personal monster essay

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Personal Narrative: The Monster Essay

Boom! The vicious, metal monster clasped down on its next victim, drawing the helpless people further into the depths of its massive body. The monster slithered like a ravenous snake as it pulled its prey along. The beast flew high above the clouds nearly touching heaven and then bolted like lightning towards the ground faster than the speed of light . As it peered over the edge of the cliff, I saw the monster look me in the eyes and scream much louder than any noise I had heard before. In my mind I was in line to sign up for my death sentence.

On any normal day, I would be running far away from the monster, but today was not just any normal day. Today was different. Today everything changed. Today time seemed to slow down to a halt, everything grew larger than life, and even the sun seemed to glare down at me as though it was watching my every move. That was when I knew, I would begin the war with the cruel beast. Thus, like a brave knight I began to prepare myself for the battle that I would face later on. Little did I know, the battle was going to come much sooner than I had planned.

For many years my dad had tried to get me to ride a rollercoaster, but fear always seemed to hold me back from trying a ride. However, on this day I would push through the fear that always held me back. Today I conquered fear. Let’s go back to where this whole story begins. It all began only two days before, my family and I traveled to what I thought was the most amazing place in the entire world, Branson. We arrived at the condo and unpacked our bags. Little did I know what was going to happen later on that week. Ever since I was a little kid I had loved Silver Dollar City and I was excited every time that I got to go there.

After the first couple days had passed, we finally got to go to the old-fashion park, but when we arrived I saw it. It was there standing high above the trees. It stood much higher than before and its jaws seemed to clamp down harder. Today something was much different than before. The sight of the monster shot chills down my spine. It peared over the clouds and stared at me telling me to come closer to it. “I couldn’t let it get to me,” I thought. “I have to stay away from it or my life is over. ” Little did I know what was getting ready to happen to me and my dad.

Even though my family and I were in the small, home-like town that I had always loved, I was focused on the serpent that climbed high above me. The slithering serpent caused me to feel frightened all day long and I ultimately dreaded my day because of it. I knew that my dad was going to try to push me forward to ride the ride, but I was determined that I wouldn’t ride it. The day passed extremely slowly. After what felt like an eternity of time, the moment that I had been dreading came. My dad tried to draw me into a trap that I could never escape.

By the time I finally gave in my dad had spent an hour trying to coax me. I ended up giving in to an epidemic that I would never be able to cure. I inched my way forward to the mile-long line that led to the mouth of the beast. I traveled in a nervous shuffle, my legs shook in terror, my heart pounded in my chest, and my lungs burned as all of the air was sucked out of them. However, the line kept moving forward at a speed much slower than I had ever seen. An hours worth of waiting led me to this one moment, I was at the end of the line. That was when it all seemed to happen.

My heart was digging its way out of my chest and I was ready to run as far away from the scene as I could. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it. I would back out like I had every other day . “What am I thinking? ” I thought. That wasn’t going to happen, not today. Today everything was different. I turned back to run as far away as I could, but then came a hiss from the monster’s tongue telling us that it had two open seats. My dad was still determined to snag me and take me into the trap. He raised his hands and in that moment I knew the seats were mine.

It was then that I knew what my dad was doing. He was pushing me to face my fears and battle the beast. I sat down in the seat as the beast’s jaw clamped down around me. I couldn’t move at all. There I sat, paralyzed as the beast hissed its sign of approval. “I will never see home again,” I imagined . “I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my mom and sister. ” This was it. I counted down my final moments. Three. Two. One. Crack! My life was now in the hands of a big ball of metal. I moved forward preparing to be swallowed. The serpent began to rise towards the sky ready to strike me dead.

Then, it shot downward whipping me through a treacherous course, but soon after I flew back up I saw it again. This time it looked different than before. The contraption was no beast at all. It wasn’t out to kill me or to hurt me even. It was there to show me the world, overcome fear, and experience the thrill. It made me into the fearless warrior that my dad was trying to get me to be. If it hadn’t been for that one day in Silver Dollar City, I would still view rollercoasters as big, killer monsters that wanted to swallow me alive. I would have flinched at the sight of something that now brings me great joy.

