Here, There, and Everywhere

"No one, I think, sets out in life to become an essayist," American writer Joseph Epstein has said. From early on, some of us may dream of becoming writers of poetry or novels, but essays? I was a college sophomore, enrolled in "The Contemporary Essay," when the idea first came to me. Smitten by essayists like Annie Dillard and Scott Russell Sanders, I learned to owe my literary gratitude to the "father of the modern essay," sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

Yet, appreciations aside, Montaigne seemed so distant from my nineteen-year-old, Midwestern, female self. Consider the Montaigne who steps out from behind the pages of Sarah Bakewell's biography How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Here is a forty-something Catholic nobleman temporarily retired from public life, holed up in a tower on his estate in France, his mother, wife, and only surviving daughter relegated to another part of his chateau. Montaigne had been born at the estate in 1533 but was soon after sent to live with a peasant family. When he returned a year or two later, his father forbade anyone to speak to young Michel in any language but Latin. It's no wonder, Bakewell offers, that Montaigne never seemed all that close to his mother, or that later, to his misfortune, he married a version of his mother in his wife, Françoise de La Chassaigne. Moreover, Montaigne's views about women didn't stretch too far beyond his contemporaries, much to the disappointment of later readers like novelist George Sand who otherwise admired Montaigne's writings. When I, a young college student and budding essayist, held the mirror of Montaigne's Essais to my face, as Bakewell says Montaigne's readers have done since their first publication in 1580, I barely recognized anything more than the spirit of Montaigne's rambling confessions (he loved books, thought his penis too small, suffered from debilitating kidney stones). It would take years before I would return to Montaigne with the same sort of admiration both for Montaigne-the-man and Montaigne-the-writer that Bakewell's biography inspires.

Bakewell discovered Montaigne while scouring a secondhand shop in Budapest. She grabbed the only English-language book she could find, a translation of Montaigne's Essais. Not fate, she concludes, so much as "the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don't get what you think you want." Unlike traditional biographies of Montaigne, Bakewell's version is an essay in itself. How to Live takes its title from that very question which occupied Renaissance humanists. Nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert told a friend to read Montaigne "in order to live"—advice that Bakewell takes to heart, using "How to live?" as "a guide-rope for finding a way through the tangle of Montaigne's life and afterlife." Each of the twenty chapters in Bakewell's biography offers an answer that Montaigne himself might have given—and does give—when you look closely at his life and essays. At first glance, the answers themselves seem contradictory—"Do something no one has done before"; "Be ordinary and imperfect." However, the more we learn about Montaigne, the more we understand that such contradictions are true to the life that he documented in a manuscript that went through substantial rounds of expansion and revision before his death in 1592. Montaigne kept returning to his essays, expanding certain essays so much that the original versions nearly disappeared under new reflections and tangents. He didn't bother to tidy up the resulting inconsistencies, that is, the evolving versions of himself that he brought to life in his essays.

Bakewell's biography generally moves chronologically, though not absolutely so (in chapter 3, for example, we arrive back at Montaigne's birth after pausing over Montaigne's deep friendship with Étienne de La Boétie). In that way...