Two-and-a-half years ago, the fiction writer Chris Dennis published an evocative personal essay in The Paris Review. It’s about his struggle with addiction, but it’s also about the nature of addiction and recovery more broadly. Finally, it’s also a portrait of a specific place—Eldorado, Illinois—which, in the author’s rendering, appears to epitomize something essential about what makes America’s struggle with addiction and hopelessness so harrowing.
Agree 100%. Personal essays are a vehicle for reflecting on the wider world, they aren't really about the narrator.