Elisa Gabbert finds a way to achieve what many writers try to, whether in fiction or nonfiction: talking about a love of something that feels organic while also endearing. Gabbert's essays are both insightful and funny while also leaving room for caution of the self: how do we define who we are by participating in experiences or allowing experiences to shape us? While the majority of these perspectives are projected through books Gabbert has read, her ability to transform the power of reading into something more macro and philosophical is breezy, cool, and inviting. Rarely has a book ignited in me a call to action to gladly inform myself of how to be excited about the future--and more importantly--what future books I'll be gobbling like Gabbert's.

I don’t often reach for nonfiction, but after hearing praise for Gabbert I thought I would give it a go. I had a lovely time reading through both her personal experience and her research into the self through media - especially enjoying the essays around Sylvia Plath. Gabbert’s humour is a great punctuator in between quite a philosophical topic

I love an good, strong essay collection and I love learning about how other people read, so this book was a great combination of those things! I enjoy Gabbert's writing style that introduces many other texts and quote but without alienating a reader who isn't as familiar with them. I found the individual essays insightful and the overall arc of the collection revealing of the many different approaches we take to reading and how our relation to it as a practice changes over the course of a lifetime. Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for the advanced copy. I can't wait to buy the physical book and transcribe all my notes and highlights to it.

one of my first introduction to essay collections, and a good place to start!! on the whole, many essays were thought provoking and ignited my curiosity on completely obscure but interesting topics, the essay on the woman who remembers everything was so original and fascinating in particular. i loved the overarching themes of literature, self and isolation, her reflections throughout this collection were compelling to read and i loved being able to see how Gabbert’s mind works. at times, i did feel lost with the many cultural references, and it felt like i was being given more of a summary rather than an essay, but overall the majority of these were a joy to read!

"I love when a piece of fiction insists that it's true. Inside itself, it always is." This was a beautiful collection of love letters to books from Gabbert. I wasn't expecting it to turn into a minor tribute to Sylvia Plath, but I didn't mind.

Any Person Is the Only Self is an collection comprised of loosely, but not at all unpleasantly, connected essays: musings on readers, writers, and what it means to have (or lack, or refine, or revise) a sense of self. With the new states of mind and life brought about by the pandemic lingering in the background, Gabbert writes with sentimentality and style - her exploration of Sylvia Plath's work, in particular, manages to be both informative and absorbing while also handling the more sensitive details with tender, genuine compassion.

The strongest essays, for me, were found in the first third of the book - Gabbert's thoughts on the motley merits of reading 'stupid classics' were illuminating and amusing, as was her essay on the pleasing randomness of a 'returned books' section in her local library: needless to say, I think she is at her best when her attention is fixed on the subject of reading. As the collection progressed, however, it seemed to lose some of this momentum, and the notion which seems intended to tie each piece together (i.e. the 'self') began to feel less coherent and, instead, just a little tenuous.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for this free ebook ARC!

Something I found out about myself is I don’t like reading essays where I have no idea what the subject matter is about lol. Half of this is that, obscure lit things I felt isolated from, but the other half are pretty personal reader reflections and a look back at Covid and the routine changes it brought on. I liked it!

3.5/5 stars

This is the type of book you read on public transport, because the cover is cool as and will immediately make you look more intelligent and well-read.

I like to think of myself as being on my journey to becoming well-read. I've been told by a friend of mine that I'm the most well-read person he's ever met, which I think is the highest compliment you can give a literary person.

This book was a necessary edition to my journey of being that well-read smart person that is putting their English degree to some form of good use. The essays that connect literature, writers, the inherent self, and the contemporary (the bulk of these essays were written during the pandemic) are fascinating, and many were a joy to read.

Some of the essays weren't my taste, but that's okay!

thank you again to NetGalley & FSG for the arc!

I will read anything Elisa Gabbert produces--her writing brims with intelligence and wit and she makes even the most unlikely topics interesting. In her latest essay collection, "Any Person is the Only Self," these subjects range from the poetry and life of Sylvia Plath; to a consideration of loneliness and isolation brought on by COVID quarantines; to an analysis of why "Point Break" remains her favorite movie; to a related discussion of the merits and drawbacks of re-reading favorite books. Even if I personally am still a bit partial to Gabbert's previous essay collection, "The Unreality of Memory," reading this latest book left me with the same feeling of mind-expanding time very well spent. Highly recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

A quick set of light, conversational, quote-driven essays about the reading life, colored by personal pandemic experience.

Gabbert often quotes the work of very contemporary and recent essayists, Paris Review interviews, and articles I’d already read, discussing their takeaways; I think I’d like this more if I’d read fewer of the same things. (A me problem!)

