On another kind of journalism altogether:

When a Man Dies in a Sex Act with a Horse -- What's a Reporter to Do?

Allyson, I think your writing definitely springs from your subjective experience but it's not really confessional in the way people were criticizing.

Your writing is bracing in its undiluted venom and snark, while streaked with hopefulness and appreciation and community. It's not cringe-making at all.

Was there cute waitstaff at Buca Di Beppo, Perkins? I mostly remember frowning. It didn't seem like we were expected to have fun.

I remember one very pretty boy. I also remember you frowning, but that may have been at the overdone cheerfulness and not the expectation of fun having.

Allyson - don't know if the bones really are the same . But even so - bones are not all there are to either a person or an essay. Let's put it this way - every play Shakespeare wrote just polished up some hackneyed old plot widely know in the England of his day. Now not comparing you to Shakespeare, (sorry) - but compare Shakespeare's Macbeth to the one in Holinshed’s Chronicles. A lot superficial similiarities, but no freakin comparision.

Something you have to live with; any type of writing you do, there will be somebody doing something superficially similar. If the somebody is a bad or unethical writer, you cannot let that fact make you crazy.

When you see an unfamiliat number on ID (and no message was left) OR someone calls and immediately hangs up, what do you do?

I ignore. But, I do have a friend who will call numbers back that she doesn't recognize because she is completely self-absorbed and wants to know who else is absorbed with her.

Confessional writing tends not to be very ironical, despite its putative self-awareness. Anthropological essays, written from a personal standpoint, probably a very different kettle of fish.

Personally, I tend to avoid Sedaris, because all of his personal essays seem to be about his own humiliation, and that is about as not-funny as humiliation-comedy on television. But some examples of cool (but not especially confessional) personal essays I've read:

• a thing in the New Yorker last year, about a toddler who had an imaginary friend he talked to only via cellphone (parents very worried, till they realized how much time they spend on cellphones);
  
• an essay (being reprinted this week in a college textbook) about giving up job, home, and security in order to live intentionally homeless in Prescott, Arizona
  
• the audio-essay series "On the Road," where Rob Gifford travelled from China's cosmopolitan coast all the way in to the dusty bordertowns with Uzbekistan, chronicling the people he met along the way
  
• Natalie Angier's essay, "My God Problem," about why she can't be polite when people drag religion into science.

There's a lot of material out there that benefits from the personal/odyssey perspective. "My journey into ____, and what cool things I have come to report about it" has a long and honorable tradition.

My take of your writing was that you were being actually candid, Allyson, and that was the point. If you're dressing it up in self-consciousness and oh-lordie-me, then you're achieving the "candid" of which I was complaining.

If that is indeed your goal or your effect, you're a lot better at it (or worse, I guess) than Olen or Waldman, because I couldn't tell.

When you see an unfamiliat number on ID (and no message was left) OR someone calls and immediately hangs up, what do you do?

I barely answer when I do recognize the number, so the unfamiliar ones aren't likely to get my attention. If it's that important, they'll call back.

When you see an unfamiliat number on ID (and no message was left) OR someone calls and immediately hangs up, what do you do?

Um. I google the number.

Um. I don't mean to get all fucked up and emotional over something so stupid, but I just received three pics of Sunnydale...

Demolished by a bulldozer.