How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
by Sarah Bakewell
Why You'll Love This
A 16th-century French nobleman who wrote about his dog's twitching ears somehow turns out to have figured out how to live better than almost anyone since.
- Great if you want: philosophy that feels personal, not academic or remote
- The experience: warm and unhurried — like a long conversation with a brilliant friend
- The writing: Bakewell weaves biography and ideas together with uncommon elegance and wit
- Skip if: you want a straightforward biography with strict chronology
About This Book
Michel de Montaigne spent decades asking himself one deceptively simple question: how should a person live? Not in the abstract, philosophical sense, but urgently, practically—how do you handle grief, navigate friendship, face your own mortality, and still manage to enjoy a good meal? Sarah Bakewell takes that question seriously and uses Montaigne's life, his obsessions, and his rambling, revolutionary essays as a lens for examining what it actually means to be human. The result is biography, philosophy, and personal inquiry braided together—an exploration of a sixteenth-century French nobleman who somehow feels like someone you might know.
What makes this book genuinely surprising is how Bakewell structures it: twenty answers to that central question, each one unlocking a different facet of Montaigne and a different era of his life. Her prose is warm and conversational without ever being slack, and she wears her considerable scholarship lightly. She makes Montaigne's world feel immediate rather than distant, and she's unafraid to follow his thinking into strange, funny, or uncomfortable corners. Readers who come for biography often find themselves, somewhere along the way, also reconsidering their own lives.