Day 5: "It's Hard Out Here for a Memoirist"

Jerald Walker (Prairie Schooner, Spring 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“When writing about certain subsets of American culture, one of the memoirist’s great challenges is to draw a distinction between bad decisions and bad people.”

—Jerald Walker, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Memoirist,” Prairie Schooner, Spring 2023.