I agree about the essay. I would say that there are a few things obstructing it from feeling successful and complete. One is the tendency to use speculative language— “it may have been the first Christmas,” etc. All essays like this are necessarily speculative (reliant on memory, a single POV), and drawing attention to it should serve a thematic purpose, and here, it doesn’t. The second is the tendency to avoid direct self reflection. She looks at her feelings and behaviors obliquely, rather than truly attempting to analyze and understand her impulses, her daughters’. The third is a lack of one, uniting conflict or question. I suppose she would say it’s the question of why she insists that her daughter join them in the water, but this question doesn’t feel all that important (the daughter resists, then relents, and that’s it) or representative of the greater family dynamic and she doesn’t ever really answer the question or come close to doing so, and she doesn’t complicate the question, either, so it just sits, unanswered and unimportant. These three issues are related and work to make the essay feel too vague, too like a list of loosely connected semi-memories. An essay should feel like insight into a mind as it works something out on the page, or tries to, anyway. This feels more like overheating a conversation she’s having with herself.
I agree about the essay. I would say that there are a few things obstructing it from feeling successful and complete. One is the tendency to use speculative language— “it may have been the first Christmas,” etc. All essays like this are necessarily speculative (reliant on memory, a single POV), and drawing attention to it should serve a thematic purpose, and here, it doesn’t. The second is the tendency to avoid direct self reflection. She looks at her feelings and behaviors obliquely, rather than truly attempting to analyze and understand her impulses, her daughters’. The third is a lack of one, uniting conflict or question. I suppose she would say it’s the question of why she insists that her daughter join them in the water, but this question doesn’t feel all that important (the daughter resists, then relents, and that’s it) or representative of the greater family dynamic and she doesn’t ever really answer the question or come close to doing so, and she doesn’t complicate the question, either, so it just sits, unanswered and unimportant. These three issues are related and work to make the essay feel too vague, too like a list of loosely connected semi-memories. An essay should feel like insight into a mind as it works something out on the page, or tries to, anyway. This feels more like overheating a conversation she’s having with herself.