Elisa Gabbert’s ‘Any Person Is the Only Self’ brims with curiosity - The Washington Post

Elisa Gabbert’s essays in “Any Person Is the Only Self” are brimming with pleasure and curiosity about a life with books.

Review by Becca Rothfeld

May 30, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

Tell people you read and write for a living, and they picture a ghostly creature, an idea only incidentally appended to a body. What they often fail to understand is that the life of the mind is also a physical life — a life spent lugging irksomely heavy volumes around on the Metro and annotating their margins with a cramping hand. The poet, essayist and New York Times poetry columnist Elisa Gabbert is rare in grasping that reading is, in addition to a mental exercise, a movement performed in a particular place.

“If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it — what room, what chair,” she writes in her charming new essay collection, “Any Person Is the Only Self.” Writing, too, proves spatial: “I think essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.”

The 16 delightfully digressive pieces in this collection are all moods that involve books in one way or another. But they are not just about the content of books, although they are about that, too: They are primarily about the acts of reading and writing, which are as much social and corporeal as cerebral.

In the first essay — the foyer — Gabbert writes about the shelf of newly returned books at her local library. “The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me,” she writes. “They weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were very often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype.” The haphazard selections on the shelf were also evidence of other people — the sort of invisible but palpable community of readers that she came to miss so sharply during the pandemic.

In another essay, she learns of a previously unpublished story by one of her favorite authors, Sylvia Plath, who makes frequent appearances throughout this book. Fearing that the story will disappoint her, Gabbert puts off reading it. As she waits, she grows “apprehensive, even frightened.”

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There are writers who attempt to excise themselves from their writing, to foster an illusion of objectivity; thankfully, Gabbert is not one of them. On the contrary, her writing is full of intimacies, and her book is a work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author’s shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. In one piece, she rereads and reappraises books she first read as a teenager; in another, she and her friends form a “Stupid Classics Book Club,” to tackle “all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had.”

Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments. In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet’s perfected phrases and startling observations. “Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically,” she writes in an essay about fictional depictions of parties. She describes the photos in a book by Rachael Ray documenting home-cooked meals — one of the volumes on the recently returned shelf — as “poignantly mediocre.” Remarking on a listicle of “Books to Read by Living Women (Instead of These 10 by Dead Men),” Gabbert wonders, “Since when is it poor form to die?”

“Any Person Is the Only Self” is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. An academic text on architecture, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a rare memory disorder whose victims recall every aspect of their autobiographies in excruciatingly minute detail, “Madame Bovary,” YouTube videos about people who work as professional cuddlers, a psychological study about whether it is possible to be sane in an insane asylum — all these feature in Gabbert’s exuberant essays. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity.

Perhaps because she is so indefatigably interested, she gravitates toward writers who see literature as a means of doubling life, allowing it to hold twice as much. Plath confessed in her journals that she wrote in an attempt to extend her biography beyond its biological terminus: “My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” The very act of keeping a diary, then, splits the self in two.

Plath once insisted that bad things could never happen to her and her peers because “we’re different.” Gabbert asks “Different why?” and concludes that everyone is different: “We are we, not them. Any person is the only self.” But that “only” is, perhaps counterintuitively, not constrained or constricted. Walt Whitman famously wrote that his only self comprised “multitudes,” and Gabbert echoes him when she reflects, “If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” And indeed, she is loath to elevate any of her many selves over any of the others. When she rereads a book that she loved in her adolescence, she thinks she was right to love it back then. “That self only knew what she knew,” she writes. “That self wasn’t wrong.” Both her past self and her present self have an equal claim to being Elisa Gabbert, who is too fascinated by the world’s manifold riches to confine herself to a single, limited life.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

Any Person Is the Only Self

Essays

By Elisa Gabbert

FSG Originals. 230 pp. $18, paperback.

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