The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Elisa Gabbert

“Edges,” writes Elisa Gabbert, “are where meaning gathers.” It’s a line I find irreducible, definitive, bumper sticker-worthy. We follow our ideas to one brink or another, and then we test their boundaries. Sometimes, greater understanding escapes us, slips from our fingers and falls into the chasm. Other times, if we’re lucky, we discover that some boundaries are far less certain than we had thought. The edges recede, and so we pursue them further. If we’re really lucky, then we might encounter a writer like Gabbert, whose pursuits deepen our own.

Gabbert’s essays explore the edges of the body and the mind, the self and the world that contains it. In “Sleep No More,” she recounts a pair of surgical procedures, a personal story that touches off a surprising study of anesthesia, the limits of consciousness, insomnia, and how we understand suffering. In “Second Selves,” she considers the journal and a few of its practitioners—from Plath and Woolf to those individuals with highly superior autobiographical memories—to challenge the limits of selfhood. “A journal is an effigy of the self, or else is the self, the self that exists because we create it,” she writes. “I am no longer sure, for the record, what people mean when they say that the self is illusory. Isn’t it here? Here where I sit, and in what I am writing?” (Versions of the question surface in her poetry, too: “Who am I,” she asks in Normal Distance, a recent collection, “when I sleep so deeply I wake up thinking of my childhood bed?”)

In a craft essay for The Georgia Review, Gabbert calls writing a “subtly coercive act,” noting, “I want a reader to arrive at my thought and feel close to the way I felt when I thought it.” She resists trivialization, preserves complexity, respects that which will not resolve. “Magnificent Desolation,” her 2016 essay, moves between simulated sinkings of the Titanic, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the Challenger explosion—disasters whose images many of us have carried for most of our lives, whose horrors, for many, are inextricable from a sense of awe. “It is terrifying how quickly an ordered structure dissolves,” Gabbert writes. “Buildings, like anything, are mostly empty space.” Like anything. It’s a thrill to be so subtly coerced.

Gabbert is the author of seven books, including the essay collections Any Person Is the Only Self and The Unreality of Memory, and wrote the “On Poetry” column for The New York Times Book Review. (She also writes very good parenthetical asides, as you’ll see for yourself.) She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her current book project is “an investigation into holes of all kinds,” including “architectural, bodily, ecological, and existential.” Meet her at the edge; see what you find out together.

— Brendan Fitzgerald

Where did you grow up?

El Paso, Texas, where I lived until I moved to Houston for college.

What places feel like home?

Desert and mountains feel like home—the Southwest broadly, sun and dry air.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

Philosophy, poetry, novels, my husband, and sharing my husband’s library.

What is your favorite time of day?

I love mornings, evenings, and nighttime. Times of changing light, times of ritual. I hate mid-afternoons—too static. And I don’t really like to stay up after midnight anymore—alas.

What are you really good at?

Mostly, writing, but otherwise: Word games. Making a meal from whatever’s at hand. Knowing what size container the leftovers will fit in. Identifying smells. Prioritization.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

I can think of a lot of great gifts. My husband gives extravagant and very thoughtful gifts. My mom sometimes finds lost treasures from my childhood and gives them back to me—a scratch-and-sniff picture book based on The Secret of NIMH, for one. Someone once sent me a model of the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared into the ocean. But the best gift? What a terrifying question. My college education? If anyone ever gives me a human skull, that will be it.

Describe your favorite meal.

I’m deeply noncommittal about favorites of any kind, but my favorite cuisines are Mexican, New Mexican, Tex-Mex. My comfort meal is chilaquiles. But if I’m celebrating I like sushi and champagne.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

Only sounds close to silence, if I really want to concentrate on reading or writing—nearly subconscious sounds like crickets, rain, or faraway music are nicer than actual silence. If I need to be occupied with something kind of boring, music or podcasts.

Where do you do your best thinking?

I do my best thinking over time, so there is no one place. When there’s something I really want to think about, I think about it all through the day and in the middle of the night, between and during other tasks, like music in the montage of my regular life.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

Getting through a period of great self-doubt and accepting there will always be doubt. I once heard a woman who’s a little bit older than me tell a man who’s a little bit younger, Things will always get better—and then, when they’re good, they’ll always get worse. I really understand that now.

Where do you like to read?

In winter, on the couch, under a blanket, ideally with candles burning. In summer, any comfortable chair near a window. No overhead lighting, that’s important. Like Christopher Alexander said, people need “window places” and “pools of light.”

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

A whole nexus of cosmology and physics stuff, and the nature of infinity. (Does it actually exist in the world? Reasonable people disagree!)

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

I’ve been enjoying Quanta, for math and science stuff. Harper’s is still doing good, weird features, like that deep dive on “gooning.” (My god.) For years I’ve loved reading Wikipedia as though it’s a publication. Can I do podcast recs? I like Overthink and Why Theory.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

Can I say “On Escape,” an early essay (1935) by Emmanuel Levinas? It’s about how we’re just so sick of ourselves, sick of being “riveted” to one self that the human condition is defined by our wish to get out of being, which is not the same as death: the “quest for the way out” is “in no sense a nostalgia for death, because death is not a exit.”

What was the last book you read?

Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt is the last nonfiction book I finished. I’m currently reading the novel Fifth Business by Robertson Davies.

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

The most widely beloved thing I’ve written is my “Close Read” on Auden and Breughel, and I am very proud of it, but it’s such an interactive experience I can’t really claim full credit. If I had to pick one piece, I’d say “The Great Mortality” from The Unreality of Memory, an essay about plagues and pandemics that I wrote a few years before COVID-19. I just think I did what I set out to do, and a little extra; I like the whole thing.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Taking a walk, looking at art, reading a classic—looking away from the problem and letting in randomness.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

This isn’t really something I do. Writers do inspire me, but not on demand, not when I turn to them for it.

What words do you overuse?

Little qualifying/hedging words and adverbs like “somewhat” and “partly” and “vaguely.” Often it’s the only way to be precise, to say what I really mean (when what I mean is vague).

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

’80s movies I’ve already seen 50 times, sour gummy candy.

What superpower would you like to have?

Greater physical resilience, in short, youth.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

Foxes, but I don’t know why.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

If it’s morning I’m probably reading. Midday, I try to take a walk if the weather’s good. But sometimes I just want to “waste it”—I want to fuck around on the internet a little, act like time’s abundant—like Robert Redford betting found money in The Sting. An hour isn’t quite enough to do something useful, but wasting it makes it feel longer.

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

When is it being opened?! Who gets to open it?!

What does your writing space look like?

I have a cheap, shitty desk that was a nightmare to build (someday I’ll upgrade) in the office I share with my husband, which we painted a rich deep green color. Our desks are in the middle of the room, facing each other, and there are bookshelves all over the walls. There are windows that look out toward a diner across the street. That said, it’s just a desk. I don’t fetishize my “writing space” per se, and I do my day job in here too. I can move my laptop anywhere quiet and private and minimally cluttered and write.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG, 2024). Her other books include Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, and The Word Pretty. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.