Daniel Nemo: Can you start by telling us a little about what first prompted Any Person Is the Only Self?
Elisa Gabbert: The earliest essays in the book were written in late 2018 and early 2019—“On Jealousy,” “Against Completism,” and the series on revisiting the classics. I had recently finished writing The Unreality of Memory, which was research-intensive work on difficult subject matter, plagues and the nuclear threat and climate catastrophe. I loved working on that book, but it had me grappling with all these big, scary questions about the end of civilization. I’m not saying writing a book is among the more demanding forms of activism or anything, but in its way it was spiritually sapping. So I gave myself a break and went back to a kind of writing that feels comforting for me, which is a literary essay with a lot of the personal in it. (That kind of writing is so comforting to read, too!)
DN: This is a book of essays that feels very carefully constructed, flowing seamlessly from one chapter into the next, and providing a personal decoding, an intimate insight into others’ works. Is that why you are drawn to nonfiction, because your writing is complementary, with prose more controlled, and poetry a freeing agent?
EG: I love thinking about this spectrum, and it’s partially true—I do find poetry freeing in some ways, compared to nonfiction—but in both forms I think I have to battle a very strong drive for control. My juvenilia, if we can call it that—the poems I wrote in graduate school, let’s say, were much too controlled. They had a sort of surface perfection that barely concealed their lack of material. I had an ear and a sense of the line and the stanza and so forth, but I hadn’t quite figured out what poems are actually for. I think I just hadn’t read enough of them. Now, whether I’m writing a poem or an essay, I’m really interested in building a tension between a controlled organization and some kind of uncontrollable wildness. Novalis said it better: “In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.” (One thing I like about poems, though, is that editors tend to leave them alone, whereas prose almost always loses some of its wildness through editing.)
DN: One of your essays, “Party Lit”, opens with successive paragraphs looking at very different types of literature, one could say at opposite ends of different scales. You combine classic works (Madame Bovary, The House of Mirth) with mass culture hits (Gossip Girl) to investigate what you group under the umbrella of “classic party fiction”. How do you see the evolution of our culture in literature?
EG: I have this heretical (ha ha) belief that you should take whatever you want from books—you don’t have to read them in full or in order or at all in the way they’re intended to be read if you’re not in the mood. (I once saw a poet on social media beg her readers to please read the poems in her book in her chosen order—my heart broke for her impossible wish!) That essay was so fun to write because I pulled tons of books off our shelves—some I’d read and some I hadn’t—and scanned for the party scenes. It’s much easier to see similarities that way, excising any gesture from its context. Our objects of culture, whether books, TV, or movies, cannot help being part of their zeitgeist—they always, try or not, have a now-ness that soon becomes a then-ness—but they are also automatically intertextual. All the party scenes of now are extensions of the party scene tradition, of the then.
DN: In an essay on reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, you conclude that “In retrospect, ‘the present’ is just a memory in real time.” Is this to an extent how you see these essays, and perhaps more widely, your critical work: a re-presentation of the past in action, past and present blurred into one, where words from a different time and voice speak through you to the reader?
EG: That’s a beautiful way to think of an essay. I often describe the form as a way of capturing thinking over time. When I’m “working on an essay” I’m paying extra attention to any thoughts I have related to the theme or the set of ideas I want to write about. Then when I sit down to write it’s a matter of arranging and contextualizing those thoughts, then seeing what new thoughts arise through that process. I get to cut out all the empty time and boring stuff that happened between any worthwhile thoughts, like a film editor—the thinking is sped up in writing, a special effect. But it’s also true that I’m splicing in snippets from the deeper past, through the work I’m quoting. So an essay is kind of a time collage.
DN: The title of the book, Any Person Is the Only Self, is borrowed from one of the essays on Plath, a poet who clearly holds a special place for you, and whom you celebrate with evident affection and eloquence. In a later essay also focusing on diary-keepers, you quote Susan Sontag on the “self you are alone in”: “‘I know I’m not myself with people … But am I myself alone? That seems unlikely too.’ If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” Are these two artists somehow connected for you? Is their dual conception of the self (the self as singular, exclusive entity versus the split, multi-persona self) something your work shares with theirs?
EG: Plath and Sontag are connected for me, yes; writers who journal extensively, and whose journals are published, have a double existence. The self that’s available there, in the journals, is often very different from the self we might extrapolate from finished work. I don’t have any illusions that my notebooks will be published or read when I’m dead—they really couldn’t be, they’re not that kind of notebook. But I’m obsessed with forms of evidence that other people are real. It’s strange that it should be so, but it’s quite hard to really maintain a belief in the full reality of other people. It’s like we don’t have the processing power. People are so complex, and there are so many of them! So we find ways to simplify people, to make them easier to conceptualize. Plath’s journals make her reality feel so immediate. And somehow seeing this makes me, my own self, feel more real as well.
