Tajja Isen Is Wary of the ‘Personal Essay Economy’

Here’s what you need to know: Tajja Isen’s lore runs deep. As coworkers at a now defunct digital magazine (RIP Catapult), I found myself constantly awed by her editorial vision and subtle humor, but it was her Wikipedia that really began to reveal the depth of her main character-ness. But even that hardly manages to scratch the surface. In her debut essay collection, Some of My Best Friends, Tajja Isen invites us into the complexities and contradictions of that expansive personal history.

Weaving together cultural criticism with personal narrative, she examines the limitations of progressivism, shifting between registers both humorous and heartbreaking. I spoke with Isen about the evolution of the personal essay economy, the horrors of writing about a politicized body, and rejecting representation as our ultimate end goal.

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Leah Johnson: You talk a lot about the evolution and expectations of the personal essay form. I think you use the phrase, “It feels like pressing on a bruise too hard.” How did you decide how much pressing on a bruise you wanted to do and how much you wanted to keep to yourself?

Interestingly, I filed in this book?” And I think I had pitched it much more as a personal critical essay collection, and then I sent them a critical essay collection. So a lot of the work of revision was figuring out what I was comfortable with and where I saw myself sitting into this book. And I feel like I was trying to develop a new vocabulary for talking about myself and my experiences. Because I do think a lot of what I see writers push to do in the personal essay economy, especially racialized writers, as I talk about in the book, does feel too bruise-like. And I didn’t want to feel trapped by any of those familiar scripts.