Reread Me:

Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person is the Only Self 

Emmy Newman

It’s easy to make people think you’re smart when you discuss complex, shadowy ideas, but it can be less obvious when you discuss Gossip Girl. In the opening of the essay “Party Lit,” Elisa Gabbert quotes a review of the book and the show that discusses the opulent aesthetic of wealth porn, glittering Blake Lively dripping with diamonds. As a tween, I would borrow seasons of Gossip Girl on DVD from the library and watch them on the family laptop computer, always trying to hide what I was watching because it felt too illicit, too dangerous to be watching these beautiful people make bad decisions. As an adult, I’ve watched the whole show repeatedly, deriving a comfort from knowing exactly where the plotlines are heading but always feeling shocked at how quickly we have arrived at the next trainwreck.

Gossip Girl pulled me through till the last essay of Any Person is the Only Self, “Same River, Same Man,” where Gabbert writes: “Memory is impoverished compared to experience—a good argument for rereading. But experience is richer than assumption or projection—a good argument for reading something new.” These are essays of choice and unchoice, constant re-reading and how revealing that act can be. Gossip Girl is nothing if not an attempt to rewrite history, to convince the viewer that this third act twist was planned all along. It is the grandest retcon I have ever seen. And it almost works—as I watch again and again, this story still feels like it holds infinite possibilities while following that same familiar route because I, the viewer, have continued to change.

I first encountered Gabbert’s work when my uncle sent me a copy of her early collection of essays The Word Pretty. It was a small book and when it arrived in the mail, I put off reading it for several weeks to preserve its small mystery. I loved that I had no idea who she was and neither did my uncle; he’d somehow felt it was a book I might like. It was a just because book, and I remain grateful for its introduction into my life. My uncle, who lives all the way across the country thought of me and just because. 

The first essay of Any Person is the Only Self, “On Recently Returned Books,” describes the joy of just because in selecting books with randomness (a rarity for any reader, whether it’s an algorithm or a friend or a publisher’s publicity department) and the clarity of that feeling made me cry in the end. How had I never thought about randomness before? How did I not know what it meant to me? The thing explain about Any Person is the Only Self is that this is not a collection of essays moving towards a goal or an idea. There is never a sense of imparting wisdom in Gabbert’s lines, even when many of them strike with force. 

These essays feel like being invited into a thought process that’s still unfolding, and when they end there is a distinct feeling this is not really the end. The essay has just stopped for moment to get a glass of water or to stare for a while out the window at the half-built building across the street and will return to us momentarily. That doesn’t mean these essays feel unfinished or forgetful, it is more like having a cliff yanked from underneath you as you walk to the edge. The ending just happens, and you are left with all this sudden air around you, breathing it in. 

My uncle, the one who sent me the book just because, emails the family every year at Rosh Hashanah to tell us what book he is reading for the high holidays that year in honor of my grandmother. My grandmother has been dead ten years but it is still easy to know what book she would like; any of the bright, lively frontlist books could still be her next favorite. This is how books keep our families alive. In “Proust and the Joy of Suffering,” Gabbert reminds the reader of “. . .Proust’s indifference to death, which is not the same as indifference to living. It is, rather, an apprehension of existence so luminous that the threat of death recedes into dim corners.” 

For much of my life, my uncle and I didn’t have much more to talk about than an average uncle and niece who see each other maybe once a year. Of course, I was always a reader, and I knew he was a reader. I think we only began sharing books once I started calling myself a writer—and then defining myself as one. I wish I could remember how we began to read together and apart. In the absolutely mind-boggling essay “Second Selves,” Gabbert writes about people who remember everything, painfully and always, and about writers who keep detailed journals like Susan Sontag in order to remember. Sontag writes about “the self you are alone,” and wondering if that is truer than the self with others. When I read alone, I feel innately myself, and I share that person with my uncle. There’s a clear point of connection; an aloneness together.  

It is a constant thrill to be invited to read with and to think with Gabbert. Whether she is writing on Leonora Carrington or Frankenstein or Point Break, we are welcomed into the process. Describing rereading The Catcher in the Rye after being taunted into reading it again as an adult, Gabbert writes “Part of the difference is that I can articulate now what I understood then more instinctively—which doesn’t make the later reading experience better.” She reminds us that living is not reading and how crucial it is these two acts can exist in separation. 

And yet, reading is also how I live. Working at a bookstore, I felt the eternal pull of the new. Backlist lurked over my shoulder but couldn’t quite compete with the shiny new galleys pouring in to the backroom, authors I remembered or remembered considering; stories that would certainly go fast, in order to get on to the next. And then everyone was always offering me a book, telling me about something new and good. I read more books that year than any other year of my life. I felt beyond lucky to be in a place with these people who love what I love. And yet, it was only after leaving that job I started to feel, again, the need for rereading. 

To remember the faulty, young, naïve reader I was and can still be—I missed that joy until Gabbert reminded me. She reminds me of how I felt reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the first time. In the essay, “On Jealousy,” Gabbert writes about seeing a critic publish a piece on Plath that expresses the ideas she herself was focusing on. To watch someone else have the same ideas you have is both infuriating and everyday. Reading Ariel I remember feeling like I finally knew what a book of poetry should be, so why should I try anything else? But Gabbert’s writing reminds me that there is no need for such things as permission, there is only how your mind wraps its arms around ideas, pulls them in. You write because you think, you think because you read. I’m not exactly proud of how many hours of my life I’ve spent watching Gossip Girl. But this is part of my own circular motion of rethinking, dipping my toes into the same river again and again. 

Looking back on my rewatching, it seems the only clear possibility for an ending, the ridiculous reveal that Dan was Gossip Girl. He is the writer. Or do I just see this now because it has been suggested to me as the obvious ending? “I don’t believe in free will, but I can’t help behaving as though I have it. In that sense, free will is automatic. It springs eternal,” Gabbert writes. The writer manipulates who gets to be real. “I must be changing all the time, but day to day, or year to year, the intervals are too small to notice. I’m not the same man, but I almost am.”

A few years ago, I met someone who had also watched Gossip Girl several times over. We did not have to discuss or critique the set-up, the impossibilities, the retcon, we knew we had some shared language. It endures, to read and reread, to watch and rewatch, even as we change, so someday we might make a friend and be reminded of who we were when we sat hunched over the laptop screen, and how we have changed. The self does not get left behind.