Why writers write so much about themselves

And why that’s not such a good thing

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

According to its About page, Substack Reads is “a weekly roundup of the greatest essays, art, and ideas created right here on Substack”. Featured posts are chosen from recommendations submitted by readers as well as staff. This is where “[t]he Substack team shares writer and creator stories and trends shaping the way we read.”

Self-congratulatory hyperbole aside, let’s take this description at its word. What, then, does the weekly Substack Reads digest tell us about these trends? Substack readers apparently like their reading divided into categories (art, politics, culture…). Many of them like visuals (drawings, photography, comics) alongside the written world. They love food.

And they like tales told in the first-person singular. One thread that runs through all the categories in Substack Reads, from pop culture to pop tarts to populism, is authors’ reflections on their personal experiences, impressions, opinions, feelings.

This is not a scientific experiment. Still, it suggests that writing on Substack is as much following as setting trends in the publishing world. Other commentators have noted in recent years that regardless of what else they’re writing about, more and more writers are writing about themselves.

Theories abound about the reasons for autobiographical turn in nonfiction writing. Yasmin Nair points to the ways composition classes are taught in US universities. In an essay on the American essay, Jackson Arn identifies a wider social and cultural development: authors are increasingly expected to assert their expertise on a subject by claiming direct experience of it. This would help to explain why the first-person singular creeps into writing that is not obviously autobiographical, such as book and film reviews or literary history.

Other commonly cited explanations are social media and identity politics, those catch-all culprits in our age of culture wars.

But the most convincing argument is the material one. Nair and Arn are in agreement that the auto-takeover is driven by the changing economic conditions of the publishing industry. Research is time-consuming and expensive, funding for it drying up. Writing about oneself is more money- and time-efficient than spending weeks in the archives or travelling around the world interviewing other people. At the end of 2022 the average professional writer in the UK (defined as someone who dedicates 50% or more of their working time to writing) was earning £7000 (around US $9000) a year — less than a third of the recommended minimum annual income for a single person. In a fiercely competitive writing world, who can blame writers for churning out what pays the rent (or at least a measly takeaway meal)?

It's less clear what readers get out of all this. Is it that in an era where so much of our time is spent in the hyperreal universe of the internet, we find it reassuring to be reminded that there are real human beings out there having real experiences in the real world? Suddenly every trip to a local coffee shop, every row with a mother or changing of a car tire becomes something that we can relate to. Explanations for the popularity of personal storytelling are full of words like “authenticity”, “trust” and “normal people”. Celebrities are out, nurses are in. Readers want to “connect” to the author. Chit-chat (“I was talking to my best friend the other day…”) makes us feel like we’re part of the story.

The problem with having to connect to an author or relate to her life is that it limits the experience of reading itself. Sure, reading can be enjoyable when it’s cosy and familiar. But we also want the joy of being challenged, of having our own assumptions about the world, about language, thrown into the air and scattered if not shattered. This is the pleasure of going beyond the self. In encountering, as Nair intimates, something new in the writing itself – whether that be a horror story, a surprisingly stunning sentence or an account of the world that has absolutely nothing to do with our lived experience of it.

Reading about other people’s activities and feelings can inspire the reader, show us what human beings are capable of (perseverance, bravery, love, victory in the face of adversity). But it can also be strangely disconnected from the material world. Writing that circles back time and again to the author’s personal voice can give the impression that she is the centre not only of the text, but of her universe, untethered from wider social forces, and from broader communities and relationships. For this particular reader the effect of reading too many such texts is not connection, but alienation – a sense of being estranged from a story in which the Ikeeps getting in the way.

But there is another kind of alienation operating here. A half century ago, the late oral historian Ronald Grele warned that first-person narrative – that which typically features in oral history, autobiography or biography – “contains a profoundly alienating potential” because it “encourages the view that individuals shape their own destinies, that they are in some way historical actors, and this is by choice”. But our decisions, actions and reactions are always shaped by the structures and institutions of the societies in which we live. Grele, like Arn and Nair, was talking about the United States. But the idea that the world is made up of autonomous beings, each of us the hero of our own lives, coming to ideas and stories through our unique imaginations and perception of the things around us, through the force of our own agency, is not an objective fact. It’s a symptom of the individualism that dominates the modern Western world.

