Telling Us About Yourself Through Your Relationships with Others

The opening line is a thesis. "I am every woman I have ever met." Most students would never write a sentence that bold; they would soften it, qualify it, build up to it. Phoebe just states it and then spends the rest of the essay proving it. Stating your thesis in the first line and then earning it across four vignettes is one of the cleanest essay shapes that exists, and very few students attempt it. The structure is a portrait montage: four women (Chloe, then three others), each occupying a section, each leaving a residue that becomes part of the narrator. What makes the montage hold instead of feeling like a list is the repeated motif — "made brave by love," tenderness "woven through me like a piece of thread." Phoebe gives you the same emotional language across all four sections so that even when the people change, the voice doesn't. That's the move that turns a montage from a list into a song. What students should steal: if your essay is going to be about people, give yourself one declarative thesis sentence at the very top, then organize the rest as portraits. And find one phrase or image you can repeat (with variation) in each section — repetition with variation is what gives a montage its rhythm.