Consider the range of approaches exemplified by the endings to Rebecca Solnit’s “The Longest War,” Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Ariel Gore’s “The Part I Can’t Tell You.” In “The Longest War,” Solnit explores the systemic worldwide violence against women. The possibilities for such nuanced endings are as vast and varied as essay writers themselves.
And the mobster… no one knows what happens to him. In real life, the queen employs complex diplomatic maneuvers that trouble the legitimacy of the war itself. In real life, the boy spends months trying to decode the girl’s text messages while the status of their relationship remains undefined. But real life rarely offers such clarity. Readers want to know if the boy gets the girl, if the queen wins the war, if the mobster gets killed, etc. This tendency is likely a function of our human wish to reach a clarifying conclusion. When writing nonfiction, it can be particularly difficult to determine a stopping point that does not seem artificial or smack of, “And the moral of the story is….” Lopate writes, “A common mistake students make is to assume they need to tie up with a big bow the preceding matter via a grand statement of what it all means, or what the life lesson to be drawn from it is: too often the result is platitude” (59 ). Since doing this well involves subtle interpersonal and aesthetic assessments, there is no singular solution, no such thing as perfect-hence Lopate’s need for “optimism”-though some endings certainly falter by falling flat, diverting or overstating. Writing, after all, is about communicating, and personal essay writing is about creating a portal through which readers can engage with the writer’s digested experience. This “apprehension of scale” comes partly though avid reading, but mostly by maintaining empathy for the person in receipt of one’s pages. As Lopate says, “I usually start with an apprehension of scale that tells me certain subject matter only merits x number of pages (bow ties, say, should get two, not ten), and not go beyond that point, however much fun one is having” (63). But it is also a matter of gauging the average reader’s tolerance. There is no prescription for this-it is something the writer must feel.
“Fatigue” suggests that there is a point at which the writer has said all he/she needs, wants and is capable of saying on a particular topic.
How do such endings arise? In talking about his own essay writing in To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, Phillip Lopate writes, “For me, endings may arise from a combination of fatigue and optimism” (63). While a writer of fiction is generally expected to craft an ending that resolves the story’s central conflict, essay writers must navigate without formal guidelines toward something more nebulous––an ending that consolidates the investigation and style of the piece so that the work resonates beyond the final page. In that sense, there was something “essayistic” about it. What was remarkable about The Soprano’s ending was that it honored the show’s aesthetic and emotional ambition while defying the conventions of fictional storytelling.
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