Less of a me problem is that the essays would move pleasantly from quote to quote, and I’d often be waiting for the analytical dive, but then the essay would be over, and the main point would be something that I already had read about and agreed with but didn’t find so incisive—the fact that the pandemic reduced pleasant randomness in our lives; that when you read the same books at different points in your life, they have different meaning; you think things only happen to you, but other authors have described the same feeling in their letters and novels. Yeah, definitely!

Which was weird when, in between accessible sections, things pop up like a quote that includes the clause “…in the Bergsonian sense of the word” or Gabbert quips, “A nook to enclose our Dasein,” which didn’t really add a lot of to the paragraph except the tingling urge to do some Googling.

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC!

I’ve been thinking recently about what constitutes good writing, and I’ve settled on the idea that—more than anything else—it is an effective curatorial impulse. It is knowing what shouldn’t be shared so that the reader can better appreciate what is shared.

This idea was on my mind while reading Elisa Gabbert’s exemplary "Any Person is the Only Self," a collection of intersecting essays with reading and writing at their center. On the surface, these pieces first present themselves as Sontag-like cultural criticism, but they quickly and excitedly drop even the possibility of pretense, instead offering readers something more inviting and celebratory.

The collection’s voice falls somewhere between a conservationist explicating an ecosystem of great writing and a curator explaining why it’s beautiful. Gabbert isn’t offering only aesthetic or intellectual appreciation, though—she’s offering kinship. Although these essays cover a range of topics and themes, they repeatedly bring the same writers into conversation, and Gabbert situates both herself and the reader in the center of the discussion. Somehow, this feat is accomplished without ego, and I was struck by how generously the author works to invite everyone into the essays. Even if some readers might not have a robust cultural or literary knowledge, it doesn’t matter—Gabbert does all the legwork necessary for someone to participate in the conversation without feeling like an imposter.

If it seems odd that I’m dwelling on the structure and tone of the book more than its content, it’s because the content almost seems less relevant. There are great insights here, and I expected nothing less after reading Gabbert’s "Normal Distance," but I feel like the book exists primarily for the reader to evaluate their own relationship to literacy. The author removes attention from herself as much as possible, creating space for reflection without didacticism.

I don't have any critiques per se, but I’m not quite sure the book is as unified in its focus on the self as the title would lead one to believe. Maybe that’s just it, though—selves are scrappy and sprawling. These essays don’t need to coalesce as much as they need to complicate. They are intended to open discussions instead of end them, and they are designed to help even the least literary amongst us find ourselves alongside literary greats.

A prime example of this is the essay, “A Complicating Energy.” In this piece, Gabbert shares about authors who struggled with anxiety and depression and their relationship to art, including the distance between the performed self and the actual self. I found it incredibly resonant, and it seems to summarize the book’s guiding impulse—sometimes we don’t need complicated feelings resolved; we just need to know they are shared.

I first discovered Elisa Gabbert through her collection 'The Unreality Of Memory' back in 2020 and fell in love with her incisive style of essay writing. Since; I've devoured her other collections of essays and poetry and so I was quite pleased to have received this review copy. It's more of the same, which is to say a series of sharp essays on art, society and culture that I can feel myself returning to in the near future.

As soon as I read the synopsis for this essay collection, I knew it was totally in my wheelhouse -- I mean, essays about books, reading, writing, memory, the self? Sign me up! Which is why I acquired and read it as fast as I possibly could. I'm delighted to say that it was an extremely pleasurable and thought provoking collection to read and my already high expectations were far exceeded.

Elisa Gabbert writes with such fervor, tact, and intellectual curiosity of the things in life that interest her and she is passionate about. This made for every essay being just as compelling, insightful, and a joy to read as the last. Her ability to take two or sometimes three seemingly different topics and weave them together with near seamless prose over the course of a long essay, was incredible and stunning. And I really admire the amount of research and time that most likely went into each essay and how well it was conveyed on the page.

This is a book for bookish people. In my mind, each essay was the equivalent of Gabbert grabbing my hand as the reader and taking me on an evening stroll to show me the inner workings of her mind and perspective. She's a writer who isn't afraid to think deeply, connect the dots, and then succeed in putting those words to the page for us to ponder and also think deeply about. This is definitely a new favorite and I'm super excited to read more of her work.

Incisive and lovely written collection of essays. Some appear to be reprints but all were new to me. Interesting to be able to follow the author through her reading and see the new connections she makes with her life. I particularly enjoyed the circling back to Sylvia Plath and the essay about missing the randomness of the recently returned bookshelf at the library during COVID

Great, accessible collection that balances philosophy and humour. I loved the meandering nature of the essays, which all come back to the love and pleasure of reading in some way or another. An easy handsell.

These essays are smart, meandering, and insightful. They inspire readers to ask questions. Themes range from authors and books, reading and re-reading, identity, time, and art. I would use this book and particular essays to ignite conversations and free writing with students on the questions Gabbert poses. Highly recommended. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.