The Personal Essay as a Form of Thinking

A personal essay can make an argument without ever announcing one. Unlike an academic essay, it does not need to begin with a claim and spend the following pages proving it. Its argument may instead emerge through accumulation: a remembered conversation, a description of a room, an anecdote that initially seems incidental, a quotation from another writer, a historical fact, a sudden change in the narrator’s understanding. By the end, the reader may have been persuaded to see things differently without being able to point to a sentence that contains the essay’s thesis.

This is one of the freedoms of the form. The essay can think associatively rather than proceeding through a conventional chain of evidence. Its intelligence lies partly in arrangement. Eula Biss’s On Immunity, for instance, moves freely among themes like motherhood, mythology, public health, and cultural anxiety. Biss is certainly interested in questions about vaccination, but her method is not primarily argumentative in the conventional sense. She follows metaphors. The idea of immunity leads toward purity, contamination, protection, fear, and the boundaries we imagine between ourselves and other people. The argument develops through these connections. By allowing different kinds of material to rub against one another, Biss makes the reader feel how supposedly private decisions are entangled with collective life.

Brian Dillon works similarly in Essayism. The book considers the peculiar experience of wanting to write without being entirely certain what the writing is supposed to become. Dillon rarely behaves like someone marching toward a conclusion. He circles his subjects. He quotes other writers, wanders into autobiography, abandons one line of thought and later approaches it from another direction. Yet the wandering produces a recognizable argument about the essay itself: that uncertainty and incompleteness are not defects the form must overcome.

Beginning with a thesis can sometimes flatten the very material that made the writer want to write in the first place. Suppose someone wants to write about leaving their hometown. They might begin with an idea: leaving home allowed me to become myself. That statement could be true. It could also prematurely determine the meaning of every scene that follows. The difficult goodbye becomes evidence. The first apartment becomes evidence. The return home years later becomes evidence. Once the writer knows what everything means, the actual experiences can begin to feel suspiciously orderly.

A more interesting essay might begin somewhere smaller: the contents of the car on the morning of departure, an argument with a parent, a highway restaurant, the peculiar embarrassment of returning several years later and discovering that almost nothing has changed. The writer follows these details without knowing exactly what they prove.

Gradually, another idea might emerge. Perhaps leaving home did not create a clean division between an old self and a new one. Perhaps the writer discovers that departure actually intensified the influence of the place they hoped to escape. The essay has still arrived at an argument, but the argument has been discovered through the act of writing rather than imposed beforehand.

This is one reason personal essay writing can feel surprisingly difficult. A writer may possess abundant material and still not know what the essay is about. The events themselves do not provide structure. Ten memories of a father are still ten memories of a father. The writer has to discover what intellectual or emotional pressure makes those memories belong together.

Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays provide useful examples of this movement between apparently separate subjects. A piece may begin with a concert, an athlete, a song, or a cultural artifact and gradually open into questions of race, friendship, mortality, belonging, or desire. The cultural subject is neither decoration nor merely a device for introducing autobiography. It gives the personal material something to think against. Meaning arises from the movement between them.

The same principle can help writers who fear that nothing sufficiently dramatic has happened to them. Personal essays do not depend on extraordinary biography. They depend on the quality of attention brought to experience. A neighborhood bar, an old photograph, a conversation overheard in childhood, or a family habit can become intellectually expansive if the writer discovers what larger questions are embedded within it.

A writing consultant can read for the moments when the essay becomes more complicated than the writer’s stated intention. The writer may believe the essay concerns independence, while several of its strongest scenes concern obligation. They may think they are writing about resentment, while the language keeps returning to nostalgia. An outside reader can notice these patterns because they encounter the material as a reader rather than as the person who lived it.

A coach can also help distinguish productive digression from material that simply belongs elsewhere. In an essay built through association, the solution is rarely to eliminate every tangent. Sometimes the tangent is where the real subject is hiding. The challenge is learning which departures deepen the essay’s thinking and which merely postpone it.

The strongest personal essays therefore often resemble thought happening in real time. They do not merely report what the writer already knows. They create a structure in which knowledge can change. The writer begins with an experience and follows its associations far enough that both writer and reader arrive somewhere neither could have completely predicted.