Fear always held me back from fun times and good memories, but by overcoming my fears I opened my mind to a maze of possibilities and outcomes. It is so funny to watch myself every time that I get on a rollercoaster now and thinking back to what I did before. I will always remember that day in Silver Dollar City that changed my perspective on fun forever. This moment would become the start of many great memories with my family and friends. The sensation of the wind through my hair and the thrill in my chest would lead me to face more and more fears. I was changed forever because of this moment. This was where it would all start.

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Personal Essay

Monster memoir instructions.

Monster Memoir Essay (2 25 points)

Due:  Various Dates (see below)

Introduction

Personal essays are just that--personal. They tell a specific story with a compelling point or meaning. For this personal essay, you'll be focusing on the "monster" you fear or the "monster" inside you.

In a well-organized, focused essay, tell a story about a moment in your life when you encountered a monster or felt like a monster.  Narrow your topic to one single incident (consisting of mainly a single narrative), and completely describe it with some underlying purpose (thesis), which may be a lesson you learned or taught someone else. There should be a reason you're telling this particular story. Please choose one (1) of the following options for this essay:

Each of us has experienced moments of fear or terror in our lives. These moments are often instigated by another person or some entity that is beyond our control. We often consider these obstacles as “monsters” – from bullies on the playground, to the snarling dog down the street, to cancer or some other debilitating disease. An important part in the development of our identities is learning how to cope with these monsters. Briefly describe a monster that you encountered, and explore how you dealt with the fear that the monster evoked. How do you think the process of experiencing and dealing with your fear shaped who you are today?

Many of us have felt like a “freak” or an outsider at some point in our lives. Have you ever had the experience of not fitting in or being treated like a monster because you were different from everyone else in some way? Or, perhaps you felt out of control in a situation and acted like a “monster” to somebody else. Maybe you were the bully on the playground tormenting another child. Whether you were treated like a monster or acted like a monster, consider: how did the experience make you feel? How did you deal with it? How has the experience shaped your sense of self? Do you have any regrets?

Dos and Don'ts

Do be honest in your writing.

Do be specific and detailed.

Do use elements of description.

Do use elements of narration (dialogue/story structure)

Do n' t try to tell your entire life story .

Don't let this essay merely become an accounting of a personal story. 

Essay Requirements

Your personal essay must include the following:

Identification information in the upper left corner

Page number header in the upper right corner with the student's last name and the page number (ex. Blomstrand 1)

Double space the entire document

12-point font size

Font styles: Times New Roman, Tahoma, Veranda, Ariel, or Century

2-3 pages (this is a guideline) 

Thesis statement that indicates your reason for telling this story

Body that tells the story of your selected topic 

No spelling or grammar errors

Draft (25 points)

Due: 9.7.23 at 11:30pm

Please upload your draft to the link in Canvas. Your draft isn't necessarily a completed essay but obviously the more you write, the more feedback you can receive by your peers. No outlines! 

Feedback (25)

Due: 9.8.23 at 11:30pm

Please provide feedback on your peer's essays before the due date. Peer feedback allows your classmates to make adjustments to their writing before the final essay is due. Feedback can be provided via the comments box in Canvas or directly on the paper. If you're not familiar with peer reviewing in Canvas, please see the Canvas Guides in the Student Resources module: Student Resources/College Resources/Canvas Guides

Peer Review Reflection (25 points) 

Due: 9.9.23 at 11:30pm

After reviewing your feedback from your peers, please respond to the questions in the assignment link in Canvas. Anwer the questions in detail explaining what you think and why you think what you do. 

Monster Memoir Essay (100 points)

Due: 9.10 .23 at 11:30pm

Please upload your completed essay to the link in Canvas. 

Reflection (50 points)

Due: 9.10 .23 at 11:30pm 

After completing your essay, please answer the following questions in an MLA formatted document . Don't include the questions, bullets or numbers. Just respond to the questions in full and complete sentences, explaining what you think and why in detail and with examples:

What did you learn about personal writing that you didn't know before? 

What did you learn about personal writing from completing this assignment?

What did you learn about your personal writing style and habits from working on this essay?

