| The New Yorker’s first Personal History appeared on October 18, 1981. The piece was by Ved Mehta, who recounts contracting meningitis as a child, losing his sight, and being sent to a distant school for the blind, where his father hoped he would become independent. Mehta begins his story at the train station, the steam rising, his father heaving him through a compartment window. “You are a man now,” his father tells him. “This sentence,” Mehta writes, “was to become the beginning of my clear, conscious memory.” He was five years old. A personal history can take many forms, but a few qualities endure. There is the intimacy of the “I,” the texture of a particular point of view. And there is Mehta’s central theme: What is a self, and how is it born? Is it rooted in experience and memory, or can it grow from the gaps between them?  Photograph by Andrea Modica for The New Yorker In this week’s issue, personal history is treated as an idea, one with palpable stakes. In one piece, Rachel Aviv profiles the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who shared more than twenty-six years’ worth of her diaries that refer, constantly, to “a secret.” Possibly it’s that Oates feels no sense of self at all. “Does the individual exist?” she asks. Answers vary. Eren Orbey writes about his father’s murder—the defining event of his life, but one that he doesn’t remember, and that he struggles to make real. Zadie Smith recounts the pains of adolescence, and also the pains of falling out of a window; Leslie Jamison reflects on losing a friend to cancer, and then completing her unfinished novel, their voices merging on the page. There’s plenty more: Rachel Syme on Barbra Streisand’s thousand-page memoir; Thomas Mallon on nostalgia; Hilton Als on the artist Betye Saar. If there’s a through line, it’s that the self isn’t so much born as it is made—and then remade, again and again. Call it the “I” of the beholder. —Sharan Shetty, senior editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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