i think a good personal essay should be like… a tasty parfait. i’m not well-versed in writing them, but i appreciate how much architecture is embedded in what makes a good one. there’s like. a surface layer, where the author puts an anecdote, a moment, some kind of scene that looks like the whole thing at first glance. that’s the part where the fruits and cream go, and it alone would be a memoir, a different kind of dessert. what makes a personal essay is the denser stuff below: reflection, analysis, memory, maybe a small private obsession the author pretends is casual. then another layer appears. and another. none of them are enough on their own, but together they hold.

the order matters, too. you can’t dump yogurt, granola, and fruit into a bowl and call it a parfait; it becomes a mess, even if the ingredients are good. that’s just. a yogurt bowl. personal essays work the same way, and i’d even argue they’re harder to get perfect than the average essay. you don’t front-load the thesis like an academic paper, and there’s so many conscious choices you have to make, rhetorically and aesthetically, so that the sweetness, the crunch, the acidity arrive in a sequence that teaches the reader how to taste what you’re really talking about. structure is what does emotional labour here, not just organizing ideas, and the rest is sensory awareness and control.

if you’re like me, you also need a parfait to balance textures. a personal essay can’t be only insight, only story, or only confession. it needs some kind of contrast, or at least awareness of juggling them together. maybe the softness of vulnerability is against the resistance of logical thought, or a moment of clarity leads to something unresolved, or abstraction complicating (and expanding) an experience that could otherwise have been unfortunately brushed off as run-of-the-mill (thinking of machado’s in the dream house!) the pleasure comes from the alternating sequence, and the balancing act it entails. i mean, probably every essay is about balance, but personal essays are set up so that the context they’re in conversation with, and sometimes fighting against, is the author’s everything.

in that, i guess a good personal essay also won’t bother to hide that it’s constructed. the reader senses the craft, the choices, the restraint, and nothing is pretending to be accidental, even when it feels intimate. i’m not sure i’m articulating this part right, but there’s transparency to a parfait. you can see all the layers at once, even before you dig in. the joy is in the experience of the senses, even knowing what you’re digging into. hm. it’s rather sensual, huh. the textural depth of a good parfait and a good personal essay.

anyway. before i let this overworked metaphor go, parfaits are also made with portion control in mind. it’s indulgent, but it’s contained bc everything will be way off if the layers and ingredients aren’t balanced as they are. a personal essay earns its ultimate boss form by knowing where to stop, when to leave one layer partly untouched, one question unanswered, so the reader walks away still tasting it. the form isn’t about dumping everything in. it’s about stacking meaning so each bite changes how you understand the last. if this makes any kind of sense at all.