DN: You observe that “A diary is the footnotes to the project of our lives, to the self as a project.” Any Person Is the Only Self is such an intimate book, where readers get the feeling they are listening in to your innermost thoughts, a shared experience of reading in confidence. These are essays in which one can almost picture some of the lines having been written in a diary first, before being more carefully crafted in the finished book. Is it where this intimacy comes from? Do you keep a diary? If so, how does your diary-writing support your creative process?
EG: That’s exactly the effect that I want from an essay—I want a thought to feel to the reader like I, the writer, just thought it, or like the idea is occurring to both of us together. I don’t keep a diary in the way that Sontag or Plath or Kafka or Gide did, with dated entries and full narrative paragraphs, but I’m constantly jotting down notes and ideas—some in notebooks, some in Word docs, some in scraps of paper or on index cards that I stick in the backs of books while I’m reading them, and keep there when I shelve them. I always try to preserve at least some of these sentences, exactly the way I first rendered them, in the finished essay, for the reason you mention. It’s a way of retaining that intimacy, like you were sitting with me in the room as I first formed the thought, and the desire to express it.
DN: You write: “There’s a double bind in the work of writing, a trap of specificity: If you don’t write about things people are interested in, nobody is going to read you. But if you write about things people are interested in, other people are writing about them too. It’s true of all my favorite subjects—the great writers have already written about them. What can I possibly add? Janet Malcolm covered Plath and Hughes, psychoanalysis, Gertrude Stein, and true crime. Susan Sontag seems to have already had all my worthwhile thoughts, the thoughts I thought were mine.” Sontag herself, in one of what you call your shared thoughts, wrote about reading André Gide: “I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself.” What both Sontag and yourself are describing seems a common experience for the truly creative artist, one I’ve often experienced myself reading Rilke and others. Is this not part of what Jung calls our collective unconscious, speaking through the artist?
EG: That’s one way to look at it, yes. Or, simply: different minds have a lot of overlap. I might react very differently from Sontag or Kafka in some kind of a crisis on a spaceship (who knows?) but when we’re sitting at a desk or in a chair, in a room on this planet, and we’re reading the same book, we might have something very close to the same thought. This was mildly horrifying to realize when I was younger, when I had beautiful unquestioned assumptions about my own uniqueness. Now I can accept that I’m not special, and also, that wanting to be special is its own universal.
DN: What are the books that act as a foundation to your writing? Do they tend to be more poetry, fiction, or nonfiction?
EG: Truly, all of them. I have a shelf in my bedroom where I keep books I like to have close to me, and right now it’s holding lots of books that helped me write Any Person—my selected Rilke and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, both in the Mitchell translations; my collected Plath that I’ve had forever, and her diaries; a row of architecture books that I love. There’s a section of journals that I’ve only dipped in and out of, so far (Patricia Highsmith is the newest addition), and some poetry anthologies. But fiction is so important to me, even though I don’t write fiction (…yet?). I think novels represent for me, maybe more than any other genre, how much life a book can hold. The world of the book contains life of its own, and then who I am when I read it, my age, where I am in space, that gets mixed up with it too. My life is also in the book.
DN: How does the process of writing this book compare to, let’s say, that of Normal Distance? How does your mind switch from poetry to criticism and essays? Do you find a critical approach to writing does something to widen and open up language, by expanding the possible frames of interpretation perhaps?
EG: Typically the difference, for me, is about duration and concentration. An essay is more of an extended engagement. It takes more time and space, and everything ends up feeling more processed and more understood. A poem happens much more quickly, and when it’s good, I think, it preserves information in a semi-unprocessed state, the feeling of the idea before I understand it. That said, many of the longer poems in Normal Distance challenge the distinction, because they’re so essayistic, and I wanted them to feel slow. Now I’m back to writing shorter poems that feel more opposed to the essay, more sudden and intense.
DN: “Belief depends on choices, on multiple paths with unpredictable end points. On still-open gates. That is faith, isn’t it? Belief in what you can’t know?” Such a beautiful line from the book, which, it seems to me, could almost stand as a metaphor for poetry. Poetry as belief. Poetry as faith. Tell us about your new poetry, which you’re turning back to. How has your poetic work evolved since Normal Distance or The Unreality of Memory?
