The Personal Essay, Quietly Returning: A Form Survives Its Backlash

By 2017, mainstream journalism had decided the personal essay was over. Jia Tolentino’s « The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over », published in The New Yorker in May of that year, became a kind of obituary for the form — or at least for the version of it that had been pumped through digital lifestyle magazines for the previous decade, where editors paid 150 dollars for a confessional first-person piece and ran it under a headline designed for outrage. The form did die, in that specific commercial habitat. What is interesting is what came back.

This piece traces what has happened to the personal essay since the 2017 collapse, where the form is being practiced now, why it has migrated to slower and longer publications, and which contemporary essayists are doing work that probably will be read in twenty years rather than forgotten in eighteen months. The argument, in short, is that the essay has been quietly rebuilt outside the mainstream attention economy, and the result is healthier than the boom era ever was.

What collapsed in the mid-2010s

The essay form Tolentino described had specific economic and editorial features. Digital outlets including xoJane, Salon, Slate’s longform sections, BuzzFeed’s culture vertical, The Hairpin and dozens of mid-tier women’s lifestyle sites paid token rates for first-person writing on subjects ranging from breakups to abortion to estrangement to medical disclosures. Page-view incentives produced editorial pressure for personal stakes, traumatic disclosure, and confessional intensity. Many of the essays were genuinely good. Many more were not, and the form’s reputation suffered for both reasons.

Several factors collapsed the model nearly simultaneously: the broader contraction of digital advertising rates after 2017; the reorganisation of social media feeds away from external link traffic; a growing reader fatigue with confessional disclosure; and a generation of writers who had been burned by editorially imposed disclosure now pushing back. The boom did not really end, in the technical sense — first-person writing did not disappear. The model under which it had been monetised collapsed, and the form had to find new homes.

Where the essay went

The essay’s new infrastructure looks like this in 2026: long-form magazine sections at The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, n+1, The New Yorker, The Yale Review and a handful of others continue publishing essays at proper rates and lengths. Smaller literary magazines (The Sewanee Review, Granta, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, The Hudson Review) have been a steady venue throughout. New publications like Astra Magazine, The Drift, and Astra Quarterly, while several have folded, kept the form serious. And, most importantly, the substantial migration of essayists to subscription newsletters has rebuilt the economic basis of the form.

Newsletters as the new infrastructure

The rise of subscription writing platforms — Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, the writer-direct model on Patreon — has restored the economic possibility of writing essays for money outside the constraint of advertising. Several essayists with newsletter subscriber bases of 5,000 to 50,000 paying readers now earn more from individual essays than they would have from any digital outlet of the boom era, and at lengths and with editorial freedom the boom-era outlets did not allow.

This has changed what the essay looks like. Pieces are typically longer (3,000 to 8,000 words rather than 800 to 1,500). They are often more meditative, less hooked to news pegs. The disclosure that does happen is more often disclosure of intellectual rather than emotional self. Several of the most-read essayists working in newsletter format — including Anne Helen Petersen, Sam Kahn, Sarah Manguso, Patricia Lockwood for her separate magazine work — have produced essays that read more like the longer Lopate-era American essay than like the boom-era confessional.

The book has returned

The essay collection, which had become a vanishing format in mainstream publishing by the late 2000s, has steadily returned since 2018. Notable collections that re-energised the market include Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom (2021), Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America (2021), Rebecca Solnit’s continuing series, Jia Tolentino’s own Trick Mirror (2019), and the older but still-circulating Eula Biss collections. Internationally, Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather (2020) and the late-career Annie Ernaux essays in translation have shifted the readership.

Independent presses have been particularly important here. Coffee House Press, Graywolf, Tin House, Two Dollar Radio, Daunt Books in the UK, and Fitzcarraldo Editions have published a disproportionate share of the strongest contemporary essay collections. Fitzcarraldo’s white-spined essay series has become a kind of brand of seriousness in itself — Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi, Esther Kinsky, and the Hervé Guibert reissues all live there.

What changed about how essays are written

The post-boom essay has several recognisable features. It is usually longer. It is typically less hooked to a personal trauma narrative. It frequently moves between personal observation and historical, scientific or critical argument — what John D’Agata’s anthology series has called the « lyric essay » tendency. And it tends to be slower in pacing, with more space for description and digression.

The essay is also being read more carefully, partly because newsletter subscribers are paying for individual pieces and tend to read them more closely than free-tier digital readers did. Click-through analytics from major newsletter platforms suggest that a 6,000-word essay on a paid newsletter typically earns 70 to 80 percent of subscribers reading to completion, while equivalent free essays of the boom era saw completion rates of 20 to 30 percent.

