The Best American Essays 2013 Read Free Page B

in my hands. Trying, attempting, and testing are what writers do in every form, of course—the making of literature is always an experiment—but I think those words convey something essential and particular about the art of the essay. Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known. A good essay isn’t a report of what happened. It’s a reach for the stuff beyond and beneath. Essayists begin with an objective truth and attempt to find a greater, grander truth by testing fact against subjective interpretations of experiences and ideas, memories and theories. They try to make meaning of actual life, even if an awful lot has yet to be figured out. They grapple and reflect with seriousness and humor. They philosophize and confess with intellect and emotion. They recollect and reimagine private and public history with a combination of clarity and conjecture. They venture into what happened and why with a complicated collision of documented proof and impossible-to-pin-down remembrances. And they follow the answers to the questions that arise in the course of writing about what happened wherever they go. The essay’s engine is curiosity; its territory is the open road.
    This is what makes them so damn fun to read. Their vibrancy and intimacy, their mystery and nerve, their relentlessly searching quality is simultaneously like a punch in the nose and a kiss on the lips. A
pow
and a
wow
. An
ouch
and a
yes
. A stop and a go.
    Or at least the essays I love most are like that. And that’s what this collection is—the twenty-six essays among the hundred and some listed at the back of this book (many of which I also loved) that made me feel, for the brief time I spent reading them, as if the rest of the world had fallen away. The essay might be about a man’s relationship to Mormonism or a woman’s search for a serial killer she may or may not have encountered decades ago. It might be about the way one hears the music of Joni Mitchell differently over time or endures the death of a child or triages injured soldiers or survives five months at sea or gives birth to a daughter. It matters not. Though they display a range of styles and cover a diversity of subjects, the essays I deemed “best” this year share a powerful drive toward emotional and intellectual inquiry that deepens into a dazzling unfolding. Each of these essays left me saying
Ah
at the end, with joy or sorrow or recognition, with delight or dread or awe or all of those things mixed together. As if nothing would ever be the same again.
     
    C HERYL S TRAYED

POE BALLANTINE
Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel
    FROM
The Sun
     
    O N MONDAY MORNINGS I modeled for the painters at an old cannery converted into art studios in Eureka, California. Laughable as it was for a thirty-two-year-old man to strike nude poses on a wooden platform, I preferred it to what I usually did for a living: short-order cooking or unloading trucks. I stood up there on this particular Monday in 1987 trying not to move for two hours, suffering muscle cramps and loss of circulation, and, as always, faintly worried about getting an erection but somehow even more uneasy about the possibility of strangers seeing me through the windows—as if a roomful of strangers weren’t ogling me already. Meanwhile down the hall my painter friend Jim Dalgee raved so violently that one of the artists suggested calling the police.
    After I dressed and picked up my $60, I went down the hall and knocked on Jim’s door. The ranting stopped for a moment, and there was a clatter, followed by the door jerking open and Jim sticking his head out. He did not let many people into his studio, but he liked me because we had both wasted our youth, had gotten off to terribly late starts, held similarly outdated and sentimental views on art, and showed no signs of ever becoming successful. A short man in his late forties with a brushed-up shock of black hair like the