Every Writer I Fall For Is An INTP And I’m Starting To Think That’s A Warning

Paula (my most-together friend; I may have mentioned her) let me talk for forty-five minutes about a dead writer I’d been emotionally involved with for six weeks, and then said, “you know she was an INTP, right? Every writer you fall in love with is an INTP. It’s a pattern. It’s not even subtle anymore. We should probably talk about this.”

That was a month ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and I regret to inform you that she’s correct. Every time I disappear into a book for three weeks and come out glassy-eyed and temporarily worse at my actual job, the writer turns out to be (or gets typed online as) an INTP. Borges, Lispector, Sebald, Calvino, Maggie Nelson. Dickinson. That can’t be taste anymore. That’s a homing signal. My bookshelf has apparently installed a filter at some level below conscious choice, and the filter only lets through one personality type, and I didn’t design it, and I’m not sure I approve.

For the people who did not spend eighth grade hiding from gym class by taking free online MBTI quizzes: INTP is the introverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving type. The cognitive-function version goes dominant Introverted Thinking, auxiliary Extraverted Intuition, tertiary Introverted Sensing, inferior Extraverted Feeling. Translated out of the podcast-speak: a brain that runs a private truth-testing loop at all hours, gets ecstatic about connections nobody asked for, keeps a frankly unreasonable archive of specific memories (a room, a phrase, the weight of a book), and is genuinely terrible at feeling its own emotions in real time, which usually means those emotions arrive late, sideways, and routed through somebody else’s mood.

That is a writer’s brain. Not the writer’s brain, because there are magnificent writers of every type, including a suspicious number of ENFJs I will not discuss today because I am currently in an argument with one. But INTPs are concentrated in the corners of literature I keep ending up in at 2am, and the INTP writer has a specific shape, a specific texture, and a specific way of imploding. Here, in the order I fell for them, are thirteen.

1. Jorge Luis Borges. The patron saint. Every INTP who has ever lost four hours to a Wikipedia wormhole is downstream of this man.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

That is the opening line of “The Library of Babel,” written in 1941, and it is the sentence that made me understand at seventeen that fiction could be a philosophical instrument rather than a story-delivery system. Borges spent his last decades almost completely blind, running the Argentine National Library by memory and writing from internal reference because his external sight was gone. That is an INTP thing; Ti can run the whole cognitive loop without new input if the archive is rich enough. He never won the Nobel (criminally), but the modernist novel, the short story, the short essay, and basically all of metafiction owe him rent. I read “The Garden of Forking Paths” on a flight once and arrived in a different country emotionally as well as geographically.

2. Clarice Lispector. Brazilian, born in Ukraine, 1920. Her family fled the pogroms when she was an infant; she grew up in Recife and later Rio, and her books are, without exception, sustained investigations of what it is to be a consciousness stuck inside a body.

I am going to have a revelation. I feel myself running, I feel myself running out of time. The revelation that is about to occur is inside me, and it only depends on me.

That is from The Passion According to G.H., a 1964 novel in which a wealthy woman enters her maid’s empty room, finds a cockroach, crushes it, and then spends two hundred pages dismantling her own identity as a result. I’ve read it three times. Each time I have to sit very still afterwards. Lispector routes all feeling through the intellect on the way to the page, which produces a strange cold fire on the surface that readers often mistake for detachment. It isn’t detachment. It is the specific shape feeling takes when it has to pass through the Ti loop first, and by the time it lands it has been translated into something stranger than raw feeling. She is the most INTP writer ever to live. I don’t make the rules; I just read them.

