The Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith

The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X. I was proudest of the essay that considered whether the poet John Milton—pace William Blake—was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” I did well on those standardized tests, but even passing was far from a foregone conclusion. I’d screwed up my mocks, the year before, smoking too much weed and studying rarely. Since then, I’d cleaned up my act—a bit—but was still overwhelmed by the task before me. My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really ? In the nineties, this was what we called “the meritocra