What are your writing strengths? 

What writing areas do you still feel you need work on?

What the most challenging aspect of this essay? 

What did you like or enjoy about this essay?

What would you differently if you had the time?

What are you most proud of when you think about your work?

Any other comments . . .

Your essay will be evaluated using the EMC Rubric. 

Conclusion 

Having completed this assignment, you'll have demonstrated your understanding of evaluation and evaluation writing.

Personal Monster Essay

First draft, 25 points; final draft, 100 points

In chapter 1 of Monsters , Andrew J. Hoffman presents a selection of texts examining the question, “Why do we create monsters?”  The writers included in the chapter explore a variety of psychological, sociological, and philosophical theories to explain our impulse to imagine frightening beasts and beings.  While only a few of us might create monsters in an artistic sense, most of us have frightened ourselves by imagining monsters in our anxious daydreams and our childhood nightmares.

In an academic essay of 3-4 pages, apply three different theories from the chapter 1 to determine the likely origins of a personal monster that frightened you during your youth.  Be sure to provide your readers with enough details to picture your monster and understand how and why it frightened you.  Also, be sure to provide enough textual evidence from Monsters to support your claims regarding what your chosen theories indicate about the origins of your monster.  Finally, be sure to distinguish between your ideas and those of other writers, to indicate any use of other writers’ language, and to document where such ideas or language comes from.

Q:  Can my topic be an inanimate object, such as a haunted house or creepy doll?

A:  Yes, but only if that object is also a being, possessed—and maybe even animated—by an actively monstrous will or consciousness.

Q:  Can my topic be an abstract concept, such as darkness or a feeling of dread?

A:  No.  A monster needs to have some physical form, even if that is only a presence in the shadows, a ghostly figure that disappears when you turn to look at it, or an invisible creature that you detect through other senses.  Be aware that the more nebulous your monster’s appearance is, the harder that monster will be to describe and analyze.

Q:  Can my topic be a monster from a television show, movie, etc.?

A:  Yes, but you will need to separate the monster as you imagined it from the “official” character and focus your analysis on your personal version.  The more obvious the differences are, the easier this will be.

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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.  

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making. 

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017. 

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time. 

READ MORE  PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves. 

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein. 

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. 

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations: 

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue. 

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)? 

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .” 

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.  

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How to Write a Monsters Essay?

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Writing an essay about monsters is not a walk in the park. It is a deeply creative and difficult piece of academic work in terms of cultural, psychological, and societal analyses it stipulates. Students tasked with an essay devoted to monsters need to show a thorough cultural understanding of the topic of their essay, be it about a folkloric monster character or a fantasy one.

In this article, we will tell you what makes a monster essay so special, and guide you on how to write a decent essay on monster of your choice, apart from providing some original ideas on possible topics for this kind of essay.

How to write a monster essay

An essay about these creepy creatures – monsters, is not much different from any other college essay when it comes to structural composition and other formal requirements, including length. A typical high school or college paper about monsters as the main theme is 2–3 pages long, and it is usually an open-topic type of paper, i.e., you are responsible for choosing the topic. This freedom is both good and bad news since modern and classic literature and cinema offer us a whole army of monsters to choose from. Check out the very last chapter for some original ideas on topics of essays about monsters.

Meanwhile, you can try out [Company] for immediate and high-quality help with writing your essay assignment. This is a trustworthy academic support agency capable of writing a great essay devoted to the topic of monsters, as well as providing any other academic assistance, including editing, counselling, proofreading, grammar and format check & cleanup, etc.

