Reading Response 1

An autobiographical essay sounds like the simplest of all essays to write because you don’t necessarily have to do any kind of research for it. It is a work that solely consists of your own words and opinions. As you start to write; however, it seems to unfold into something more than a lesson learned, you are likely to find out more about the situation that you yourself lived and thought had all figured out.
In The Curious Writer, Bruce Ballenger states that in a personal essay, there is no way to hide behind the pronoun “one”, and that you are fully exposing yourself when writing a personal narrative. Ballenger points out that a personal essay should reflect the questions, “Why does this matter? What do I make of it? How does it change the way I think of myself and the way I see the world?” (Ballenger 93). The author also advises that you write an autobiographical piece on something that you aren’t fully familiar with. Life lessons can sometimes be metaphorical and with a simple happening, you can learn a valuable piece of information that you cherish for the rest of your life. Authors Charlotte Hogg and Catherine Black take simple happenings in their life and can easily turn out a grand significance of the event while including what Ballenger would consider essentials in writing a personal essay.
In the essay, “I’m a Believer”, Charlotte Hogg tells her story of being a fan of a certain celebrity from her teen years into adulthood. She concludes her essay by sharing that although she thought she knew Davy Jones from the Monkees, only after meeting him in her adult days did she realize that this person she thought she knew so well, she really didn’t know at all. There are ways in which Charlotte Hogg follows what Ballenger would consider necessary features of a personal narrative. Hogg is able to take a simple story in her life and turn it into a meaningful lesson that anyone could apply to his or her own life. Her main thesis, that you may not know people as well as you think, does not come through until the end of the narrative. Ballenger would agree that in personal essays, a thesis may not appear until later, unlike many other kinds of essays you write.
The other essay I read, “The Joy of Mud”, by Catherine Black, is a personal narrative about Black living in Hawaii and never wholeheartedly wanting to stay there. As she spends a day in a mountainous setting with one of her good friends, she eventually finds herself finding that she always thought of herself as not rooted, but in the moment she finds that she is indeed experiencing being rooted. Thus, the way I understood, the meaning of her essay is that sometimes you find what you were looking for when you least expect to discover them. I also think she is stating that the path rarely traveled is one that may lead you to what your looking for and you may be surprised in how you feel about it. This essay has the same features of what Ballenger would consider essential features for a personal narrative. Like Hogg’s story, the thesis of this essay is not mentioned in the beginning of the paper, but comes through toward the end of the narrative. Ballenger says that a personal essay relies on memory and observation, and Catherine Black’s essay is one that is very descriptive and her words create vivid images of the scenario, making you feel like you are right there with her.
Even though these stories are narratives of simple happenings in the authors’ lives, I think that the actual story is told to control the “so what” of each essay. Hogg tells her story to give an example to help you understand that some things are different than you come to believe, even when you’ve done your best to try and understand it. The way I interpreted it was that there are some things that you can’t control and no matter how hard you may try to keep up with something, you may eventually find that what you saw from afar is not what you see up close. While I’m reading the essays, especially Hoggs’, I found myself asking, “why does this matter? What lesson will she learn from being a super fan of a celebrity?” The authors had me asking how the essays were going to end and what real lesson was going to be learned. While reading Catherine Black’s essay I felt the same way, I asked myself where the story was going and why it mattered. For her essay, I felt that curiosity was controlling the “so what?” factor. I wanted to keep reading to find out what was going to be the end result, what life lesson was she going to extract from this event in her life.
Both essays have elements of Ballenger’s “Features of the Form” and bring readers to ask the “so what?” question. They involve minor events in the authors’ life in which a deeper theme is waiting for the reader to discover.