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What struck me the most was the idea that essayists are writing about themselves, but also about humanity in general at it's most fundamental level. What I mean by this and what I gathered from the reading was that a good essayist writes about the things that no one else is writing about, but everyone is thinking about. The ability to connect to the inner thoughts of another persons mind, where the experience is so personal that they didn't believe another living soul would be able to describe it in words, yet the essayist is supposed to be proficient in this. I feel as though this portion of the text can help me to dig deeper into my own mind and put more of my personality onto the page. That is what the reader is looking for, the entertainment. The Art of the Personal Essay also mentions the readers' excusal of the essayists past in order to make way for the condor. This catches me because it gives me the sense that in my future writing, I won't be tempted to hold ba...

The main argument of this article is how is it possible to determine truth is writing, and is the option of writing memoirs as novels a better alternative? She draws from examples of other works, and shows how it's been the case before that the truth has not been told in what people have claimed to be memoirs. She tells about fiction and non-fiction being more similar than they are different. It is difficult to determine from a persons experience as to whether they are telling the complete, accurate truth on a specific matter. I do believe she has a strong argument, though. She explains the extreme inconvenience of how to obtain the exact truth, and what substitutes could be made, or changes that could be applied that would solve our suspicions and clear our mindset towards what we believe should be in a memoir, or rather what to expect. She comes across the idea in her struggles to write her own memoir to write freely and have the courage to not hold back. I'm drawn to thi...