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The cover of How to Live

How to Live

Sarah Bakewell, 2010

Follow Montaigne’s unfinished experiment in living as he tests fear, friendship, skepticism, public duty, and mortality without turning experience into a final doctrine.

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8 parts, about 23 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Follow a sixteenth century essayist through twenty possible answers to how to live, framed as experiments rather than rules
  • See how a riding accident shifted the essayist away from rehearsing death, and how a restless retirement started the Essays
  • Learn how skepticism, moderation and bounded public service were tested against religious war, plague and cruelty

Who it is for

  • Readers asking how to live without final certainty
  • People who want philosophy drawn from ordinary days rather than systems
  • Readers approaching the Essays for the first time

What the summary covers

  1. An Experiment Made from a Life2 min
  2. When Death Redirected Attention3 min
  3. How a Fallible Judge Was Formed3 min
  4. Friendship and a Toolbox of Philosophies3 min
  5. Private Freedom Tested among Other People4 min
  6. Curiosity and Bounded Public Service3 min
  7. The Book Escapes Its Author3 min
  8. Let Life Remain the Answer2 min

Recommended by

  • Phillip LopateAuthor of The Art of the Personal Essay
    The affection of the author for her subject is palpable and infectious.
  • Nick HornbyWriter, in The Believer, November/December 2010

About the author

  • Sarah BakewellBritish author who received the Windham Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction
    • Born in Bournemouth, England; her parents ran a small hotel
    • Studied philosophy at the University of Essex
    • Worked as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library from the early 1990s
    • Left the library in 2002 to write full time

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