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 truthspeaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the the sense of things is larger than it was before. […] I become interested in my own existence only as a means of penetrating the situation in hand. I have created a persona who can find the story that I, in an unmediated state, ambotherwise going to drown in. – Vivian Gornick, The situation and the story
Niet wat, niet voor wie, maar wie is de ik die schrijft. Welke larger sense maakt die ik van de dingen. Vanuit welk inzicht maak je die ik? Die ik is the story.