What is a personal essay, and where should you start reading them?

An essay at school was an argument with a thesis and three supporting points. A personal essay is almost the opposite: it starts with a person and a question, and lets you watch someone think. When it works, it is like the best kind of conversation with a clever, honest friend.

What makes an essay "personal"

There is no strict definition, but the personal essay usually has:

• A first-person voice. The writer is present, with their opinions, doubts and quirks.
• A starting point in experience. A walk, a meal, an illness, a pair of shoes, a friendship.
• A movement outward. The small subject opens onto a bigger one: time, love, work, how to live.
• Candour. The writer admits things, including what they do not know.
• Room to wander. Digressions are part of the pleasure.

Essays are often divided into formal ones, serious and logically organised, and informal ones, marked by personal voice, humour and a rambling structure, as Wikipedia's overview of the essay notes. The personal essay lives at the informal end.

A very short history

The word comes from the French essayer, to try. Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais first appeared in 1580, used it for his attempts to put his thoughts into words, and in doing so more or less invented the form. Francis Bacon's Essays of 1597 were the first English works to call themselves essays. The form flourished in the periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth-century writers such as Virginia Woolf and E. B. White carried it further, the same overview notes.

One nineteenth-century landmark is Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia, which appeared in the London Magazine from 1820 and as a book in 1823. Lamb wrote under the pen name Elia, in a personal, conversational tone that many readers still find charming, according to Wikipedia. The collection includes a famous comic piece, A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.

Five places to start

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580). The source of everything. Start with the short ones; we suggest which in where to start with Montaigne.

2. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823). For the gentle, funny, digressive English tradition. Try Dream-Children and Old China, often counted among his finest.

3. Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues (1962). Our top recommendation. Le piccole virtù (1962) collects short pieces that include a portrait of the writer Cesare Pavese, per Lex.dk. Plain, piercing, unforgettable prose. More on it in our page on The Little Virtues.

4. Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006). A collection of humorous essays on getting older and being a woman, written when Ephron was in her sixties, as Wikipedia describes. Proof that the personal essay can be laugh-out-loud funny.

5. Phillip Lopate (ed.), The Art of the Personal Essay (1994). The great anthology, running from Seneca and Plutarch to James Baldwin and Adrienne Rich, grouped by themes such as ambition, education and leisure and idleness, as the Christian Science Monitor reported on publication. Lopate called the personal essay a deeply humanistic form. Use it as a tasting menu and follow the writers you like.

How to read them

Slowly, and one at a time. A personal essay is short but dense with voice; three in a row blur together. Read one with a coffee, then go about your day and see if it follows you around. If you want to try writing one, start with a small, specific thing that bothers or delights you and keep asking why. Our mindset page on journaling if you hate writing is a gentle first step.