brown betty. It is too hot to bake, but I don't care. I have restored order, and feel better. But man, I really need to nope out a little quicker next time. Although the clean kitchen counters are a net positive.

[pameladean]

There are probably less traumatic ways to achieve clean countertops, but they are a good thing regardless.

P.

[naomikritzer]

I've read essays structured like this that were effective and compelling, but you're right: far more often, it winds up a disorganized mess. Sometimes we circle back to someone we read about before but I've lost track of what their history is. To make matters worse, there are also news sites now that play with formatting in ways that makes it harder for me to skip back for a reminder of whether they've talked about this person before.

My favorite long-form essays just tell a single story in detail. (An example: https://psmag.com/social-justice/toast-story-latest-artisanal-food-craze-72676 -- how toast became an artisinal food craze in California. The journalist traces it back to a single woman and then explores what the coffee shop means in her life. It's about friendship, connection, food, and mental illness, and coming from fandom, it really spoke to me strongly and I recommended it to everyone I know, with a note saying, "this isn't actually about toast.")

[lydy]

Oh, hey, I did read that essay, and it was beautiful. I was especially struck with the way in which the woman was substituting many loosely held connections for a more usual approach of a couple of very tight relationships, and the way that worked, the trade-offs that it had. It is a lovely, lovely article.

Part of my frustration is that I do think that the personal is relevant and important. Big deal policy is really best understood when you look at how it affects daily life, and some of the ways in which we make choices de-emphasize the personal, and that leads to error. But I find that the way this structure is used often hides those connections, rather than reveals them, and tends to assume that there is no real difference between objective and subjective reality, and that does not provide any real way forward.

[naomikritzer]

Yes, the "substituting many loose connections for a handful of close ones" was SUPER striking.

I have now tried to read the abuse article. It's particularly poorly written -- like a jumble of randomly selected horrors that someone rifled through and then spilled out on the floor for everyone to wade through. It doesn't serve the victims well, given the presence of anecdotes that reminded me strongly of stories that came out of the Satanic Panic (and the time period of when the stories were first told aligns with it).

[lydy]

Oh, lords, I remember the Satanic Panic much too well. I wasn't tracking on the abuse stories too closely, and I failed to notice the resemblance. I did notice that the writer was treating "recovered memories" uncritically, and that was definitely seemed like a warning sign.