INTRODUCTION
When I was six, I named my first diary Clementine and wrote to her like she was my best friend. I collected fragments of my life—kids’ menus, candy wrappers, toy ads—to make collages on Clementine’s pages. I never understood why my parents would throw away the colorful cardboard packaging around my new dolls, when they could be used in a collage. I wanted to save every piece, every bit, every scrap that had left even the faintest trace on my life. I didn’t think it was enough to write daily to Clementine, detailing the drama at recess and fights with my little brother, I also needed to gather together all the shards, assemble the layers into meaning and make something beautiful. In order to do justice to the rich texture in my life, I thought I had to capture and absorb everything onto the pages of my diary. Subconsciously, I think I wanted to understand how all these loose ends and layers of meaning influenced me. And my journaling practice hasn’t changed much since I was six. My thoughts still overflow onto my journal for at least three pages a day, and I save business cards, festival pamphlets and bookmarks in the pockets at the back of my journal.
With this essay collection, I made a collage of all the academic disciplines I’ve come to love over the past four years—anthropology, journalism, sociology and creative writing. At the start of college, people suggested it’d be best if I focused my attention on one area of study, but my instincts told me that if I mixed methods and styles from each area, I would arrive to that full, rich expression I’ve been striving for since I was a kid. I wanted to write essays that blurred the lines between what is considered social science, journalism and art. I wanted my writing to incorporate the best of each area—ethnographic observation, sociological research, journalistic accessibility and literary flair.
“Anthropology has turned the ‘normal’ into the ‘fascinating,’” I wrote in a reflection for Anth 101 my freshman year. “I used to think moments were only significant if they occurred in another country, outside of my daily life, but now, everything is significant—the way the stir-fry guy at the cafeteria rolls his eyes at customers, the portrayal of volunteers in Peace Corps pamphlets, the change in atmosphere after a xenophobic joke.” Anthropology, which was one of my initial majors, taught me how to deconstruct social practices, unravel all forces of influence and understand the structures and systems that give rise to phenomena and subcultures. The flexibility of cultural anthropology also thrilled me. My professor told us to write about whatever we wanted, and I realized anything and everything could be deconstructed and critically analyzed. An Instagram post was no longer simply a photo, it was a representation of how one desires to be portrayed. I wrote about how Instagram is used differently around the world. I wrote ethnographically about a group of weed smokers and hookup culture. I also wrote autoethnography about my experiences writing news articles for The Daily Mississippian. The double practice of writing news articles and then reflecting ethnographically taught me to tease out my emotional reactions from the objectivity sought after in journalism.
I learned to tie experiences and subcultures to their wider cultural context and significance. I read Sherry Ortner’s Life and Death on Mount Everest and understood how the phenomenon of mountaineering is a product of modernity—from analyzing years of qualitative data, Ortner used inductive reasoning to conclude that climbers are “countercultural romantics” seeking to transcend the vulgarity and materialism of modernity through rigor and beauty. And more recently, I read about the newer field of autoethnography in Carolyn Ellis’s book, The Ethnographic I. Ellis defines autoethnography as a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. Ellis made me realize that my own personal experiences, full of layers of emotions, are relevant in understanding broader contexts. “There’s something to be gained by saturating your observations with your own subjectivity,” Ellis writes. “Social life is messy, uncertain, and emotional. If it is our desire to research social life, then we must embrace a research method that, to the best of its ability, acknowledges and accommodates mess and chaos, uncertainty and emotion.”
As a student journalist, I remember being exhilarated by all the opportunities to engage with the local community through interviews and reporting. I interviewed members of the Oxford Muslim Society, local poets, artists and musicians, and protestors at the March on Mississippi at Nissan. I wrote about the University Dance Company’s performance, the LGBTQ Pride Camp and a Holocaust survivor’s lecture on campus. I covered important issues, such as House Bill 1523, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the arrival of a controversial political student organization on campus. From these experiences, I became more enmeshed in the community and learned to find sources, conduct interviews and write accessibly and succinctly to a wide audience, which are all skills that carried over into this thesis.