If you are resolved on writing an essay by yourself, however, below please review several important steps you should consider taking:

• Define a promising topic. Unless you already have a brilliant topic idea in mind, this step may require you to conduct thorough research – recalling the latest fantasy movies you’ve watched about monsters, checking out your folk literature, going online, and generating a couple of relevant search engine results. The result should be an interesting topic, that you find inspiring and can talk about describing its cultural significance, and societal meaning.
• Make a thesis statement. Even an essay about such a popular topic as monsters must have a clear thesis statement. It can be your personal claim, an intriguing opinion you might have about your topic or an assertion that you can prove with reasoning and logic (it would be naïve to expect facts in connection with a fantasy topic).
• Develop a good outline. For your writing to run smoothly, you need to follow a clear plan or an outline. A monster outline essay is equally important as the text of your essay.
• Introduction (including some background information about the topic and a clear thesis statement);
• The main body, which consists of arguments in the form of logic or reasoning. The main body is also the place to “present” your monster, and talk about its place in the society (culture, whether global or local).
• Conclusion – reflect on the chosen topic and its cultural significance. Talk about how you managed to prove/disprove the central point you made in the introductory paragraph.
• Check and edit. Give some time to carefully read your essay, perhaps after a small break. Edit and proofread your text.

We cannot stress enough that your writing would be easier if you spent a little time researching the topic. Even though your favourite monster may be “famous” and you may have plenty of information about it, some background research and extra online reading would always bring additional details (often unexpected), highlight the historical context, and open up new aspects and dimensions.

Monster essay topics

Below, please find several ideas for topics of essays on monsters. You are welcome to change and modify them should you find promising topics for your essay that you’d like to adjust and improve.

• Vampires: discuss the historical origins and cultural connection of the vampire monsters. How they came into being, and what continues to make them an interesting topic for modern book and movie plots.
• Zombies: explore the fears that zombies represent in the global culture. If you are knowledgeable in the local cultural aspects of the zombie phenomenon – that would make up an excellent essay topic!
• Ghosts: what makes the fear of ghosts so ubiquitous? Pick up and explore a ghost story of your choice that is different from the mainstream ghost stories often presented in Hollywood movies.
• Bigfoot: the fictitious and non-fictitious aspects of the Bigfoot. Which cultures and nations are more susceptible to the sighting and stories about Bigfoot, and why?
• Loch Ness Monster: what does the Loch Ness Monster represent? Is it more of a legend or a scientific phenomenon? Talk about the origins of this legend/phenomenon.
• Sirens: what is the exact mythological symbolism of sirens, and why stories about them were so popular during the age of Great Discoveries on the Sea?

Monster essay examples

To aid your writing work, we have located a couple of great examples of essays about monsters online. Check them out below.

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“Monster” by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style Essay (Book Review)

Alongside with his poems, in 1999, Walter Dean Myers presented an excellent drama novel, Monster , about one 16-year-old black kid, Steve Harmon, who was charged with felony murder. One of the most attractive features of this book is its structure and style of writing. Monster by Walter Dean Myers essay shall provide an analysis of the characters of the book and author’s style.The reader is captivated from the very beginning of the story, as it is similar to the beginning of the famous Star Wars .

Steve Harmon is the writer, director, and main character of Monster. Such a decision to present the story from one person’s point of view, divide characters into good and bad ones, appeal to the facts from one diary only, and use not a standard form of narration is unique indeed.

The style chosen by the author of this story takes several pages to get used to. Monster writing style attracts the attention of the reader due to the contrasting mix of such strategies as controlled development of thoughts and stream of consciousness, which create unique tone and mood in the story. However, such a manner of writing influences Meyers’ development of the theme only in a positive way. Why did Walter Dean Myers write monster in the format of a screenplay? It may be assumed that, by doing so, he wanted to show the feelings of the characters and the development of the conflict at the same time.

Monster is interesting to read because it provides the reader with a chance to create his/her own impression about the main character. The writer does not tell you what to think, but let you make decisions and conclusions independently. During the whole story, it is not mentioned whether the main character is good or bad.

It was pointed out that the character is surrounded by bad people, with bad guns, and bad intentions. Kathy O’Brien is Steve’s defense attorney, and she does believe that Steve is guilty and tries to prepare him for the worst. “Both you and this King character are on trial for felony murder. Felony murder is as severe as it gets. Sandra Petrocelli is the prosecutor, and she’s great. They’re pushing for the death penalty, which is really bad” (Myers 12). Family members also support Steve, though the ending of the book shows complicated relationships between them. Thus, in Monster by Walter Dean Myers, characters provoke ambiguous emotions in the reader.