A small stack of contemporary essay collections beside a half-empty cup of coffee on a bright wooden table, with a paperback by Annie Ernaux on top, sunlight falling diagonally across the page edges. — Independent press essay collections have driven much of the form’s recovery since 2018.

Essayists worth reading now

A short list of contemporary writers whose essays repay sustained attention:

Maggie Nelson for the lyric essay form at full ambition
Annie Ernaux in translation, for the slow autobiographical essay tradition
Hanif Abdurraqib for music and cultural criticism with personal depth
Olivia Laing for the art-and-life essay
Jenny Odell for essays on attention and capitalism
Rachel Cusk for the cold-eyed autobiographical essay
Hervé Guibert in retranslation, for the body-and-illness essay
Sarah Manguso for the aphorism and short-form essay
Brian Dillon for the essay-on-essays tradition
Patricia Lockwood for the LRB-form long literary essay

The craft case for studying the form

For working writers, the essay deserves study because it is the form most flexible across other genres. Fiction writers who handle paragraph-level observation badly almost always benefit from a serious year of essay reading. Poets working on book-length projects often find essay structure useful for handling the prose connective tissue of hybrid books. The essay’s structural minimum — sustained attention to a single subject, voice consistent across multiple movements — is a discipline that strengthens almost any prose.

Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay remains the most useful single anthology, partly because it traces the form back through Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Orwell, Baldwin, Sontag, into the present. Reading the form’s full historical range cures the impression that the essay is a new and embattled mode. It has been defended as dying for at least four hundred years and has consistently failed to die.

What the next decade probably looks like

If newsletters continue to consolidate as the working economic infrastructure of the essay, the form will probably continue to drift toward longer, slower and more intellectually ambitious work. The mainstream publishing industry will continue to publish essay collections from established figures, while debut collections will become harder to sell. Substantial new essay voices will most likely emerge first in newsletters or small magazines, accumulate audience over several years, and only then publish in book form.

That is a healthier ecology than the boom era produced. The essays that survived the 2017 collapse were largely the ones that were too long, too strange or too patient for the boom-era outlets to have run anyway. The form has, in a quiet and uneven way, returned to its strengths.

The economics of the newsletter essay, in numbers

The shift from boom-era page-view economics to subscription newsletters has produced strikingly different per-essay revenue. A representative example: a literary essayist with 8,000 free subscribers and 600 paid subscribers at five dollars per month earns about 36,000 dollars per year, less Substack’s 10 percent fee and Stripe’s transaction fees. Most full-time newsletter essayists publish between 30 and 60 essays per year, which yields a per-essay revenue of roughly 600 to 1,200 dollars — comparable to mid-tier magazine rates of the 1990s and substantially better than digital lifestyle outlets of the 2010s.

The economics scale unevenly. The top 10 percent of paid newsletter writers, by Substack’s own published data, earn over 100,000 dollars annually. The median figure across writers with any paid subscribers is closer to 4,000 to 7,000 dollars. The distribution mirrors most creative-economy distributions: a long tail with a small but visible apex. Substack’s CEO has been public about these figures, partly to manage expectations and partly because the platform’s advertising depends on demonstrating viability for working writers.

The non-newsletter alternative remains the magazine essay. The London Review of Books pays roughly 350 to 600 pounds per long essay. The New York Review of Books pays similarly. Harper’s pays 1.50 to 3 dollars per word for full-length essays. The smaller literary quarterlies pay 100 to 400 dollars per piece, often with a year’s print subscription added. None of these rates support a full-time essayist on their own; the realistic working economy involves a portfolio of newsletter, magazine, book and teaching income.

What the lyric essay actually means

The term « lyric essay » has been thrown around so loosely since the late 1990s that it is worth defining carefully. John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, in their original 1997 essay coining the term in the journal Seneca Review, described the lyric essay as a hybrid between essay and poem: an argumentative or reflective prose piece that moves through associative leaps, image-driven structure and explicit attention to language as material. Eula Biss’s On Immunity (2014), Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) are exemplars of the form at its most ambitious.

The form has its detractors. Critics including Daniel Mendelsohn have argued that the lyric essay’s strategic ambiguity sometimes substitutes for argumentative rigour. There is a fair case to be made on both sides. What the lyric essay tradition has demonstrably done is reopen the form’s structural possibilities for younger writers, including Maggie Nelson’s students at the University of Southern California, Eula Biss’s at Northwestern, and the poet-essayists who have moved between forms — including Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle and the late Mary Oliver in her prose work.