3. Fernando Pessoa. Portuguese poet, died in Lisbon in 1935 at age 47, left a trunk behind containing over 25,000 unpublished pages. Here is the part that is almost unbelievable: he didn’t just write as himself. He invented heteronyms, separate authorial personalities with their own biographies, birthdates, stylistic tics, and philosophies. Álvaro de Campos was a bisexual naval engineer with a futurist streak. Ricardo Reis was a classicist doctor living in exile in Brazil. Alberto Caeiro was a pastoral shepherd-philosopher. Bernardo Soares, the one I love most, was a junior bookkeeper in a Lisbon office who wrote The Book of Disquiet in fragments over decades. From Soares:

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

INTPs don’t have one self; we have a parliament of selves, each running a slightly different experiment. Pessoa just externalized the parliament and gave everybody a byline. He is the reason I once drafted an entire client pitch under a fake name to see if my own advice would land differently coming from somebody I invented. (It did. Upsetting.)

4. Franz Kafka. Named my betta fish after him, as previously disclosed. Kafka worked at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague; he asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts when he died in 1924; Brod ignored this, which is the only reason any of us have ever said the word Kafkaesque.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

The INTP signature in Kafka is that the horror in his work is procedural, not supernatural. Not monsters. Not ghosts. Forms. Bureaucracies. Misfiled paperwork. The department you’ve been transferred to that nobody can name. Most people’s nightmares are about being chased. Kafka’s nightmares are about being processed. That is the INTP shadow made visible; what happens when Ti runs unchecked and starts to treat even dread as a system to diagram. I reread The Trial every time I have to deal with the DMV.

5. David Foster Wallace. Typed himself, more or less. Wrote Infinite Jest in the 90s, which is an INTP brain on paper with footnotes so aggressive the footnotes have footnotes. Taught at Pomona. Died in 2008.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

That is from the story “Good Old Neon,” and it is the best one-sentence description of the INTP inner experience ever written by anyone, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. Wallace’s work is what happens when Ti runs unchecked for a lifetime and Fe cannot metabolize the resulting emotional load. I don’t bring up the way he died to mine it for content; I bring it up because the INTP-to-crisis-of-meaning pipeline is a real thing, and if you are that kind of brain you should know. His unfinished novel The Pale King is about tax auditors and attention, and it is as close as American fiction has ever gotten to writing the inside of an INTP head.

6. W.G. Sebald. German novelist who emigrated to England, taught at the University of East Anglia, died in a car accident in 2001 at 57.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

That line is from Austerlitz. His other masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, is ostensibly a walking tour of coastal East Anglia that is also, somehow, a meditation on silkworms, British colonial herring fishing, the writer Joseph Conrad, and the firebombing of Hamburg. It shouldn’t work. It works because Sebald trusts the associative jump the way other novelists trust their outline. He is the single biggest reason I can’t write linear pieces anymore, which as a working content writer is genuinely professionally inconvenient, and also the reason the thing I do write is occasionally strange enough to be memorable.

7. Italo Calvino. Italian, died in 1985 before he could deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard; the notes were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and they are my secret creative bible. The six memos are: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency. I re-read the list every time I’m stuck on a project. From Invisible Cities:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

That is the only prescription for creative survival I actually trust. It is also what I whisper at my monitor when a client sends an unreasonable edit.

8. Emily Dickinson. Lived almost her entire life in the family house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Wrote approximately 1,800 poems and published fewer than a dozen during her lifetime. Hand-stitched most of them into little booklets called fascicles and stored them in a drawer where her sister Lavinia found them after her death.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise…

Dickinson is INTP on two axes at once. First, the poems themselves are hyper-compressed logic puzzles dressed up as lyric. Second, the entire archive-in-a-drawer move is a classic INTP behavior: the obsessive private categorization, the refusal to publish because publishing means having Fe feelings about strangers reading your interior, the preference for keeping a parallel world neatly filed at the foot of the bed rather than showing it to anyone. I think about Dickinson every time I feel the urge to delete everything I’ve ever posted and put it in a Google Doc titled “for later.”