EG: Poetry has become a kind of faith for me—I went so long without writing it, over two years, I had started to imagine I might never write a poem again. I crossed that doubt. (“Faith is Doubt,” as Emily Dickinson writes!) Writing a poem now feels like a kind of meditation, a brief period of almost total focus, and all my worldly anxieties drop away. It helps me a lot. In that two years or so of not-writing, I think I absorbed new influences. I read a lot of Glück a few years ago, and I feel that I sound more like her now. She has that quality of staring down the void, unblinking.
DN: Your poetry, in fact, has that element of unpredictability--the lines often seem to surprise themselves. I’m thinking at first of your 2022 poetry collection, Normal Distance, where you write in “Moon News”:
“We realize the same things over and over, new every
time.
We are born not remembering why we walked into the
room.”
And even your more recently published work, the wonderful “Here Lies Dust”, where the poem stuns and bewilders the reader and itself, with astonishing line breaks:
“The day turns silvery-gold behind
its clouds, like crossing paths
with Satan. A thought thrills
the mind – life is evil.”
Do you find that poetry as a medium gives you that space to erase your own self, to speak from a ‘greater than yourself’ viewpoint, an art form where the unconscious takes over the subjective self?
EG: Yes! I have joked in the past that poems are great for plausible deniability—you can always claim you didn’t really mean it—but it really is profound, the effect that the poem has on how you form ideas. In just that little distance, between your life material and circumstances, and the voice of even a very I-driven lyric poem, you can shock yourself by what you are capable of saying, and maybe believing. (I also think surprise is so, so important for good writing, and good poems are little surprise machines.)
DN: As a reader with “an aversion to long novels”, did you ever go back to Proust? Which books are you reading now, or looking forward to reading?
EG: I’m still very delinquent on Proust and Melville, I’m afraid, but I have been reading some longer novels recently, and this summer I’m planning to tackle Lonesome Dove. At this moment, I’m reading Alone by Richard E. Byrd, an account of a winter he spent by himself in a shack in inland Antarctica in the 1930s. It’s like a combination of an adventure story and philosophical nature writing. I absolutely love it. I’ve also just started Dayswork, a fragmentary novel (about Melville, in fact!) co-written by a married couple. I heard them read from it on a podcast and instantly went out to get it from the library.
Elisa Gabbert: The earliest essays in the book were written in late 2018 and early 2019—“On Jealousy,” “Against Completism,” and the series on revisiting the classics. I had recently finished writing The Unreality of Memory, which was research-intensive work on difficult subject matter, plagues and the nuclear threat and climate catastrophe. I loved working on that book, but it had me grappling with all these big, scary questions about the end of civilization. I’m not saying writing a book is among the more demanding forms of activism or anything, but in its way it was spiritually sapping. So I gave myself a break and went back to a kind of writing that feels comforting for me, which is a literary essay with a lot of the personal in it. (That kind of writing is so comforting to read, too!)
DN: This is a book of essays that feels very carefully constructed, flowing seamlessly from one chapter into the next, and providing a personal decoding, an intimate insight into others’ works. Is that why you are drawn to nonfiction, because your writing is complementary, with prose more controlled, and poetry a freeing agent?
EG: I love thinking about this spectrum, and it’s partially true—I do find poetry freeing in some ways, compared to nonfiction—but in both forms I think I have to battle a very strong drive for control. My juvenilia, if we can call it that—the poems I wrote in graduate school, let’s say, were much too controlled. They had a sort of surface perfection that barely concealed their lack of material. I had an ear and a sense of the line and the stanza and so forth, but I hadn’t quite figured out what poems are actually for. I think I just hadn’t read enough of them. Now, whether I’m writing a poem or an essay, I’m really interested in building a tension between a controlled organization and some kind of uncontrollable wildness. Novalis said it better: “In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.” (One thing I like about poems, though, is that editors tend to leave them alone, whereas prose almost always loses some of its wildness through editing.)
DN: One of your essays, “Party Lit”, opens with successive paragraphs looking at very different types of literature, one could say at opposite ends of different scales. You combine classic works (Madame Bovary, The House of Mirth) with mass culture hits (Gossip Girl) to investigate what you group under the umbrella of “classic party fiction”. How do you see the evolution of our culture in literature?
