To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

The reader realizes that the man who’s using turtles as a stand-in for human intimacy has been there from the very beginning. He tells us clearly enough: He had grown up loving all the animals, expecting to live in peace with his fellow creatures. But the developers had just kept coming. And the creature within had become entombed in the mud. Yet he, like the turtle, had survived: cold, quiet, alert. Containing within himself not multitudes but a sufficiency of response just large enough to avoid the charge of unnatural.

It is Hoagland’s complexity—the intentness of his observation coupled with the elegance of his withdrawal—that gives this essay its inner life. His mixed feelings provide the texture, and the drama. Patiently and “quietly,” they lead us into the starkness of solipsism. The turtles have taught the narrator that nothing outside himself is quite real to him.

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.

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.