At first, Lopate’s attempt to define the personal essay in contrast from familiar essay in Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay appeared as confusing and daunting as writing the personal essay itself: the personal essay is informal essay with an ‘intimate style’ whereas the familiar essay is a more intimate type of informal essay. Did you just question if you read the same sentence twice? But Lopate’s wittyquip that the difference “if…any, is of nuance” and that perhaps the two forms of essays are identical twins or close cousins offers the very same honesty and “candor” which he deems essential in a personal essay—as he discloses he too is not able to perceive the difference. It is not only comforting to know that we readers feel a “little less lonely & freakish” in misunderstanding the difference between a familiar and personal essay but also to know that Lopate can both write and do what he defines as elements key to the personal essay,
Despite combing through countless books of published personal essays ‘that worked’ throughout high school and college and conceding that these were in fact excellent personal essays, I never managed to sum up the definition of a personal essay into one sentence let alone pinpoint the ever elusive essential elements. Lopate’s portrayal of honesty as the one of the first of the personal essay’s essential conditions (before pleasurable literary style, formal shapeliness and intellectual sustenance) specifically resonated in my mind as I too, wanting to be both an honest person and good writer, find dropping psychic defenses a struggle. Lopate’s quotation of Baldwin, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” could not have summed up the struggle for honesty better as being honest and a good writer are two separate entities. Similarly, I find it writing about myself a bit egotistical. Fortunately, Lopate’s suggestion to write as if it were a friendly conversation between a friend and trick to realize that it I am not important as it is only my example that can make readers feel a “little less lonely and freakish” lit the path to both honesty and overcoming the problem of egotism. Additionally, his reference to the personal essay as if you were whispering into friendly ears reinforced Williams’s reasons for writing in “Why I Write.”
Though Lopate’s critique for fluidity of form seemingly create tension in the artistic and aesthetic aspect of personal essays, I feel it’s not so much of an ‘either-or’ sort of ordeal but rather finding a balance between the two. In a way, it’s a lot like how the discerning point between telling a lie and lying is not always black and white. Just as Montaigne portrays the personal essay as a ‘free’ form of writing, so does Adorno though the mind must be a balance between “reigned in” and “given free reign.” Ultimately with both Klaus’s “Essayist on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time” (specifically, the various essay ‘flavors’) and Lopate’s portrayal of the personal essay through the “personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme, freshness of form, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic,” I feel a bit more armed (though not yet ready) to tackle the personal essay. After all, you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been as Will Smith once said in Hitch.
WRT 303.01: The Personal Essay 