After about a year of writing these objective, third-person articles for the DM, I craved to write more creatively in first-person about the issues that mattered to me, so I switched to writing opinion. With opinion, I aimed to write pieces that might be considered “public sociology,” meaning I took many of the sources and insights I gained from my honors Sociology of Gender, Sexuality and Religion course and applied them to local issues for a general audience. I wanted my parents and friends to read all the books I read in that honors seminar, such as Lisa Wade’s American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, but I knew many of these texts were complex, full of sociological jargon, and thus, often unappealing to a wider audience. Each week, I excitedly picked out my topic and accumulated research, quotes and ideas, then the night before the editor’s deadline, I would sit down at my desk with a thermos of coffee and fervidly write for hours, motivated by the adrenaline rush of knowing that my voice mattered in the community. I remember beaming when I saw my first opinion piece in the paper, titled“Deconstructing the ‘Boys Will be Boys’ Myth.” I also wrote articles about how institutionalized distrust of women protects rapists, how sorority rules contribute to sexual assault, and how the key to avoiding ‘gray areas’ in sexual consent is for men to be more empathetic and women more assertive. When Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, came to speak on campus, I wrote a follow-up piece emphasizing how the words we use contribute to sexual violence.
My junior year, I took advanced creative non-fiction with Beth Ann Fennelly, which is where I discovered essayist Leslie Jamison. We read Jamison’s essay The Empathy Exams in class and I was instantly infatuated with her vulnerability, complexity and ability to connect different experiences and explore every avenue of thought: “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.” Over the years, I’ve read all of Jamison’s creative non-fiction— The Empathy Exams, Recovering and Make It Scream, Make It Burn and am always astonished by how she seamlessly weaves together memoir, reportage, research and literary criticism. Her unique style allows her writing to meander and probe from many angles in order to ultimately offer insight into how metaphor, empathy, storytelling and pain affect her life and the lives of others. Jamison writes about wrought topics, such as abortion, pain and hypochondria, which I used to shy away from because as Jamison herself points out, “Confessional writing gets a bad rap. People call it self-absorbed, solipsistic, self-indulgent.” But by writing and publishing “confessional” essays, Jamison realized that confession elicited responses and “coaxed chorus like a bushfire.” As Carolyn Ellis also points out in Ethnographic I, hearing the stories of others helps us understand our own stories better. I was blown away with Jamison’s ability to confront and grapple with such personal issues, which inspired me to write an early draft of “The Red Swimsuit” essay in Beth Ann Fennelly’s course. “The essay doesn’t offer seamless narrative or watertight argument,” Leslie Jamison writes. “It investigates its own seams. It traces what leaks.”
With “The Red Swimsuit,” I wanted to excavate my earliest interactions with social media in order to understand how they snowballed into an unhealthy obsession and understand what made it possible for me to let go of that obsession. I juxtaposed my experiences with the current social media trends. And I also wanted to look at how the formative experience of living in Perth, Australia affected my psychosocial development. My hope is that this essay will console and inspire young girls and parents who may be struggling to soar beyond the harmful effects of social media. This piece was inspired by Jessica Valenti’s book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, and Leslie Jamison’s essay“Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” both of which incorporate personal experience, research and reportage in order to evocatively examine how our culture harms young women. Yet, I didn’t want “The Red Swimsuit” to be as heavy as Valenti and Jamison’s pieces. I wanted“The Red Swimsuit” to be humorous and light-hearted, in the same way Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project *or Anne Lamott’s *Bird by Bird offered personal experience and advice while also making one laugh. I worked on balancing comical self-mockery with serious conclusions in “The Red Swimsuit.” Like Sarah Vowell’s hilarious and informative Assassination Vacation, which follows Vowell’s comical obsession with presidential assassinations, I want my readers to come away from “The Red Swimsuit” having learned something new while also having a laugh.
