Personal Problems - Blake Smith

One of my father’s favorite sayings—and one of my least favorite things to hear growing up—was “that sounds like a personal problem.” Maybe for that reason, one of the things that attracts me to writing about other people’s ideas is that I don’t have to find out until much later that I was really writing (about) something personal. For example I wasn’t very aware in writing an essay about Barthes’ doomed crush on a student that I had just gotten through (although not yet over) something similar myself. I certainly didn’t, and still don’t, have any interesting thoughts about what that something similar meant in my own life or reveals about love in general—whereas the essay on Barthes, which I think is one of my best, does, in a spiraling, digressive, or oblique way, end up saying about life, love, and even about me specifically things I couldn’t manage by tackling such subjects without the frame-story that this is just commentary. Indeed, one of the themes of that essay, which I get at

One of my father’s favorite sayings—and one of my least favorite things to hear growing up—was “that sounds like a personal problem.” Maybe for that reason, one of the things that attracts me to writing about other people’s ideas is that I don’t have to find out until much later that I was really writing (about) something personal. For example I wasn’t very aware in writing an essay about Barthes’ doomed crush on a student that I had just gotten through (although not yet over) something similar myself. I certainly didn’t, and still don’t, have any interesting thoughts about what that something