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1 prologUe The “Person” in a Personal Essay he sense of a human presence that animates a personal essay is surely one of the most beguiling literary phenomena , for it usually comes across in so familiar and direct a voice, seemingly without effort or contrivance, that it’s easy to believe I’m hearing (or overhearing) the author of the piece rather than a textual stand-in. Listen to Montaigne tell about his near-fatal fall from a horse, or Virginia Woolf about the death of a moth, or James Baldwin about his sojourn in a Swiss mountaintop village, or Joan Didion about keeping a notebook, or Vivian Gornick about street-life in NewYork City, and you will hear such distinctive voices that you too might refer to the persons in those pieces by the names of the authors who created them, as if they were one and the same. And in a sense they are, given the self-referential status of “I” that’s entrenched in language. A personal essay does, after all, put one more directly in contact with the thought and feeling of its author than do other forms of literature, if only because personal essayists speak in their own name rather than through the fictive characters that inhabit the work of novelists and playwrights. But the “person” in a personal essay is a written construct, a fabricated thing, a character of sorts—the sound of its voice a byproduct of carefully chosen words, its recollection of experience, its run of thought and feeling, much tidier than the mess of memories , thoughts, and feelings arising in one’s consciousness. As Scott Russell Sanders says in “The Singular First Person,” “What we meet on the page is not the flesh and blood author, but a simulacrum, a character who wears the label I.” Indeed, when personal essayists write about self-embodiment in the essay, they often acknowledge an element of fabrication or of artful impersonation. Montaigne admits in “Of Giving the Lie” that “Painting my self for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than the original ones.” Charles Lamb in an unpublished review praisesWilliam Hazthat it’s easy to believe I’m hearing (or overhearing) the author of T 2 Prologue litt for the “assumption of a character . . . which gives force and life to his writing.” In “The Modern Essay,” Virginia Woolf dramatizes the paradox of essayistic self-​ embodiment in a striking imperative: “Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem.” Likewise , Vivian Gornick tells of discovering the need for a persona “who was me and at the same time was not me.” Edward Hoagland doesn’t even nod at the possibility of being oneself, suggesting in “What I Think, What I Am” that “the artful ‘I’ of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction.” E. B. White in a letter about his work (August 15, 1969), frankly acknowledges that “Writing is a form of imposture: I’m not at all sure I am anything like the person I seem to a reader.” And Nancy Mairs, whose self-​ revelatory essays in Carnal Acts might seem to be unrehearsed confessions, declares in “But First,” that “I am not the woman whose voice animates my essays. She’s made up.” The “made-​ up” self and the manifold ways it has come to life in a wide range of essayists and essays—these are my central concerns in this book. Thus it is intended to reconceive the most fundamental element of the personal essay—the “I” of the essayist—and by doing so to demonstrate that this seemingly uncontrived form of writing is inherently problematic. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s devious or willfully misleading like some fictionalized memoirs of recent years. But it’s well to remember that the world of literary nonfiction borders upon the world of fiction, and sometimes their boundaries overlap, as Phillip Lopate implies in his Foreword toThe Essays of Elia: “all autobiographical first persons are highly selective and therefore distorting representations of their owners, even when theydo not bother, as Lamb did, to employan alterego or pen name.” Lopate’s observation is a reminder too that whenever we write in the first person, reflecting on our personal experience, we inevitably create a version of ourselves, crafting a self out of words. Though the essayist’s “I” has not been the subject of a book-​ length study, personal essayists have shed light...

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