Personal expression remains a continuing struggle for me as a writer. I have a tendency to either reveal too much of myself in personal essays or nothing at all. Neither approach satisfies me, but I’m still unsure how to solve the riddle.

I have been critical for Montaigne at times for concealing his true feelings. But this essay is an interesting example of him letting his emotions slip in a sly, effective way. Much of this essay about his departed friend Etienne de la Boetie concerns the nature of friendship, and at times feels a bit too much like copying Aristotle on the subject.

He finally gets around to discussing the nature of his friendship and uses a flurry of quotes to help illuminate his loss, most of them keeping his feelings at a safe distance. But he saves the hammer for last, with this passage from Catullus capping it all:

Brother, your death has left me sad and lone;

Since you departed all our joys have gone,

Which while you lived your sweet affection fed;

My pleasures all lie shattered, with you dead.

Our soul is buried, mine with yours entwined;

And since then I have banished from my mind

My studies, and my spirit’s dearest joys.

Shall I ne’er speak to you, or hear your voice?

Or see your face, more dear than life to me?

At least I’ll love you to eternity.

Montaigne makes no effort to contextualize the poetry, he immediately moves on to the politics of La Boetie and why he’s chosen not to publish his Treatise on Involuntary Servitude, as he promised on his friend’s deathbed. I guess this is one way to minimize revealing feelings.

Another way is in a song by Adrianne Lenker called “Fool,” which I’ve written about previously. In this piece off her most recent solo album, Adrianne is once again lamenting a lost love, but does so through an imagined catch-up conversation where she ticks off what everyone they know has been up to since the pair broke up.

It’s an interesting tactic, because the litany is a social commentary to her former lover — see all the people (and likely a couple dogs) you lost contact with when you walked away from me? Lenker’s songs always escalate in every verse, and this is how she closes the song:

Jamie’s in L.A.

Ali found a five-acre-farm

Max is gonna play

John got a clown on his arm

Lucky’s gonna flip (flip, flip)

Jerry’s gonna go for a dip (dip, dip)

Birds gotta fly (fly, fly, fly, fly away)

I’ll love you ‘til I die

Oh, what more can I possibly say?

So if you wanna go, I say, “Baby, okay (‘kay), okay”

I recently took an online songwriting class that Lenker taught and it inspired me to sign up for a songwriting class this fall at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Maybe my problem with self expression can be fixed by changing writing genres, perhaps the essay isn’t the best tool for me.

Lenker explained her writing process in the class, saying that every song for her is a combination of observation and confession. The interplay of those two styles leads to some interesting combinations — observations lead to metaphors, which illuminate confessions … while confession can produce projection, which colors the way we see the natural world and how we describe it.

Feelings have a way of seeping into everything whether we like it or not. Political polls are a great example — people tend to pay most attention to the polls that tell the narrative people want to believe, which accounts for why results are often shocking for the losing side of races. Polling averages tend to be much closer to final results, but they lack the drama we so desperately want to believe at times.

I fall prey to this as well when I check up on my analytics. If I see that one of my books has sold or a visitor drops by my website, I actually learn very little about who my writing attracts — but I learn quite a bit about who I want to be reading my work, because my mind immediately creates a story to explain the statistical blip.

A week and a half ago, I saw Adrianne Lenker’s band Big Thief at the Salt Shed in Chicago. Lenker and the band performed a song that she had just written the night before and it went over very well with the audience — which then inspired to share another song she had written the previous evening.

Except this second song was something completely unfamiliar to her bandmates, and Lenker admitted that it wasn’t finished, so she asked everyone not to film it. And halfway through the first verse, she told the band to drop off, and she restarted it solo.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Lenker went through a long period where she wrote many songs about a painful breakup. It led to some of her most beautiful, memorable songs. But it’s been a relief over the past year or so to see her move on — and have a little less emotion in songs written over that period.

This new song, however, was about this person dropping back into her life and perhaps asking if they could start again. Is this something Adrianne experienced or just imagined? The song is unfinished, so it’s hard to tell. But I can imagine her bandmates, already perhaps annoyed a bit to be performing this song they didn’t know, might be witnessing this ghost re-entering their lead singer’s life.

Dealing with loss and disappointment is extremely painful, but also fuel for creativity. And Adrianne was at the height of her creative powers throughout the show last week. Maybe she’s at a place where she has put this relationship in the past and can now write about it fictionally. Or maybe she’s experiencing a new chapter of it.

She and Montaigne had this in common, and maybe that’s what attracts me to both of them.