Are "personal essays" written much in the UK?

[Medea]

You know, like that essay Ayelet Waldman wrote about loving her husband more than her children, the one that made everyone parp their heads off.

I guess they're quite common in the US; just as memoirs are quite popular. Lots of self-centred writing over there, I guess!

Anyway I'm teaching that topic today and suddenly wondered if it's a genre people here are familiar with. I suppose people are always writing columns in the Guardian and so forth that draw on their personal experience, but would that be callled a "personal essay" here?

TIA.
ps I accidentally posted this question under an incomplete subject line, so I'm posting again.

No, not in my experience Medea. And that specific example put me off Mr Chabon so extremely I nearly jettisoned my copy of The Wonder Boys!
I think the nearest one gets is, as you say, the parptastic Polly Filla drivel that most of the broadsheets now delight us with. My personal, recent favourite being the excruciating Imogen Edwards-Jones' "Shall I be a Mother" in the Telegraph (Marina rolls eyes and wonders how a touching subject as IVF and a worrying pregnancy can have been made into such a ghastly read).
At its best though you get stuff online such as Ivan Noble's brave, terrifying Tumour Diary on the BBC website.

lol at parping their head off

oh GOD lets resurrect that article again

Thanks, Marina. . .v. interesting. That's my impression, too.

no because they tend to be up their own arse and brits in general are less self-obsessed and self-analytical

or mroe modest
aprt form one s with HUGE sunglasses

although diary pieces on people facing crisis are quite popular .. the ones that spring to mind are John Diamond's diaries through his throat cancer \link{http://www.times-archive.co.uk/JohnDiamond/frontpage.html\here}

and there's also a girl facing progressive blindness who writes a column but can't remember where (saturday guardian I think)