How to Stop Being Self-Obsessed

An author fails to escape solipsism. But we learn something anyway. Illustration by The Dispatch. (Photo via Jad Limcaco/Unsplash) Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. Modern writers are obsessed with themselves. Or so says Sean Thor Conroe, the author of The Walk Book, published earlier this summer by Little Engines Press. In a June Substack post, he wrote that the memoir “comes very much from this place. Of disgust with the ninniness, the clever righteousness, the insularity of the Institution and the Literary World.” A few sentences later, he described the kind of writing he’s trying to escape as “solipsistic.” Daniel Sipes is a Dispatch intern from Washington, D.C. He graduated in 2026 from the University of Chicago with degrees in economics and public policy and a minor in English and creative writing. His hobbies include weightlifting, reading, and continually writing and then throwing away the first 10 pages of the Great American Novel. More on Literature