The Best American Essays 2014

"Also in store are recurring nightmares, obsessive behavior, the fears and anxieties of aging, suicide, and--as they say in those infomercials--a whole lot more," heralds Robert Alwan, series editor of The Best American Essays 2014. Indeed, this selection, narrowed down by John Jeremiah Sullivan, does tilt toward the dark side. There are two essays, one by Barry Lopez and another by Chris Offut, that detail their childhood abuse at the hands of a pedophile. By accident of the alphabet, these essays are back to back, and I don't recommend reading them both in one sitting.

There are indeed essays about obsessive behavior. Timothy Aubry writes about his night terrors n "A Matter of Life and Death,", while Leslie Jamison informs us about a syndrome called Morgellons disease, which involves strange hairs coming out of the body, and uncontrollable itching. "Itching is powerful: the impulse that tells someone to scratch lights up the same neural pathways as chemical addiction. An itch that starts in the brain feels just like an itch on the skin, and it can begin with something as simple as a thought. It can begin from reading a paragraph like this one." How many of you just read that and felt an itch?

Zadie Smith pens a delightful essay, "Joy," about the difference between pleasure and joy. She begins, "It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road--you simply have to a little further down the track. That has not been my experience." She goes on to say that joy is only felt a few times in a lifetime, and is so emotionally exhausting that one wouldn't want too much of it.

Other highlights include "Slickheads," by Lawrence Jackson, written in the language of the streets, and the very fine "Thanksgiving in Mongolia," in which Ariel Levy details the painful story of how she gave birth and then the baby died while in that country on an assignment. James Wood writes, in "Becoming Them," how people do become their parents.

I have two favorites. First is Wendy Brenner's "Strange Beads," about how, during a time of difficult health problems, she became fascinated by a seller of mostly junk and costume jewelry on eBay. What interested her is that each item was sold separately, thousands of them. It's a delightful personal essay that intersects with life in these times.

But my favorite is Wells Tower's hilarious "The Old Man at Burning Man." He, about forty, takes his elderly father and two other elders to the Burning Man festival. This sounds like a fish-out-of-water cliche, and it is, but Tower writes so well, and it's laugh out loud funny. I've never been to Burning Man, and am certainly too old to go now (I would go hoping to get laid, and end up extremely disappointed) but I feel like Tower took the trip for me. Here's his opening paragraph, in all it's glory:

"The land, the very atmosphere out there, is alien, malignant, the executioner of countless wagon trains. I am afraid to crack the window. Huge dervishes of alkaline dust reel and teeter past. The sun, a brittle parchment white, glowers as though we personally have done something to piss it off. An hour out here and already I could light an Ohio Blue Tip off the inside of my nostril. One would think we were pulling into the planet's nearest simulation of hell, but if this were hell, we would not be driving this very comfortable recreational vehicle. Nor would there be a trio of young and merry nudists capering at our front bumper, demanding that we step out of the vehicle and join them."

While as all the Best of series is a mixed bag, I found this particularly strong, if only for those last two pieces.