Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin

There’s a fine balance between intimacy and oversharing. We live in an era where the two are often conflated and confused, where it’s easy enough to mistake the display of both mundane minutia and overly chronicled major life events for closeness. In our hearts, though, we understand this is not closeness. How do we know? One clue: intimacy doesn’t breed loneliness. An experience of true closeness with another person, even if only brief, can have a lasting impact. The encounter can render us more empathic, more humane, able to fill out our own skin more wholly. Closeness can change a mood, add an actual spring to one’s step, give us the energy to attempt a more intimate relationship with ourselves. These things feel good, and so we seek out close connections everywhere, from our friends and our lovers and our social media accounts and our writers. The genres of memoir and the personal essay are an obvious place to look for connection. But they are tricky forms. In my experience, these