By Lilly Dancyger
The first time I wrote a braided essay, I had no idea that was what I was doing. I’m not sure if I’d even heard the term “braided essay” in 2017, when I started writing about my cousin Sabina’s murder for the first time. She was killed in 2010, three weeks before her twenty-first birthday. For seven years, I didn’t write a word about her, or what had happened to her. I wrote about just about everything else in my life—this was the height of the “it happened to me” era of internet writing—but I was afraid to look directly at a grief and horror so huge.
If you look directly at a solar eclipse, the brightness of the sun can damage your retina, leading to a condition called solar retinopathy, or “eclipse blindness.”
Often, peripheral vision is spared in cases of eclipse blindness, with the damage concentrated in the center of the field of vision. A permanent imprint of the eclipse, seared into your retina forever. This was what I feared would happen if I looked straight at the story of what happened to Sabina—it would be imprinted on my mind’s eye forever, superimposed over every other thought I had from then on.
* * *
In 2017, seven years after Sabina’s murder, journalist Kim Wall was killed by a source she was interviewing. Her body was found, and then her picture was all over the internet, like Sabina’s had been. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I started writing about Kim Wall—but of course, I was really writing about Sabina. I was used to churning out short news write-ups and opinion pieces in a few hours back then, but this essay took me two years. Two years of writing about Kim Wall’s murder, and letting that slowly, repeatedly open up into a story about Sabina. I thought of this piece I was working on as an “indirect personal essay” before I learned what a braided essay was, and that I was writing one.
The only safe way to look straight at a partial solar eclipse is through the protective film of eclipse glasses—made from black polymer or mylar—that transmit only about one one-millionth of the sun’s light. They let in just enough that you can see the ring of rays around the dark center of the moon’s shadow—you can see the general shape of the thing, but with drastically reduced potency. Shielded from the intensity that would burn itself into your retinas forever if you looked at it directly.
A braided essay is typically defined by its strands—two or more topics or narratives, woven together. But when I think about braided essays now, what defines them for me most clearly is not the shape and rhythm of the weave, but the kinds of stories that the shape and rhythm make possible.
* * *
Since that first essay (which was published by Longreads , and appears in revised form in my forthcoming essay collection, First Love ), I’ve used the braided form to write about all kinds of big, fraught personal things I didn’t know how to approach head on: A friend’s suicide, my ambivalence about motherhood, my feelings about true crime. In each of these cases, like in the first one, I wrote into the too-bright thing by writing away from it, into something else.
If eclipse glasses are not available, you can also safely view an eclipse indirectly using a pinhole projector. All you need for a pinhole projector is a sheet of paper with a small hole in the center—or, as you’ll notice if you look at the dappled shadows of leaves during an eclipse, anything that casts a shadow with small spaces for light to pass through.
Facing away from the eclipse, hold up the piece of paper, allowing the sun’s rays to pass through the pinhole and project the shape of the eclipse onto whatever surface you’re facing. Each tree or fence or screen door casting hundreds of tiny, partially-eclipsed suns onto the ground.
* * *
The magic of a braided essay is in the points where one thread drops and another comes in: sometimes these moments of transition are just white space, leaving room for the unsayable.
And sometimes the transition points bring the disparate threads more directly into contact with each other, the writer saying, “See? This thing that I can’t describe is reflected in this other thing, which I can.” That shadow, there on the wall, a dark circle with a curve of light carved into it—that is the sun.
That story in the news, a dark circle with a curve of light carved into it—that is my grief.
__________
Lilly offers an independent study course on writing braided essays, and a four-week braided essay seminar beginning March 2 ($275).
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021). She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica , Literary Hub , The Rumpus , Longreads , Off Assignment , The Washington Post , Playboy , Rolling Stone , and more.
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