Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
We Are Now on Threads as well as Facebook
Learn More here
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders here
November 13, 2026
from Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
by Kate Carroll de Gutes
“...peel it back, begin to take it apart, semantically and linguistically and personally, and it all comes clear.”
—Judith Kitchen
Judith Kitchen was a fabulous teacher. Just say her name in front of any of her students and stand back for the cascade of praise. Her books of poetry and essays are her legacy, it is true, but her teaching, and the many students of hers who have become important writers are a tribute to her as well.
Each year in November we feature the work of Judith Kitchen, but this time to honor her we will reprise a Spring 2015 piece on one of her students: Kate Carroll de Gutes who published her first book, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, with the Kitchen imprint Ovenbird Books. It won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir. Her latest book, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, was released in August 2017.
On the surface, her debut collection of essays considers her sexuality, gender presentation, and the end of her marriage. But Kitchen writes in her preface that each essay is really the story of unravelling a mystery: “peel it back, begin to take it apart, semantically and linguistically and personally, and it all comes clear.” What is clear, as the objects of her past come closer, is that de Gutes is more than a survivor. She is a powerful writer with a winning voice that, thoughtful but unresigned, usually gets the better of her woes. —THE
The Paragraph of the Week
I didn't ever expect to have an ex-wife. Of course, I didn't expect to have a wife, either. At least not one I talked about openly. Wrote about. Introduced as "my wife Judy." The prefix "ex" is from the Latin for "out of, from; to remove from, without." This woman helped make me who I am. I am from her. We grew up together. Came out together. Figured out roommate, spousal equivalent, partner, and wife together. And I have removed myself from her, as well, expurgating my history as well as my heart.
—Kate Carroll de Gutes
Commentary
One striking characteristic of Kate Carroll de Gutes’ memoir is that it moves backwards in time. It begins with her choosing Ikea furniture for a new apartment after her breakup with Judy, her wife of twenty-three years, and ends with the complicated waltz steps her parents did to keep the dance of their difficult marriage together when she was a girl. This passage about the “ex” in “ex-wife” comes somewhere near the middle, at the heart of both the book and her story. She takes apart the definition of the Latin prefix—“out of, from; to remove from, without” to show that she has been redefined by a single syllable. She is “out of herself” away from her wife, and at a “remove” from love that has left her bereft, completely “without.” She takes a gloomy comfort in the fact that she is part of a larger problem that has little to do with her sexual orientation, “that relationships fail for gays and lesbians just as they do for straight people.” Calling herself “the lesbian Woody Allen” she uses humor to take away the sting—and her book, which is in some ways a romp, is very funny. But it is sadness that fuels the tale from a beginning, which is the end, to the ending where it all began. Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear serves as a reminder that even those who risk so much to break taboos in an attempt to find love are as susceptible to heartache as those who lead more conventional lives.
—THE
~ ~ ~
Weekly Reminders from
The Humble Essayist
We are now on Threads and will begin posting weekly reminders there. If you are on Threads, please follow us there. We are still on Facebook as well. Due to the toxic nature of X we no longer promote our site there.
The best way to keep up with us is to add your name to our growing list of subscribers, and we will send free, brief, weekly reminders of our features with a link to the page directly to your email. Please click on the blue button to subscribe.
Unsubscribe Here.
~ ~ ~
Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
