The Queen of Oversharing

“The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over,” declared the headline of a much-circulated article on The New Yorker’s website earlier this year. It was the “God Is Dead” of the Jezebel generation, reporting that the craze for essays with titles like “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina”—a story by a writer named Michelle Barrow that became a fleeting sensation in 2015—had come to an end. To borrow a late-19th-century saying about the United States patent office, everything that could be found inside a vagina had been found.

Let young essayists find hope in the life and letters of Joyce Maynard, who has withstood market corrections to the personal-essay economy for 50 years, ever since her first one appeared in magazine when she herself was 14. She is the Joyce Carol Oates of women’s confessional essays, firing them off in such rapid succession