In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, A Life in Men, published in the New Yorker, Merritt Tierce self-deprecatingly hypothesizes about the reasons a man she is on a first date with at a restaurant might want to sleep with her even though she had sensed that he “wasn’t blown away by my beauty” when she first walked up. “His kids were with their mother, in Brooklyn, and I was good enough for a Tuesday night,” she writes. Write a personal essay that explores a moment from your past when you felt you weren’t good enough in some way, incorporating a layer of humor to balance the emotional pangs. Include small, specific details to evoke the atmosphere and your mindset from that time. Then consider the insights that you’ve gained now that years have gone by. What have you learned from how you see yourself?
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