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.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. “Good writing has two characteristics,” a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.

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.

These writers might not “know” themselves—that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us—but in each case—and this is crucial—they know who they are at the moment of writing. They know they are there to clarify in relation to the subject in hand—and on this obligation they deliver.

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.