Steve, as the author of this script, realizes that he is too young to be sentenced to death or spend about 20 years of his life in jail. “They’re pushing for the death penalty, which is really bad” (Myers 12). He also understands that this case will be rather challenging to win because of two simple reasons: (1) even his attorney, O’Brien, finds him guilty, and (2) he is a young black man that makes him being concerned with numerous crimes and larcenies.

He tries to prove that he was just in the wrong place and certainly at the wrong time. (Jones 190) He cannot accept such a reality and decides to do everything possible to evade this likely verdict. He decides to escape if necessary, even if it costs him his life.

O’Brien’s decision to turn away from Steve after the verdict was announced makes all the readers think about why she did it. What made her turn away? Was it the right decision? Maybe, she saw something wrong that even made the screenwriter title this story as Monster .

Young adult literature is one of the most significant steps up, which allows comprehending and analyze various themes from different perspectives (Suen 41), Monster is the story about the importance of making choices in life, possible challenges, and consequences. This book is one of the most brilliant messages to young adults.

It underlines a straightforward truth that only a person, himself/herself, is responsible for all choices he/she makes. The consequences of any decision will undoubtedly affect both the life of the person, who makes a choice, and the lives of other people. This is why it is crucially important to realize such significance and make wise and well-weight decisions.

Works Cited

Jones, D. Painless Reading Comprehension. Barron’s Educational Series, 2004.

Myers, W. D. Monster. HarperTemest, 2001.

Suen, A. Picture Writing. Writer’s Digest Books, 2003.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 31). "Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style. https://ivypanda.com/essays/monster-by-walter-dean-myers-the-significance-of-personal-choice/

""Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style." IvyPanda , 31 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/monster-by-walter-dean-myers-the-significance-of-personal-choice/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '"Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style'. 31 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. ""Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/monster-by-walter-dean-myers-the-significance-of-personal-choice/.

1. IvyPanda . ""Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/monster-by-walter-dean-myers-the-significance-of-personal-choice/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Monster" by Walter Dean Myers: Characters & Style." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/monster-by-walter-dean-myers-the-significance-of-personal-choice/.

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The Essential Joan Didion

Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here’s where to start.

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at The Times. Her book “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” will be published by Liveright next year.

• Published April 26, 2024 Updated April 28, 2024, 10:44 a.m. ET

The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021 . There’s her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. There’s the packing list enumerated in her essay “The White Album,” written between 1968 and 1978, which is sometimes cited as aspirational , even instructional . There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine . And, of course, there’s her most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — which opens “The White Album” and is frequently invoked, wrongly, for inspiration.

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.

And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff. Didion may be best known as the California writer who chronicled midcentury cultural decay, but her body of work is much wider and deeper. She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales behind them.

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit , revivals of her play , a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

I want to start with the foundational text.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

Like all of her collections, the book consists of essays written on assignment for a variety of outlets: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. Taken together, they start to convey a portrait of the cultural critic as a young woman, and especially her sense, nurtured from a very young age, that the world was coming apart at the seams.

The book’s title comes from one of its essays, about the decaying vibes in late ’60s Haight-Ashbury. That’s in turn plucked from a Yeats poem, quoted as an epigraph. In the preface she writes that the essay was reported and drafted in an attempt to beat a despairing writer’s block: “If I was to work again at all,” she writes, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Didion often spoke of writing as the way she figured out what she thought, which makes the title essay a must-read for understanding the author. But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a jewel chest, and the shiniest gem inside it might be “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s classic essay about falling in and out of love with New York City.

The often-quoted “On Self-Respect,” which also appears in this collection, has a funny origin story: Didion wrote it as a Vogue staffer because the editors had put the headline on the cover without assigning a writer, and she happened to be around.

Was there a sequel?

Not exactly. But “The White Album” (1979) is kind of a follow-up to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” though it also works all on its own. The book’s title essay is somewhat autobiographical, an account of Didion’s life in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Dunne were raising their daughter, Quintana Roo, and spending a great deal of their time with movie stars and rockers. Written as a series of vignettes, the essay floats from Didion’s psychological trouble to her encounters with familiar figures — the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. There’s a sense in which the essay is responsible for the way many of us born later “remember” the late 1960s; you could spot its DNA, for instance, in certain seasons of “Mad Men,” or in Quentin Tarantino’s film “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .”