Misconceptions about the contemporary essay

Several common assumptions about the modern essay deserve correction. The first is that personal essays must always involve dramatic personal disclosure. The post-boom essay has moved decisively away from that formula. Many of the strongest essays now circulating involve quiet observation of ordinary life, intellectual curiosity about a non-personal subject, or critical engagement with art and culture, with personal voice present but not the load-bearing structure.

The second misconception is that the form is gendered female. The boom-era confessional model was indeed gendered, partly by editorial assignment and partly by reader demand, but the longer history of the form is mixed. Lopate’s anthology includes Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Baldwin and Vidal alongside Sontag, Didion and Janet Malcolm. The current generation of essayists working in newsletter and book-length form is at least as male as female, and the gender of the writer rarely tells you much about the work.

The third misconception is that the essay form does not pay. As the numbers above show, it pays modestly and inconsistently for most writers, but the floor has risen since the boom-era collapse. Several working essayists who would have earned 150 dollars per piece in 2014 now earn 800 to 1,500 dollars per piece between newsletter and magazine work. The form has not become lucrative, but it has become less precarious.

A short reading list for new readers

For readers wanting to enter the contemporary essay seriously, the practical sequence below builds a working sense of the form within roughly six months of attentive reading. Begin with a comprehensive anthology, then move to a single contemporary collection per month, then sample three or four newsletters across different aesthetic temperaments.

Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay (1994) for the canonical historical sweep
Joan Didion’s The White Album for the late twentieth-century American voice
Annie Ernaux’s The Years in the Alison L. Strayer translation for the European autobiographical essay
Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America for music criticism merged with autobiography
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and The Argonauts for the lyric essay tradition
Brian Dillon’s Essayism for an extended argument about the form itself
Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather for the contemporary art-and-life essay
Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land for the political-personal essay at full ambition

The teaching of the essay form

The essay form has substantially reshaped how creative non-fiction is taught at university level over the past two decades. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has expanded its non-fiction track substantially since the early 2010s, with the late David Foster Wallace’s teaching legacy continuing to influence the programme. Columbia University’s MFA in Writing programme includes one of the most rigorous non-fiction tracks in the United States, with faculty including Phillip Lopate (now emeritus), Margo Jefferson and various visiting writers. The University of East Anglia in the UK runs a similarly substantial non-fiction MA programme that has produced several substantial contemporary essayists.

The pedagogical conventions for teaching the contemporary essay have evolved as the form itself has evolved. The traditional creative writing workshop model, where students submit drafts for group critique, works less well for substantial essay drafts than for shorter forms because the time required to read 6,000 to 8,000 words per workshop participant is substantial. Many programmes have moved toward smaller workshop groups for non-fiction, with more individual mentorship time, to address this constraint.

The non-academic teaching of the essay form has expanded substantially through online platforms. The Catapult writing classes, the GrubStreet programme in Boston, the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and various smaller programmes offer non-credit essay-writing courses with substantial student bases. The instruction varies in quality but the overall expansion of accessible essay-writing instruction has substantially shifted the demographic profile of who is writing essays seriously.

The international essay tradition

While the boom-era discussion was largely Anglophone, several substantial international essay traditions have continued in parallel and deserve attention. The French essay tradition, descended directly from Montaigne through Camus, Barthes and Cioran, has continued through contemporary writers including Annie Ernaux (whose late style has substantially influenced contemporary international essay practice), Christine Angot, and the philosophical essayists associated with the journal Critique. The German essay tradition through Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Botho Strauss and contemporary writers including Daniel Kehlmann maintains its own distinct character.

The Latin American essay tradition has produced some of the most distinguished contemporary work, with the late Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia, the Mexican Valeria Luiselli, the Brazilian Cristóvão Tezza, and the Argentine Mariana Enriquez all producing substantial essay work in recent years. Several of these writers have been published in English translation through the work of small presses including Coffee House, Two Lines and the more recent World Editions catalogue.

The Eastern European tradition, particularly through the late W. G. Sebald (German-born but writing partly through Eastern European concerns), the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s essays, and the work of younger writers including the Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov, has produced a distinctive register that English-language readers are increasingly accessing through translation. The Hungarian writer Péter Nádas’s essay collections in English translation have been particularly influential among working English-language essayists.