As for the essays, Edwidge Danticat makes clever use of form

Essay collections appear infrequently on lists of the most popular nonfiction books: memoirs and historical narratives dominate conversations about the genre. Those forms of nonfiction are wonderful in their own way. They are also the closest versions to fiction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can exclude the essay’s unique offerings.

An essay collection presents a condensed, sometimes poetic, reading experience that often requires the author to demonstrate the act of forming an opinion. At its most exalted, the essay collection is about many things at once. Its goal is not to share information about a topic but to dramatize the formation of a perspective, the development of an informed point of view—an approach that makes the form much more dependent on the writer than on the subject. “We Are Alone,” a collection of eight short essays by the celebrated Haitian-American novelist and short story writer Edwidge Danticat, exemplifies that achievement.

Readers who have appreciated other voice-driven essay collections, such as Zadie Smith’s pandemic-inspired “Intimations,” Erica Caldwell’s “Wrong Is Not My Name,” Jordan Kisner’s “Thin Places,” Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings,” or Elissa Gabbert’s “The Voice,” “The unreality of memory” In “We’re Alone,” Danticat strikes a familiar chord. The thematic thread of this collection revolves around experiences of disconnection or isolation that are exacerbated by a sense of risk based on racial, political, or social vulnerability. In the essay “A Rainbow in the Sky,” Danticat writes, “The less stable your house is, the more terror you feel.” She has elegantly captured that those who face a storm with all their foundations intact have a different relationship to the experience than those who were already struggling before it.

In the book’s preface, Danticat reveals that writing essays allows her to be both alone with herself and present with a reader. These pieces represent her outstretched hand, an invitation to spend shared time in reflection. Danticat took the book’s title from the French poem “Plage” by Haitian writer Roland Chassagne, whose tragic prison story is also explored in the book. Her poem imagines a night spent under palm trees and a longing for the end of a profound disappointment. Here Danticat finds an early foothold in one of the book’s main concerns: the thresholds where someone’s feelings have been constrained for the sake of other people’s comfort. The title also invokes a plural self, a collective that shares the writer’s experience of loneliness and disaffection.

In the literary essay, a tradition that marries personal introspection with anecdotes, evidence, and reasoning, one of the most satisfying moments is finding where the writer’s logic fails and how he struggles to fully accommodate the proportions of his subject. Such moments make the inquiries seem vulnerable and honest, even when they are really simulations of searching for meaning. Not all essayists strive to show their struggle to understand or are given the space to do so, but Danticat invites readers to take up the challenge of bringing facts and feelings together. She excels at showing how difficult it is to know what the right questions are to ask or how to answer them, and, like many of us, she struggles to talk about difficult subjects, especially with her children.

For example, in “By the Time You Read This…”, Danticat wrestles with how much and when to tell her daughters about how police violence affects how black people and immigrants think about safety. She writes, “Every time a young black man is killed by a police officer or a vigilante civilian, I wonder if it’s time to write my daughters a letter about Abner Louima and the long list of people who didn’t survive and who came after him.” There’s dignity in her doubt, which gives way to the kind of compassion that characterizes these essays.

Danticat’s reflections are informed by accounts of the hardships of friends and family: her beloved mother walks away at an airport; an uncle suffers from progressive, irresolvable disorientation; Louima, a family friend, is attacked and raped by police; and two mentors, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall, live out their final months. These experiences emphasize the possibility of loss and disconnection, reflecting a kind of hypervigilance that can be an inheritance of trauma. Danticat approaches these accounts with the courage of an intentional witness, maintaining that perspective even as she looks beyond her own circle. In “Chronicles of a Death Foretold,” Danticat tells the story of a self-proclaimed prophetess who predicted the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, and the collection’s penultimate essay, “Wozo, Not Mawozo,” examines the weeks following the 2021 kidnapping of Christian missionaries in Haiti.

These are clearly the essays of an accomplished novelist. They zip through detailed anecdotes and varied landscapes, even when the main action the speaker is engaged in is “thinking.” There is room in an essay for dramatic action, for expression of the body in relation to thought, something that was a little lacking here. At times, I struggled to see the author as a figure in the dramatic action she cited. Still, it is a testament to Danticat’s skill that these short, intense works on serious subjects don’t feel heavy-handed. She brings us close enough to the problem at hand that we can’t mistake what we’ve seen.

But we are not alone in our attempt to make sense of the feelings that arise when we become witnesses to this world. No one is.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of the prose collection Multiply/Divide and an associate professor of nonfiction at Columbia University.