“Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

Montaigne wrote that in 1580, as a preface, and then went on to write about his bowels, his fear of death, his sexual failures, his cowardice, and bad memory in such patient and good-humoured detail that four and a half centuries later we still read him to feel less alone. The warning that this is nothing much, followed by the thing itself: that, perhaps, is the purest description of what the personal essay is. 

I have been thinking about Montaigne and the art and craft of personal writing lately. The honest, digressive, self-scrutinising prose essay he invented seems to me more needed now than it has been in a long time, and somehow harder to find.

The book I keep going back to is Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. What McCourt does in that book—and what lifts it beyond the misery memoir about a Limerick childhood—is that he never tells us what his father’s drinking meant to him. He puts it down. Then he moves on.

Take this passage.

Mam faced him. These children are hungry. Where’s the dole money? We’ll get fish and chips so they’ll have something in their bellies when they go to sleep. She tried to stick her hands into his pockets but he pushed her away. Have respheck, he said. Reshpeck in front of shildren. She struggled to get at his pockets. Where’s the money? The children are hungry. You mad oul’ bastard, did you drink all the money again? Just what you did in Brooklyn. He blubbered, Och, poor Angela. And poor wee Margaret and poor wee Oliver. He staggered to me and hugged me and I smelled the drink I used to smell in America. My face was wet from his tears and his spit and his snot and I was hungry and I didn’t know what to say when he cried all over my head.

You feel the whole tangled thing without being told how to feel it. The shame, the love, the rage, the small boy’s helpless tenderness, all there. McCourt was for me, in some private way, a kind of therapy. He gave me a way of looking at my own childhood, my parents, my family, the small Kerala world I grew up in, without having to translate any of it into a moral. He let me see that the failing self was already worth writing about. You didn’t need to have survived something monumental. You just needed to have looked honestly.

This, I think, is what makes the personal essay or memoir different from other writing. It is close to fiction in its attention to inner weather, but it carries a different kind of impact or weight, because you know it actually happened. When McCourt writes about his shame, or when James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son describes his father dying as Harlem riots outside, the knowledge that these things are true changes what you bring to the reading. It is not voyeurism. It is closer to recognition.

Diaries do a similar thing. When Samuel Pepys wrote down his jealousies and fears in 17th century London, he was not writing for a reader; he was writing against forgetting. Kafka wrote about his insomnia and self-loathing in Prague for no audience at all. Anne Frank wrote in an attic in Amsterdam because there was nothing else to do with the days. Rilke wrote letters to a young poet partly to think out loud. The diary is the only form of writing with no imagined reader, and that absence is what makes it so honest. The moment a reader enters—even an imagined one—you start to manage. You select. You arrange. You soften. The personal essay sits somewhere in the difficult middle ground between the private compulsion of the diary and the public act of saying it. The best ones feel as if the writer briefly forgot anyone was reading.

Which is why self-writing in the age of platforms is worth thinking about: it has been turned into a product. Social media did not invent narcissism. It gave narcissism a business model. The influencer logic now reaches far beyond clothes and skincare—into therapy, grief, illness, political suffering. The self is a brand, and vulnerability is content. The flaw is still mentioned, one sees it on Instagram a lot, but it is mentioned or recorded only to be overcome; the breakdown shared only as a triumph of resilience; the painful childhood disclosed as motivation. What gets left out is failure, confusion, grief. Which is to say, most of what actual life consists of.

The vulnerability may be real, but it is packaged inside a market: the detox plan, the online course, the paid community. Even when nothing is being sold, the algorithm rewards engagement, and engagement rewards legibility. A messy account of a relationship with one’s father is harder to like than a tidy arc of trauma met and overcome. 

The serious personal essay survived the 20th century partly because a few publications kept open a culture in which long and uncomfortable first-person writing could find a home. Granta in Britain. The New York Review of Books. In India, many publications tried it (one remembers the Granta-inspired Civil Lines, the literary magazine by Ravi Dayal launched in 1994, which ran rarely but ran beautifully) along with a handful of newspapers and little magazines. Much of that is gone now, replaced by the confessional essay as clickbait in digital media. 

I keep coming back to why McCourt and Baldwin and Montaigne feel more useful than a hundred hours of therapy. I think it has something to do with the specific weight of text. In a reel or vlog, you see a face, and the face is performing even when it doesn’t mean to. The body shows up and distracts. In text, all you have is the mind—its movements, its hesitations, its small contradictions, the places where it tries to say something and can’t quite get there. Text is the closest thing we have to unmediated thinking. A private conversation conducted in public. That paradox is what gives text its strange intimacy, and it is why Montaigne, four and a half centuries on, still feels like someone you know.

At Frontline, we have been trying to hold open that engagement. White Space, which appears in print and online, is closer to what the personal essay was before the influencer economy arrived. A place for honest rumination, for a writer to sit with something unresolved, let it think itself out on the page. The pieces are not very long. They do not always reach anywhere in particular. But they take the self seriously as a subject without turning it into a brand. White Space, where we encourage creative non-fiction, is our modest attempt to reclaim a valuable kind of writing. Do read; we will keep some of them free-to-read for the next few days!

As you read, you will see that you are engaging with ordinary, honest accounts. Love, relationships, observations, musings, memories, regrets. And, if you feel so inclined, we would be delighted to publish something you have written. After vetting, of course. From the mind to the page is, I believe, the most honest way to write.

Wishing you a meaningful week ahead,

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor, Frontline