Course: Reading and Writing Autobiography

Instructor: Lucy Marx

The Personal Investigative Essay

“Write about what you don’t know about what you do know.”

– Eudora Welty

For this assignment, you will not be writing a “straight” autobiographical narrative but a personal investigative essay (PIE), in which you ask a question about your experience, and try to deepen your understanding of it through research, thinking, and writing. In one way, you do know your own experience intimately; you’ve lived it. But you don’t fully understand it; we never do. So, in a very real sense, you will be writing about “what you don’t know about what you do know” to understand your experience better.

The process of writing this essay will be broken down into a number of mini-assignments along the way as you clarify your focus, carry out your investigation, integrate what you learn with your own thinking, and develop the trajectory of your developing insight.

Where will you get? That’s really up for grabs. What matters is how you bring us along as you move forward with your thinking, letting us share in your process of coming to some new understanding. However, that understanding might just be a more developed, more well-informed, question and not an answer at all.

Where should you start?

Brainstorm and freewrite to find a topic and a key question that genuinely interests you, coming out of your own life experiences—what you do a lot of, what you care about, what you think about. Try to articulate a clear question like: Why should I keep mowing my (expletive) lawn when it’s so (expletive) tedious and boring? Or: Why do I prefer finding something worn and used at a flea-market instead of buying something new? Or: What’s the difference between a very good athlete (which I know I am) and a great one?  Or: How can I best approach my god? (OK, so I was suspicious of this last one—too vague, too big, too subjective to write about without resorting to cliché, too hard to find objective sources—but see how this writer finds a way to address this question in a personal investigative essay that makes good use of relevant sources, gives us an honest look at his own story, and tells it in a fresh, engaging voice, as he avoids proselytizing, i.e. trying to convince us to believe exactly what he does.)

Mini-assignment #1: Write a one-page proposal that addresses:

1. What’s the personal experience (or experiences) that I am interested in exploring—what particulars, or incidents, help clarify that experience?

2. What question(s) does my experience generate, and what’s my personal stake in thinking that question through?

3. What resources are available that can enrich my thinking?  (Name some if possible or at least clarify where you will find them.) What do I think they will add?

4. Where do I imagine I will get as I try to deepening my understanding?