On the whole, the essays in “The White Album” feel more descriptive of Didion’s life than earlier writings, but she expertly toed a fine line that made her readers (especially women) feel they knew her, even though she never really revealed a lot about herself in her writing. Other standouts in the collection include “The Women’s Movement,” which will give you a sense for Didion’s reluctance to call herself a feminist, and “Holy Water,” which becomes a personal history by way of California history.

I want to read Didion at her most vicious.

The cattiest (and thus maybe the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Pretty Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the first lady of California. Didion, part of the fifth generation of a well-off Sacramento family, had absolutely no use for either Reagan from the moment the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans became the prevailing metaphor for everything that was wrong with the American political scene, because she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and governed like Hollywood figures. “She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures, and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you,” Didion writes near the end of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is practically dripping off the page.

Despite inflicting a significant sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her own memoirs — “Pretty Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books until the final one, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021). It’s a perfect glimpse into a young, irritated writer who knew exactly what she was doing.

Did she ever get swoony?

Words like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are usually applied to Didion’s cultural analysis, but if you want to see her in full weak-kneed mode, read the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she finally landed a pitch she’d been longing for: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned Didion to travel to northern Mexico, where “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long review in Vogue — was shooting. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a converted aircraft hangar on the Army base where her father was stationed during World War II. He became her idea of manhood, safety, strength.

Wayne-like characters pop up across Didion’s fiction, as does her longing for the kind of security this line represented to her. But Wayne as an actual person was important to her, too. When she finally met her hero on set, he was just coming off a lung cancer scare; she mentions his “bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his diagnosis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage people in the smoke-filled era to get screened for the disease.

John Wayne is key to Didion’s story for more than just entertainment reasons. Her political views, until well into adulthood, were sternly conservative, not as right wing as Wayne’s but nearly so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner parties, seemingly for shock value, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Party embraced Richard Nixon, but as late as the 1990s she was still saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in every election since, had he run.

Didion also ended up working in the movie industry, in one way or another, for her entire life, and it’s not hard to believe she was hooked on the business by her love of Wayne.

How much of a Hollywood insider was Didion, really?

Didion and Dunne considered themselves novelists first and journalists second, but they really paid their bills by writing and doctoring scripts. Their first produced movie was the 1971 addict drama “The Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino in his first leading role, and Kitty Winn, who won Best Actress at Cannes for the role. The pair wrote a number of scripts together, including “Play It as It Lays,” “A Star Is Born” (the Barbra Streisand one), “True Confessions,” “Up Close and Personal” and the HBO short film “Hills Like White Elephants.” If you really want a great overview of Hollywood through their eyes, you can’t do better than two of Dunne’s books: “The Studio” (1969), about life on the back lot at 20th Century Fox, and “Monster” (1997), about the travails they experienced getting “Up Close and Personal” made.

But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published as “In Hollywood” in “The White Album.”

“Hollywood: Having Fun” is a careening tour through the wheeling and dealing of the movie business, and also a way for Didion to take out-of-touch East Coast movie critics to task. (She specifically names Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, with whom Didion had briefly shared a movie review column at Vogue. By 1973, Kael was arguably the most powerful movie critic in America; Didion airily suggests she’s full of hogwash.) Didion believes that “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally,” because if you don’t experience Hollywood directly then you can’t possibly understand how the sausage gets made and, thus, understand what you’re really seeing up on the screen.

What’s clear is that, having worked as a movie critic herself for a while, she’s not particularly interested in critics’ thoughts anymore, which leads to this brilliant line: “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” You said it, Joan.

What about Didion’s fiction?

Most people will tell you to read “Play It as It Lays” (1970), her second novel, and they’re not wrong. Like the screenplay version she and Dunne later wrote, Didion’s novel is a bleak tale of a melting-down actress in a tumultuous 1960s Hollywood.

