Life essays examples

My favorite personal essays showcase a vivid personality and clear mind or perception of the world. I find these qualities more engaging than really amazing material.

There are great, award-winning essays focusing on horrifying or remarkable stories—a hitchhiker who survives an encounter with a serial killer targeting hitchhikers, for example. Of course, those story-driven essays also have to be very well written, and the one I alluded to in the previous sentence contains beautiful prose.

Life essays examples

But I’m especially interested in essays that manage to achieve a similar level of potency with somewhat mundane material.

This list contains an essay by Melissa Febos, for example, whose first book was about her time as a dominatrix (exciting material!) but by far my favorite writing from her is after she’d exhausted that “dramatic” material.

Here are ten of my favorite personal essays, though I may add more in the future. Many are wonderful demonstrations