How to Live
A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sarah Bakewell · 2010 · Philosophy
12 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Sarah Bakewell reconstructs the life of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French nobleman who invented the essay, by organizing his ideas around a single stubborn question: how should a person live? Rather than offering doctrine, Bakewell shows how Montaigne answered through self-observation, skepticism, and tolerance, and traces how later centuries kept reinventing him to fit their own anxieties about certainty, selfhood, and death.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- Readers drawn to philosophy who want ideas delivered through a life rather than an argument - Anyone anxious about death, uncertainty, or self-doubt who wants historical company rather than advice - Students of literary history curious how the personal essay as a form came to exist
What’s inside
- 1A Question, Not an Answer1 min
Montaigne's genius lay in treating 'how to live' as a question to be lived through rather than solved, which makes his writing more durable than any systematic ethics.
- 2Make Yourself the Subject1 min
Writing about oneself in ordinary, unheroic detail can reveal more about being human generally than any collection of exemplary sayings or systematic doctrine.
- 3Doubt as a Way of Living1 min
Radical skepticism, far from paralyzing a person, can free them to act with more flexibility and less cruelty than those who are certain.
- 4Grief and the Limits of Consolation1 min
Some losses cannot be reasoned away, and Montaigne's honesty about unhealed grief is itself a form of wisdom that Stoic philosophy denied him.
- 5Little Tricks Against Fear and Pain1 min
Practical, almost improvised tactics for managing anxiety and pain served Montaigne better than any grand philosophical doctrine of preparation.
- 6Live Sociably, Tolerate Difference1 min
Moderation and a refusal of fanatical certainty, not superior conviction, were what let Montaigne survive an age of religious massacre with his conscience largely intact.
- 7Keep a Room of Your Own1 min
Periodic withdrawal from public duty into private reflection is not selfish escapism but a necessary condition for the clear judgment that public life later requires.
- 8The Essays' Long Afterlife1 min
Each era has remade Montaigne in its own image, which shows less that he was inconsistent than that his open, unfinished form invites endless and legitimate reinterpretation.
About Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell is a British writer and former antiquarian book cataloguer turned biographer. She has written on figures including Montaigne and the existentialists, and taught creative writing. How to Live won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize, establishing her as a leading popularizer of intellectual history.