EG: I have this heretical (ha ha) belief that you should take whatever you want from books—you don’t have to read them in full or in order or at all in the way they’re intended to be read if you’re not in the mood. (I once saw a poet on social media beg her readers to please read the poems in her book in her chosen order—my heart broke for her impossible wish!) That essay was so fun to write because I pulled tons of books off our shelves—some I’d read and some I hadn’t—and scanned for the party scenes. It’s much easier to see similarities that way, excising any gesture from its context. Our objects of culture, whether books, TV, or movies, cannot help being part of their zeitgeist—they always, try or not, have a now-ness that soon becomes a then-ness—but they are also automatically intertextual. All the party scenes of now are extensions of the party scene tradition, of the then.
DN: In an essay on reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, you conclude that “In retrospect, ‘the present’ is just a memory in real time.” Is this to an extent how you see these essays, and perhaps more widely, your critical work: a re-presentation of the past in action, past and present blurred into one, where words from a different time and voice speak through you to the reader?
EG: That’s a beautiful way to think of an essay. I often describe the form as a way of capturing thinking over time. When I’m “working on an essay” I’m paying extra attention to any thoughts I have related to the theme or the set of ideas I want to write about. Then when I sit down to write it’s a matter of arranging and contextualizing those thoughts, then seeing what new thoughts arise through that process. I get to cut out all the empty time and boring stuff that happened between any worthwhile thoughts, like a film editor—the thinking is sped up in writing, a special effect. But it’s also true that I’m splicing in snippets from the deeper past, through the work I’m quoting. So an essay is kind of a time collage.
DN: The title of the book, Any Person Is the Only Self, is borrowed from one of the essays on Plath, a poet who clearly holds a special place for you, and whom you celebrate with evident affection and eloquence. In a later essay also focusing on diary-keepers, you quote Susan Sontag on the “self you are alone in”: “‘I know I’m not myself with people … But am I myself alone? That seems unlikely too.’ If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” Are these two artists somehow connected for you? Is their dual conception of the self (the self as singular, exclusive entity versus the split, multi-persona self) something your work shares with theirs?
EG: Plath and Sontag are connected for me, yes; writers who journal extensively, and whose journals are published, have a double existence. The self that’s available there, in the journals, is often very different from the self we might extrapolate from finished work. I don’t have any illusions that my notebooks will be published or read when I’m dead—they really couldn’t be, they’re not that kind of notebook. But I’m obsessed with forms of evidence that other people are real. It’s strange that it should be so, but it’s quite hard to really maintain a belief in the full reality of other people. It’s like we don’t have the processing power. People are so complex, and there are so many of them! So we find ways to simplify people, to make them easier to conceptualize. Plath’s journals make her reality feel so immediate. And somehow seeing this makes me, my own self, feel more real as well.
DN: You observe that “A diary is the footnotes to the project of our lives, to the self as a project.” Any Person Is the Only Self is such an intimate book, where readers get the feeling they are listening in to your innermost thoughts, a shared experience of reading in confidence. These are essays in which one can almost picture some of the lines having been written in a diary first, before being more carefully crafted in the finished book. Is it where this intimacy comes from? Do you keep a diary? If so, how does your diary-writing support your creative process?
EG: That’s exactly the effect that I want from an essay—I want a thought to feel to the reader like I, the writer, just thought it, or like the idea is occurring to both of us together. I don’t keep a diary in the way that Sontag or Plath or Kafka or Gide did, with dated entries and full narrative paragraphs, but I’m constantly jotting down notes and ideas—some in notebooks, some in Word docs, some in scraps of paper or on index cards that I stick in the backs of books while I’m reading them, and keep there when I shelve them. I always try to preserve at least some of these sentences, exactly the way I first rendered them, in the finished essay, for the reason you mention. It’s a way of retaining that intimacy, like you were sitting with me in the room as I first formed the thought, and the desire to express it.
DN: You write: “There’s a double bind in the work of writing, a trap of specificity: If you don’t write about things people are interested in, nobody is going to read you. But if you write about things people are interested in, other people are writing about them too. It’s true of all my favorite subjects—the great writers have already written about them. What can I possibly add? Janet Malcolm covered Plath and Hughes, psychoanalysis, Gertrude Stein, and true crime. Susan Sontag seems to have already had all my worthwhile thoughts, the thoughts I thought were mine.” Sontag herself, in one of what you call your shared thoughts, wrote about reading André Gide: “I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself.” What both Sontag and yourself are describing seems a common experience for the truly creative artist, one I’ve often experienced myself reading Rilke and others. Is this not part of what Jung calls our collective unconscious, speaking through the artist?