With “The New YouTube: Suburbia & Sleek Sabotage,” I used my personal experiences to help me understand why young people are so infatuated with watching such banal vlogs of rich kids in LA, then I extrapolated this subculture to a wider context and speculated on what it might mean for the future. This piece was inspired by many different feature magazine articles, including Seyward Darby’s piece about the women of the alt-right, “The Rise of the Valkyries,” in Harper’s; Caitlin Flanigan’s yearlong investigation of Greek houses, “The Dark Power of Fraternities,” in The Atlantic; Vauhini Vara’s look inside the competitive Indian-American spelling community, “Bee-Brained,” in Harper’s; Leslie Jamison’s essay about virtual reality, “Sim Life,” in The Atlantic, and Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence. These texts all involve the writer immersing herself in a subculture, writing in the first-person and exploring the greater implications on society. Vauhini Vara also used her personal experience as an Indian American spelling-bee competitor to inform her exploration of the subculture, which in anthropological terms, would be called a reflexive or narrative ethnography. Vara alternated between flashbacks and reportage on current spelling bee families, champions and competitions to create a layered piece, which is what I aimed to do with “The New YouTube: Suburbia & Sleek Sabotage.” I traced my interactions with YouTube back to my roots in my hometown area of Cleveland, Ohio, which helped me better understand the ways in which suburbia shapes the new Youtuber. Yet, compared to “The Red Swimsuit,” my essay about YouTube dwells less in my own experiences and focuses more on the ascent of the average kid in suburbia to LA stardom. Like Michael Pollan, who went on psilocybin trips in order to better understand his topic, I wanted to participate in my research, so I engaged with the new YouTube and reported on my reactions. Pollan also doesn’t like writing as an expert, admitting that he’s a “naïve fish out of water” on page one, because he uses his own learning process as a stylistic tool, which is a technique I used in the essay on YouTube. “The narrative that we always have as writers is our own education on the topic,” Pollan said. “We can recreate the process of learning that’s behind the book.”
The essay about photographer Maude Schuyler Clay, “A Record of the World as She Sees It” was inspired by Leslie Jamison’s essays on photography, “Maximum Exposure” and“The Photographs That Make Me Feel Less Alone,” and Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem essay about Joan Baez, “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” in which Didion deftly characterizes Baez with an authoritative stance. “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person,” Didion writes. “And like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.” However, unlike Didion, I used the first-person in “A Record of the World as She Sees It” because I thought Maude Schuyler Clay’s life story and artistic vision made me reflect on my own artistic vision. And, I used the first-person because I was inspired by Jamison’s essays on photographers Annie Appel and Gary Winogrand. Jamison didn’t write the basic profile piece, she wrote an essay that used the artistic profile as a springboard to ask questions about representation, witness, storytelling, authenticity, morality and loneliness. In my essay, I found that grappling with Maude Schuyler Clay’s artistic story and mission made me aware of my goals moving forward as a young writer.
The essay I struggled with most was “Reckoning with Your Barbie Savior” because I had trouble focusing on one theme. I wanted to explore the gendered and racial aspects of volunteer-tourism, the morals, ethics and altruism. And I wanted to ask, can we help ourselves and others at the same time? But by writing many, many drafts, I realized I most wanted to investigate the tangible effects of orphanage volunteerism on the population we’re meant to be serving.“Reckoning Your Barbie Savior” was inspired by Katherine Boo’s book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Mary Gaitskill’s essay “Lost Cat,” Lacy M. Johnson’s essay collection The Reckonings, Bassey Ikpi’s essay “Yaka” and Kiese Laymon’s essay “You Are The Second Person.” Like Katherine Boo, who spent years reporting on a makeshift community of Mumbai, I took copious pages of notes while I was in Ghana and aimed to write evocative scenes full of tension. Critics applaud Boo for writing non-fiction that reads like a novel, which is exactly what I love to read and write. Boo’s attention to detail and real-life narrative arcs are remarkable. Like Mary Gaitskill did in “Lost Cat,” I wanted to shift back and forth in time and place without confusion and I wanted to braid these different experiences in order to produce a resonating message. And, like Lacy Johnson, I wanted to reckon. Many of Johnson’s essays reckon with crisis and injustice. In “What We Pay,” Johnson reflects on her privileged position in the world while analyzing the fallout from the BP Oil Spill and narrating her participation in a protest against BP, in order to reckon with injustice. With “Reckoning with Your Barbie Savior,” I wanted to reckon with my involvement in volunteerism—what does this experience mean to me, how should I move forward and how can my experience illuminate issues within the industry.
