Might it not strike us as curious, given the defining role of indefiniteness in our thinking about the essay, that we so often encounter the idea that it is a form of nonfiction? ‘[T]he essay belongs, obviously, in the category of nonfiction’, avers G. Douglas Atkins, ‘and from it we expect, certainly, honesty as well as candor and fidelity to historical and biographical truth, in addition to accuracy of representation’.Considering the indefiniteness abovementioned, there are no doubt many scholars of the essay who would pause before such an emphatic statement of expectation. In an essay published in the New York Times, Christy Wampole writes:

Similar admissions abound in the critical literature. But even Wampole describes the essay as ‘nonfiction prose’.In his introduction to Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace – while acknowledging ‘all the noodling and complication involved in actually trying to define the term “essay”’ – declares a preference for the term ‘literary nonfiction’, implying a significant degree of overlap, if not outright interchangeability.Robert Atwan, though conceding that essays ‘emerge from the same creative urgency as do short stories and poems’, clearly labels them ‘nonfiction’.That it is nonfiction might be the second-most agreed upon of our certitudes about the essay – right after the fact that we do not really have any.

In the following pages, with the hope of deepening our sense of the essay’s categorial ambiguity, I want to lend my voice to recent efforts to problematize this idea. Indeed, I want to invite the reader to consider whether the assumptions implicit in the term ‘nonfiction’ undermine the indeterminacy we often note – and sometimes claim to prize – in the essay as a mode of writing, reading and thinking. This will involve arguing that the kind of thinking the essay embodies or experience it evokes is, as Claire de Obaldia phrases it, ‘closer, in a sense, to the “as if” of fiction’.