In the words of the British political theorist Jeremy Gilbert, individualism is characterised by the idea that “(s)ocial relations are things that happen to individuals rather than things which actually define their identity and the co-ordinates of their existence”. In the individualist understanding of human identity, we all have relationships with others, we belong to communities, but these connections are not what define us. Our sense of self is something internal to each one of us. Especially relevant for the question of writing is Gilbert’s observation that the “individualist model […] tends to posit the self as the key source of most of our capacities to act in the world – to innovate, decide and create”.

When journalists or historians use other people’s first-person accounts to tell bigger stories, our job is to read or listen attentively and respectfully, and to put those stories in their context – to provide for the reader an account of the environment in which narrators’ lives were lived, analysing their words in relation to the wider cultural narratives that shape how we make sense of our lives. When we write about ourselves, we have a similar task – only the stories we have to contextualise are our own. We have to have critical distance from our experiences in order to make sense of them.

But surely, some readers will object, there is a fundamental difference between stories that come from a position of privilege and those written by people from a position of oppression. After all, an essential part of providing a more complete and accurate account of the world is hearing from more marginalised voices. This is true. But why assume that the best way to resist the dominance of the proverbial cishet white middle-class male voice is by countering it with a series of less normative individual voices? We’re still left with the liberal individual as the centre of the story – or at least the thread that holds it together.

There are of course many examples of memoirs and personal essays that trouble the self as doer and knower, that resist individualism by situating the teller within a set of wider cultural traditions and social and economic forces. There are rich traditions, such as Indigenous storytelling, that centre relations. There are projects that promote spaces to create and celebrate different kinds of writing that do not centre the self. There are groups that get together to write ever more innovative versions of that iconic radical political genre the manifesto, typically penned and signed by a group of people.

But in today’s world of competitive individualism, where one exists as a brand or one does not exist at all, almost everything – from career progression to time constraints to economic necessity – militates against collective activities in which as individuals we remain anonymous or in the background. We’re encouraged to understand our creative and intellectual endeavours as unique personal struggles and achievements. In such a world, it comes as no surprise that the self makes its way to the heart of our writing.

Something else might be going on as well. In the face of pressures on writers to produce quickly, writing about oneself may represent an attempt to alleviate the alienation of writing itself. For people who write professionally, often on topics that may not interest them at all (just like there are probably few people who have an innate passion for toilet cleaning or Amazon delivery), writing can be alienating – in Marx’s sense that work under capitalism is alienated labour. Like other workers, the writer-worker has little or no control over her time or what she produces, often for a pittance. When writing is commodified, our emotional and intellectual relationship to it (the product) is severed. When we compete with other writers for limited pay and recognition, we’re separated from those around us. Writing about one’s own life thus becomes more than an attempt to boost that meagre wage by appealing to a wider audience eager to relate to the author’s experience. It helps us to feel connected to our writing, to wrest back some of that much-talked-about but ever-so-illusive thing called “creativity” in a world driven by the demands of the market.

It would be unfair (as well as politically pointless) to fault individual writers for trying to produce work that is both profitable and satisfying. In a world where writing is a commodity and readers are consumers, anyone who wants to earn a living, and a name, as a writer has little choice but to chase the entrepreneurial dream of market success. But in the long run this is unlikely to pay off either financially or emotionally for more than a small number of authors. The publishing industry is just as fickle as any other. Like all cultural trends, the demand for endless personal narratives is likely to dry up at some point (and that’s before we factor AI into the equation).

The other option is to work collectively for a world in which different kinds of writing are sustainable for those who want to write. In such a world there would still be room for personal storytelling. But the first-person singular would not have to open and close every post. And there would be many more stories without any Is at all.