I had trouble condensing “Reckoning with Your Barbie Savior,” until I decided to experiment with the second person present tense, which helped me to naturally cut out extraneous information. I was inspired by Bassey Ikpi’s “Yaka,” which alternates between second and first person to unravel Ikpi’s relationship with her mother and reflect on how her bipolar disorder affects that relationship. “In your eyes, you, have never been completely whole,”Ikpi writes, which stung me when I read it because I was directly experiencing Ikpi’s thoughts as if they were my own. I wanted to do the same with my thoughts about volunteerism. Many people criticize Western women, like me, who sponsor orphans in Africa, so I wanted the reader to understand how she could also get tangled up in something so corrupt. I wanted readers to feel what I felt as I was experiencing it in the present tense so they would no longer villainize Barbie Saviors and understand the nuances of the entire situation. And, like Kiese Laymon did with his essay “You Are The Second Person,” I wanted to use second-person to implicate myself and blur the lines between oppressor and victim. Laymon writes, “You’re not a monster. You’re not innocent.” My hope is that “Reckoning with Your Barbie Savior” will encourage others to come forward and confront unethical mistakes they’ve made in the past.
With “Wanted: Someone with Whom to Simply Pass the Days,” I was eager to deconstruct the concept of love, and through this process come to a revelation about my own confusing love life. For an early draft, I went to the library and checked out a stack of books on love, written by psychologists, psychiatrists, cultural critics, sociologists and biological anthropologists, and aimed to synthesize all this research with my personal experiences in order to create a friendly and informative piece. “Wanted: Someone with Whom to Simply Pass the Days” was inspired by The New York Times Modern Love column, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Like writers of Modern Love columns, I wanted to narrate my revelations about relationships, dating and love in a fun, accessible style that would draw the reader’s attention. Like Fennelly’s Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, I wanted to write in a conversational tone, as if I was chatting with a friend. Like Rubin, I also wanted to incorporate the research, articles and other pieces of information that helped me come to my final realization, which was that love isn’t a fairytale, it’s a matter of simply finding someone with whom to pass the days. Like Rubin, I hope that readers will gain insight from my essay on how to be happier and nurture healthy relationships. Lastly, like Gilbert, I wanted to include the insight I gained from my experiences engaging with other cultures in order to provide a holistic view on love and romance that might challenge the conventional Western perspective.
Ultimately, I hope to expand this thesis into a full collection of 16 essays, organized into four subsections of four essays—Attention, Manic, Crash and Forward—that’ll tell the story of my life, with all its messy emotions, in tandem with telling a greater story about what it’s like to grow up in a globalized world wrought with social media. Many writers and researchers, such as Jean Twenge, Lisa Wade, Nancy Jo Sales and Kate Julian have analyzed Generation Z, with Twenge and Sales focusing on social media’s effects on mental health, and Wade and Julian focuses on the implications of hookup culture and the so-called sex recession, but those writers are from an earlier generation. There are few Gen Z writers who are able to write auto ethnographically about their first-hand experiences with the trends and statistics mentioned in magazines like The Atlantic. Unlike other reportage, I will be able to reflexively narrate and reflect upon the tangible effects of growing up online in a time of hookup culture and in a highly mobilized world.
