Personal Essay

Like, seriously, how am I supposed to write one of those?

In her essay “He and I”, Natalia Ginzburg writes about her husband in a series of contrasts which
highlight both her feelings of inadequacy and her love for a man who is in sometimes very unlike
her.

I am very untidy. But as I have got older I have come to miss tidiness, and I sometimes furiously
tidy up all the cupboards. I think this is because I remember my mother’s tidiness. I rearrange the
linen and blanket cupboards and in the summer I reline every drawer with strips of white cloth. I
rarely rearrange my papers because my mother didn’t write and had no papers. My tidiness and
untidiness are full of complicated feelings of regret and sadness. His untidiness is triumphant. He
has decided that it is proper and legitimate for a studious person like himself to have an untidy
desk.

Through clear language and frankness, Ginzburg endears herself to the reader by stating the truth
about her attitude toward “tidiness.” The admission that she is “untidy” and the sequence of details
about her occasional cleaning benders are believable, even funny. Followed with the final analysis
that both neatness and a lack of are a function of emotion, even ego, Ginzburg tries to get to the
heart of why she is untidy which is different entirely from the reasons her husband is untidy.
In his essay “I Bought a Bed”, Donald Antrim describes the process of trying to choose a new bed in the
months after his mother passed away after a long, slow death by cancer complicated by mental illness. To
start off the essay, he explains the circumstances of his mother’s death, but then he tells the reader that he
will frame the sordid details of the relationship he had with his mother by telling a different story--his quest
to purchase the perfect mattress:

With this in mind - the story of my mother and me, my mother in me - I will try to tell another story, the story
of my attempt, during the weeks and months following her death, to buy a bed.

I should say to keep a bed. I bought several. The first was a big fat Stearns & Foster queen from
Bloomingdale's at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue. My then girlfriend, R., came along to the store,
and together we lay down and compared. Shifman? Sealy? Stearns & Foster? Soft? Firm? Pillow top? I
watched R. crawl across a mattress; she bounced up and down with her ass in the air, and I found myself
thinking, delusionally, about myself in relation to my mother, who had died the week before, At last, I'm free
of that woman! Now I'm going to buy a great bed…

By the end of the essay, the reader is as educated about the process of buying a mattress as the writer
became. But of course, the essay is not about the bed, but what a perfect bed meant to the writer, and
how, in the end, he could not buy his way out of his grief.