The Best American Essays 2024

Starred review from October 7, 2024
Wrenching family stories headline this affecting installment, edited by New York Times Magazine staff writer Morris and series editor Kupperman (I Just Lately Started Buying Wings), in the annual anthology series. Jenisha Watts discusses her challenging upbringing as the daughter of a crack addict in “Jenisha from Kentucky,” recounting how her mother, in exchange for free drugs, would keep her and her siblings occupied with coloring books while allowing her dealers’ customers to get high in her apartment. In “If Not Now, Later,” Yiyun Lee, a novelist accustomed to contemplating plotlines for her characters, recalls deciding to stop thinking about what her son might have grown up to do had he not died by suicide at age 16. In the volume’s strongest entry, “The Ones We Sent Away,” Jennifer Senior traces the abysmal treatment endured by people with mental disabilities throughout American history while telling the heartrending story of her aunt, who was born with a pronounced intellectual disability, institutionalized before she was two years old, and rarely thereafter discussed by her family. Other high points include James McAuley’s nuanced meditation on how the ubiquity of Holocaust memorialization masks a growing numbness to the genocide’s horror, and Richard Prins’s formally ambitious message to his daughter that begins each sentence with the word “because” (“Because these lopped-off arms of mine will keep bearing your weight after the rest of me flies home”). Moving personal reflections and a uniformly strong crop of contributors make this a standout entry in the long-running series.