Precisely the place to which our eulogist finally puzzles her way: her own mixed feelings. First she sees that she has them. Then she acknowledges them to herself. Then she considers them as a way into the experience. Then she realizes they are the experience. She begins to write.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work.

Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” have a powerful commonality. Both turn on race, both continuously interweave the personal with the political, and both are dominated by a murderous truth-speaking voice: the narrator using himself to demonstrate that none are exempt from the dehumanizing effects of racism. At the same time, in neither case is the writing pulled around by the emotions that actually drive the essay. Orwell, too—composing paragraph after paragraph of measured narrative, analysis, and commentary so that the writing itself is continually bringing the heat of reaction under control—is holding it all together through the hard, clear, civilizing voice he was making distinctively his own; “civilizing” being the operative word.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.

From the moment I found myself standing in front of a memoir-writing class with a hunk of manuscript in my hand, asking, What is this all about? —and the answer came back, It’s about this dysfunctional family in Cincinnati, and I said, No, no. What is it about?—I saw that my classes would be reading as I needed to read: looking for the inner context that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate circumstance; places a writer’s thought and feeling; imposes shape and reveals inner purpose; the thing that is invariably being addressed when one says to any writer of imagination, But what is it about? and does not expect to hear, It’s about this family in Cincinnati.

Virginia Woolf sets out the scope of illness in her brief essay “On Being Ill”: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness . . . it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.