You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it.

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.