Articles Available Online

‘An essay’s heat is interior’, writes Cynthia Ozick in ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’ When I first came across Ozick’s piece in The Atlantic (later to serve as her introduction to the 1998 issue of the Best American Essays series), the title gave me great hope This is the writer, after all, who famously asked Norman Mailer what colour ink he dips his balls in Yes, the essay as a woman, the essay as a body, flesh and blood: vulnerable, resilient, proud, secretive, rebellious, surprising ‘A warm body’ can mean a placeholder, a stand-in, filler, an innocuous form carefully placed to occupy space – a neutral, affable presence But here, I thought, the warm body must be something else: an indentation left in the sheets, a fleeting form of hotness, words burned into the ether, a radiant, unapologetic scorch mark; but also with grim suggestions of the cadaver, as in, the body was still warm   Ozick’s essay was in fact slightly more tepid than I had imagined She was interested in the essay as the formal embodiment of a female protagonist who gives voice to the ‘sensations of the self’: ‘she is there, a living voice She takes us in’ Still, the idea of the essay as a potentially incendiary form has stayed with me, and something about Ozick’s proposal seems radical and exciting It’s as if the essay is alive in a way that other forms are not; as if it possesses human traits and bodily characteristics, making it particularly supple and fitting when it comes to writing about certain conditions or experiences What might this look like on the page? Two recent debut essay collections offer some interesting possibilities ‘How much can a body endure? Almost everything,’ Chelsea Hodson asks and rejoinders in, Tonight I’m Someone Else ‘Sometimes it seems that you don’t know your body at all The names and locations of things You need someone else to tell you what your body is doing,’ writes Ashleigh Young in Can You Tolerate This? Though markedly different from each other in tone and temperament,