your story is worth more than $50

All you writers out there currently pondering how best to convert a good personal experience into the kind of ballin’ personal essay that grabs billions of eyeballs and an excitable book agent or two — listen up: Helen Rosner’s got some advice for ya. (This also goes for anyone feeling the ridiculous pressure of not having a memoir automatically in the works in their 20s or whatever, because like not even Laura Ingalls did that!! Home(stead)girl took a few decades, too).

In the Longform podcast interview she gave earlier this summer, Rosner (The New Yorker’s food correspondent) talks about Queer Eye, Bourdain, and writing about lowbrow food — but she also comments on the personal essay industry with some wise words for bb writers (skip right to 30:30 if you wanna listen):

“It winds up being a monetization of personal tragedy. And when you're particularly a young writer or a writer who's coming to the writing community from a place where you might not have a lot of privilege or advantages, often what you have to sell is your tragedy and your struggle. And so when you're early in your career, you wind up selling the biggest story of your entire fucking life for $50…And you can never have that back for the rest of your life. You can never sell that story again.”

Rosner then goes on to add, of course, that you should live your truth & tell your story the way you see fit, but like, AT LEAST make a few thous off it, yes?? We’re here for that longterm $$, okay Deezers?

Like Deez Links? Forward to premature memoirs.