EG: That’s one way to look at it, yes. Or, simply: different minds have a lot of overlap. I might react very differently from Sontag or Kafka in some kind of a crisis on a spaceship (who knows?) but when we’re sitting at a desk or in a chair, in a room on this planet, and we’re reading the same book, we might have something very close to the same thought. This was mildly horrifying to realize when I was younger, when I had beautiful unquestioned assumptions about my own uniqueness. Now I can accept that I’m not special, and also, that wanting to be special is its own universal.
DN: What are the books that act as a foundation to your writing? Do they tend to be more poetry, fiction, or nonfiction?
EG: Truly, all of them. I have a shelf in my bedroom where I keep books I like to have close to me, and right now it’s holding lots of books that helped me write Any Person—my selected Rilke and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, both in the Mitchell translations; my collected Plath that I’ve had forever, and her diaries; a row of architecture books that I love. There’s a section of journals that I’ve only dipped in and out of, so far (Patricia Highsmith is the newest addition), and some poetry anthologies. But fiction is so important to me, even though I don’t write fiction (…yet?). I think novels represent for me, maybe more than any other genre, how much life a book can hold. The world of the book contains life of its own, and then who I am when I read it, my age, where I am in space, that gets mixed up with it too. My life is also in the book.
DN: How does the process of writing this book compare to, let’s say, that of Normal Distance? How does your mind switch from poetry to criticism and essays? Do you find a critical approach to writing does something to widen and open up language, by expanding the possible frames of interpretation perhaps?
EG: Typically the difference, for me, is about duration and concentration. An essay is more of an extended engagement. It takes more time and space, and everything ends up feeling more processed and more understood. A poem happens much more quickly, and when it’s good, I think, it preserves information in a semi-unprocessed state, the feeling of the idea before I understand it. That said, many of the longer poems in Normal Distance challenge the distinction, because they’re so essayistic, and I wanted them to feel slow. Now I’m back to writing shorter poems that feel more opposed to the essay, more sudden and intense.
DN: “Belief depends on choices, on multiple paths with unpredictable end points. On still-open gates. That is faith, isn’t it? Belief in what you can’t know?” Such a beautiful line from the book, which, it seems to me, could almost stand as a metaphor for poetry. Poetry as belief. Poetry as faith. Tell us about your new poetry, which you’re turning back to. How has your poetic work evolved since Normal Distance or The Unreality of Memory?
EG: Poetry has become a kind of faith for me—I went so long without writing it, over two years, I had started to imagine I might never write a poem again. I crossed that doubt. (“Faith is Doubt,” as Emily Dickinson writes!) Writing a poem now feels like a kind of meditation, a brief period of almost total focus, and all my worldly anxieties drop away. It helps me a lot. In that two years or so of not-writing, I think I absorbed new influences. I read a lot of Glück a few years ago, and I feel that I sound more like her now. She has that quality of staring down the void, unblinking.
DN: Your poetry, in fact, has that element of unpredictability--the lines often seem to surprise themselves. I’m thinking at first of your 2022 poetry collection, Normal Distance, where you write in “Moon News”:
“We realize the same things over and over, new every
time.
We are born not remembering why we walked into the
room.”
And even your more recently published work, the wonderful “Here Lies Dust”, where the poem stuns and bewilders the reader and itself, with astonishing line breaks:
“The day turns silvery-gold behind
its clouds, like crossing paths
with Satan. A thought thrills
the mind – life is evil.”
Do you find that poetry as a medium gives you that space to erase your own self, to speak from a ‘greater than yourself’ viewpoint, an art form where the unconscious takes over the subjective self?
EG: Yes! I have joked in the past that poems are great for plausible deniability—you can always claim you didn’t really mean it—but it really is profound, the effect that the poem has on how you form ideas. In just that little distance, between your life material and circumstances, and the voice of even a very I-driven lyric poem, you can shock yourself by what you are capable of saying, and maybe believing. (I also think surprise is so, so important for good writing, and good poems are little surprise machines.)
DN: As a reader with “an aversion to long novels”, did you ever go back to Proust? Which books are you reading now, or looking forward to reading?
EG: I’m still very delinquent on Proust and Melville, I’m afraid, but I have been reading some longer novels recently, and this summer I’m planning to tackle Lonesome Dove. At this moment, I’m reading Alone by Richard E. Byrd, an account of a winter he spent by himself in a shack in inland Antarctica in the 1930s. It’s like a combination of an adventure story and philosophical nature writing. I absolutely love it. I’ve also just started Dayswork, a fragmentary novel (about Melville, in fact!) co-written by a married couple. I heard them read from it on a podcast and instantly went out to get it from the library.
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Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.
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Any Person Is the Only Self, by Elisa Gabbert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)
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