Feeling guilty about fleeing the city for greener pastures is not a sufficient reason to write a personal essay.
Aside from a few unique flourishes ― Mealer weaves in the history of his own great-grandmother and her daughter, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic ― all of these essays tread the same tedious ground: an acknowledgment that New Yorkers were meant to stay home, an enumeration of reasons why it was personally preferable for the author and their family to nonetheless relocate , a catalog of hygiene practices followed during the illicit journey .
Like all the worst personal essays, these are not unflinching examinations of the writers’ own behavior, but lazy exercises in self-justification and projection. “Three weeks ago,” Daum opens her essay, “I fled New York City for the countryside. I know there are arguments against this, some expressed more thoughtfully than others.
Daum, like Business Insider’s Lichtenberg, mostly seems to experience quarantine as a sort of rural Rumspringa, a pretext for rediscovering the bucolic delights of, respectively, Appalachia and eastern Pennsylvania. “This corner of the state is full of preserved farms and old houses made of stone,” Lichtenberg rhapsodizes. “It has rolling hills dotted with pretty trees covered in white or pink or yellow leaves.
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