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.

In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. I became enraptured, tracing out the development of the persona in memoir after essay after memoir (it was out of this rapture that I realized I was a nonfiction writer). I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

We’d realize the writer is struggling to make sense of feelings whose complexity he acknowledges. The struggle alone would have made the subject vital.

When Rousseau observes, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,” he is saying to the reader, “I will go in search of it in your presence. I will set down on the page a tale of experience just as I think it occurred, and together we’ll see what it exemplifies, both of us discovering as I write this self I am in search of.” And that was the beginning of memoir as we know it.

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.