ON THE IMPERSONAL ESSAY

Thinking in six parts.

- 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 meritocracy.” As a system of evaluation, it favored the bold and the brash, laid waste to the rest, and was irrelevant to the rich, whose schools drilled essay technique into the student body from Day One. In a school like mine, exams came as a surprise. Up to that point, we'd basically thought of school as a social event, a sort of mixer for a diverse group of teenagers, many of whom had only recently arrived in the country—like a mini U.N., but with easier access to psychedelics. Almost half the school was felled at the first hurdle, leaving after G.C.S.E.s, aged just sixteen. (For G.C.S.E.s, you usually studied about nine subjects; for A-levels, only three.) Those of us who survived struggled on, trying to jump through meritocracy’s narrowing hoops. If you couldn't do maths and had trouble with the hard sciences, each hoop came with an essay topic attached. (I did English, History, and Theatre Studies.) The stakes were presented as not just high but existential. You had to produce a thousand effective words on the rise of the Chartists—or else! What did “else” mean? Never earning more than minimum wage, never getting out of your mum’s flat, never “making something of yourself.” My anxiety