What It Took to Write the Personal Essay That’s Setting the Web on Fire

Jenisha Watts, a senior editor at The Atlantic, penned a phenomenal piece that’s blowing readers away. We chatted with her about what went into writing the essay of a lifetime.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte | Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

Every once in a while I start reading a story and know right away that it’s going to be the kind of piece that truly grabs me and allows the rest of the world to fall away while I read. Jenisha Watts’s new essay for The Atlantic, “I Never Called Her Momma: My childhood in a crack house,” is one of those stories. And I wasn’t alone — the entire internet has been ablaze with words of adoration since the essay was first published earlier this month. Jenisha is still surprised by the overwhelming amount of praise she’s received on her essay, which graces the cover of the October issue. Her story is a heartbreaking yet hopeful tale of growing up with a single mom who struggled with an addiction to crack, the effect that had on Jenisha and her siblings and how Jenisha used her love of words and literature to eventually leave her hometown and move to New York City.

Jenisha’s writing is poetic, and she’s brutally honest in the way sh…