The Year In Great Sentences
Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 co-founder, Associate Editor at Men’s Journal
Sentence: “I loved seeing the way my words traveled beyond the pages and became about so much more than what I’d lived, or what I’d felt.”
Where it’s from: Leslie Jamison at The Guardian.
Why it’s great: People tend to approach personal essays with some apprehension, something Jamison points out at the start of this piece on how “Confessional writing is not self-indulgent.” Either the writer is worried they’re revealing too much or too little, or readers might, as Jamison points out, dismiss the entire genre as,” self-absorbed, solipsistic, self-indulgent.” And that’s why I loved this particular sentence as a way of summing up what I think was the ascension of the personal essay in 2014. To me, this sentence worked as a statement of where nonfiction writing is at in 2014, the type of pull quote I’d expect to see in a roundup of the year in writing.