‘Someone lives in me’: how essayists enter our lives

When we read, we imagine an author who wrote what we are reading and we imagine what they are like. This essay describes how authorial personae are shaped, in particular those of essayists, by considering the work of Michel de Montaigne and Joan Didion in relation to their use (or lack) of friendliness and knowingness. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy, with particular reference to Toril Moi, along with philosopher Alexander Nehamas's conception of friendship, I explain the sense of quasi-conversational connection that readers can experience when reading Montaigne and Didion, and argue that applying a language of sociality to reading can reveal how our picture of an author influences our interpretation of their text.