I teach the art of the personal essay to students every week. We discuss the importance of connecting with the examiner, of declaring that you are more than a student number and proving that through anecdotal moments and personal observations. The personal essay is usually avoided by students, in favour of the short story or the speech. Why? Quite simply put, we are uncomfortable with talking about ourselves in a way that allows others to see us as we are.

Yet, we are in a new dawn of writing, particularly in Ireland where the personal essay is becoming a firm favourite on the bestseller lists and people are buying them. Not just literary people or people ‘in the know’, but people like you, people like me. We are buying collections of personal essays, alongside and sometimes in place of the novel. This is (in my humble opinion), a surprising trend given that until a small number of years ago, we were a traditional, safe and reliable bet in terms of our top ten listings in bookshops. Our writing and our reading has become darker, more exploratory, bleaker, more compassionate, more accusatory. Our writing is real and we are open to a spectrum of evocative language and range of subject matter.

Emilie Pine was an eye opener for many readers in Ireland. Suddenly we are being handed, even trusted with someone’s careful emotions and experiences. In handing us a collection of personal essays, Emilie Pine was leaving herself open to ridicule, to public condemnation or to possible claims of self indulgence. She was also giving us her pain, her memories and her past and laying them in a stack in our none too gentle hands. Yet we accepted them, we cradled them, we experienced them and we breathed a private and eventually public sigh of relief that someone has lived through pain like we have. Someone has grieved and hurt and bled and they are standing; this lends hope to us.

This trust was extended to us by Sinead Gleeson in her ‘Constellations’ collection and she took the honesty spoken by Pine and she reached even deeper, the result being a savage torment internalised over the years to emerge glittering and optimistic; an eternal optimist shaped by a litany of hurts. On a similar vein of personal experiences are Ian Maleney and Kevin Barry.

We are devouring these offerings. They offer us a complete person and they offer us a voyeuristic window where this complete person is seen to be pummelled and hurt, loved and decimated. The final result between the eaves of the books are humans, stunningly flawed humans, every scar a lesson learned and an obstacle overcome. The personal essay is on the rise I firmly believe, because with every one of them, we are developing a stronger level of humanity. We are literally learning how to be decent human beings by reading the lives of others, mapped out onto the page. We are learning to listen to our pain, recognise our blessings and to see ourselves, that’s the important part, to really see ourselves as beautiful. The popularity of the personal essay is not just that they are written exceptionally well but that they tap into our sense of self, they see us and they reassure us and they hold our hands a little until we can stand alone. Mental health in Ireland has a tonic in the personal essay, our voices can collectively rise, each one more powerful than the next.