The final book-length collection will explore themes of femininity, popularity, celebrity, vulnerability, love and exploitation. “The Red Swimsuit” and “The New YouTube” will be in the first subsection, “Attention,” which will focus on my generation’s obsession with attention and celebrity. “Wanted: Simply Someone with Whom to Pass the Time” will be in the second subsection, “Manic,” which will explore the phenomena of hookup culture and polyamory, and my personal issues with partying and substance abuse. The third section of the book, “Crash,”will focus on mental health, my experience with burn-out in college and the resultant process of healing. “A Record of the World as She Sees It” and “Reckoning Your Barbie Savior” will be included in the fourth and final section, “Forward,” which will look at all I’ve learned and how we can move forward from the mistakes and turmoil of our pasts.
Before writing creative non-fiction, I honestly had very little experience with revision. When I wrote yearbook articles and pieces for the school paper, I seldom revised and never rewrote anything, but working on this thesis has given me a whole new appreciation for the art of revision. I guess I always assumed that authors just had natural talent, but William Zinsser writes, “A clear sentence is no accident, very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.” And John McPhee wrote a New Yorker piece titled “Writing by Omission,” in which he points out writing is selection: “Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going.” Beth Ann Fennelly, the Poet Laurate of Mississippi and my thesis advisor, has taught me, through her edits and cuts, how trimming a piece can make it stronger and snappier. With my instinctual desire to document everything, like I did with my diary as a kid, my first drafts can be tens of thousands of words and read like a folder full of thick description field notes. But by adopting a diligent daily practice—I write for about two hours almost every morning—I’ve learned that it’s possible and necessary for me to slowly and methodically chip away at my endless first drafts. “An essay is not an attempt captured in its first iteration, but in its ninth, or tenth, or fifteenth—honed, interrogated, reimagined,” Jamison writes. “Another word for this is ‘revision.’”
I revised with a cookie cutter and kept the parts most relevant to theme and then saved the rest of the dough to be recycled in later essays. At first, I hated this process. I thought it was monotonous and I was impatient to move onto something new, like I was used to doing with the weekly opinion columns. But now I’ve seen the benefits of rewriting, rereading and revision, and learned to cherish the little triumphs and improvements. My revision process was also inspired by my professor Kiese Laymon, who writes in his award-winning book Heavy: An American Memoir, “For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there, I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.”
Writing is a form of inquiry and with each revision of the essays in this thesis, I got closer to the truth. I wrote the first draft of “Wanted: Simply Someone with Whom to Pass the Days” nearly three years ago, in the summer of 2017, and am astounded by how much it has changed and grown with revision. I wrote the first draft of “The Red Swimsuit” in the fall of 2018, which focused on the social media aspects of the piece, then, in the fall of 2019, I took Nature Writing with Ann Fisher-Wirth and wrote a memoir about the experience of moving to Australia, being a misfit, making new friends and learning to scuba dive. I ultimately realized that these two drafts were connected, so I took bits and pieces from each, and added some new material, to create the final product in this thesis. I am proud of how far this essay has come in two years, after seven drafts and feedback from many professors and friends. Similarly, “The New YouTube” and “Reckoning Your Barbie Savior” began in spring of 2019 with the earliest drafts written in Vanessa Gregory’s special topics in journalism course, Writing with a Voice. After multiple rewrites and rounds of feedback, the final pieces are almost unrecognizable from the first drafts. I also took Advanced Creative Nonfiction with Kiese Laymon in the fall of 2019, where I worked on rewrites of “Reckoning Your Barbie Savior” and wrote the earliest draft of“A Record of the World as She Sees It.” Working on this thesis has made me realize that writing is a group effort, not an individual pursuit, and exchanging feedback is a crucial part of the process of writing as inquiry.
When I used to write for the school paper, I cared more about seeing my name in print, but writing this thesis has allowed me to find so much joy in the creative process and for that, I am sincerely grateful. I hope the joy I gained from collecting and assembling all these pieces is expressed and transmuted to you as you read these essays.
* Some names and identifying information in these essays have been changed to protect the privacy of people involved *