But of her five novels, the best is “Democracy” (1984). Occasionally I think it might be the Great American Novel. Narrated by a journalist named Joan Didion, it’s mostly the story of Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedy-style senator who ran a failed campaign for president. But Inez has been in love since she was a teenager with a man named Jack Lovett, whose occupation is unclear (C.I.A. agent? War profiteer?) but who, for her, represents safety. He is the John Wayne figure in the book. He can’t keep bad things away, but he can fix them.

“Democracy” ends tragically — all of Didion’s novels end tragically — yet with a note of romantic hope that turns the whole thing into a sweeping epic. You can almost hear the strings swelling.

I want to understand Didion’s politics.

Good luck. She did start out very conservative, and trended leftward into adulthood after getting fed up with Nixon and Reagan. Yet she remained very difficult to pin down. Her early work is full of takedowns of idealism on the right and the left, as if she is always looking at these matters through narrowed eyes.

But if you want to see, roughly, where she landed, then the place to go is her book “Political Fictions,” a collection of essays that had the misfortune to be published on Sept. 11, 2001. They’re mostly reporting from campaigns of figures like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, or the travails of an impeached Bill Clinton, and the eye she casts is clearly one that wears Hollywood-colored glasses. Everything in a campaign or a presidency, she writes, is carefully choreographed in much the same way as a movie set. This is a sign, to her, of political decline, a category error that renders politics as flat, useless and commodified. The candidate is a product being sold to the public, just like a movie star. Don’t miss the review of Newt Gingrich’s work in “Political Fictions,” which she manages to take apart by simply listing his metaphors and references.

Once you’re done with “Political Fictions,” pick up “Where I Was From,” published a few years later, in which Didion retreads her own work and life story. It’s a re-evaluation, after both her parents’ deaths, of the myths and ideas she absorbed as a young girl in California, and thus a re-evaluation more broadly of American myths and legends. (She does some of the same work in the slim book “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” which fiercely questions dogma that arose in the wake of the attacks and, in particular, ideas and articles published by The New York Times.)

What is one Didion essay that can’t be missed?

Didion’s most consequential essay may be “Sentimental Journeys, ” first published in The New York Review of Books in 1991 and later collected in “After Henry” (1992). It concerns the infamous case of the Central Park jogger and the railroaded confessions of the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully accused of the crime and sent to prison. In a full-page ad he personally paid to place in four local papers, Donald J. Trump, then a local businessman, called for their execution . In 2002, their convictions were vacated. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a New York City councilman.)

In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion comes at the case sideways, examining the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves about the city and its inhabitants. She writes about how racism distorts this story, and questions whether the jogger’s name should have been released to the public. And she explores how a single case such as this one, though hardly the only of its kind, can be wound up by the news media, politicians and opportunists into representing something much bigger and much less logical.

Her diagnosis has aged breathtakingly well. “In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented,” she wrote. In typical Didion fashion, that could have been written yesterday.

What was she thinking about near the end of her life?

Didion’s final two decades were filled with loss. On Dec. 30, 2003, Dunne and Didion returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in the hospital, where she was in a coma. Dunne suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Didion told the story of her year of grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the National Book Award. Just before the book was published, Quintana died. Didion toured in the midst of her grief, then wrote a theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in March 2007, starring Didion’s longtime friend Vanessa Redgrave as the author.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is intense and cyclical, evoking the mind caught in a state of grief as much through its form as its content. Many who have read it in the middle of grief (including me) have found it profoundly cathartic. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself, something she continued in “Blue Nights” (2011), which reflects on her daughter’s life.

It’s often overlooked, but as a supplement to reading these late Didion books, don’t miss her essay “ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ,” published several months before Quintana died. In it she wrestles fervently with the fate of Schiavo, a woman on life support who had become a source of national political debate. Once you know from her books what she went through while Quintana was on life support, the essay takes on a whole new meaning. Didion made the personal both cultural and political — a practice she’d honed over a storied career.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the woman known as the Central Park jogger. She survived the attack; she was not murdered.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a screenplay Joan Didion wrote with her husband. It was “The Panic in Needle Park,” not “The Panic at Needle Park.”

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Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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Monster: Descriptions

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Monsters in literature, modern monsters.

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