9. H.P. Lovecraft. Important disclaimer before I say anything else: Lovecraft was an appalling racist, including in his letters, and the man’s actual politics were worse than most of his fans want to admit. I am not here to rehabilitate him. I am here to note, honestly, that he is also one of the most completely INTP writers to ever publish, and that the cosmic-indifference framework he built is a perfect externalization of the INTP philosophical instinct.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

That’s the opening line of “The Call of Cthulhu,” and it is basically the INTP credo. An INTP can, given enough time, correlate all of it, and the result is usually not a peaceful person. Lovecraft’s horror wasn’t about monsters; it was about what happens when the frame of the universe is too vast for any human meaning system to hold. That is a philosophical nightmare, and a specifically INTP one. You can love the cosmology and refuse the bigotry. I do.

10. Simone Weil. French philosopher, mystic, factory worker, Resistance sympathizer, died in 1943 at 34 after essentially starving herself in solidarity with occupied France. She wrote, in an essay that I re-read more often than I care to admit:

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

That is an entire spiritual life in one sentence, and it is the most INTP sentence anyone has ever assembled. Weil treated attention itself as a moral act, attention-as-prayer, attention-as-ethic, which is what INTPs secretly believe but usually don’t say out loud. Her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies” argues that paying attention to a math problem is a form of devotion. I believe this and I cry about it when my Apple Screen Time report comes in on Sundays.

11. Maggie Nelson. Still alive. Thank god. Poet and critic, teaches at USC, wrote the book I hand to people who claim they don’t read poetry, which is Bluets.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession…

Bluets is a 240-numbered-fragment meditation on the color blue, and her Paris Review interview about how she wrote it is basically a map of the INTP writing brain. Long periods of what looks externally like nothing. A sudden network of connections. A stubborn refusal to call the network a “theme” because themes are something editors impose afterward. Her later book The Argonauts does something similar with queer family, gender, Wittgenstein, and the poet Dana Ward. I reread Bluets every January. I don’t examine why.

12. Umberto Eco. Italian, died in 2016. Semiotician, medieval scholar, political columnist, and a novelist he became in his late forties, which is a deeply reassuring professional timeline. From Foucault’s Pendulum:

When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

The Name of the Rose (1980) is an INTP fanfic about medieval libraries and theological heresy that also happens to be a murder mystery. Eco wrote the novel partly because, he said, he “wanted to poison a monk.” This is the most INTP origin story a book has ever had. The relief of reading Eco is that the intelligence in the work is unembarrassed. He is not performing modesty about how much he knows. He trusts the reader to keep up. That kind of confidence is increasingly rare, and I miss it every time I open a bestseller list.

13. Samuel Beckett. Irish, lived in Paris, fought in the French Resistance, died in 1989. The credo line everybody quotes, correctly:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

That’s from a late novella, Worstward Ho. It is the sentence I have written on a Post-It above my drafting table, and it is the one piece of advice I will never not take. Beckett’s work (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the Trilogy) is what happens when you take Ti to its logical endpoint and find waiting, which is not nothing, because waiting produces a very specific kind of attention, which is a form of life, and if you look long enough at Beckett’s plays you realize nothing is happening and everything is happening, depending on the axis. The INTP loves Beckett because he is the patron of our exact emotional problem; how to keep caring while also observing that caring may not change anything. I re-read Endgame when I need to stop feeling sorry for myself. It works every time.

So that is the list. Here are the patterns I can’t stop noticing.

INTP writers tend to be drawn toward systems rather than characters. Not because they don’t care about people; character emerges for them as an output of system rather than as an input. That’s why Borges’s people feel like geometry and Lispector’s people feel like weather. It’s why Kafka can write a cockroach and break your heart with it. The character was never the point; the character was the result.

They have high tolerance for unresolved endings, which makes them about 80% incompatible with commercial publishing. They are obsessed with taxonomy: lists, categories, orderings, classification schemes, the act of putting a thing in its proper place as a creative end in itself. Dickinson’s fascicles, Pessoa’s heteronyms, Calvino’s memos, Sebald’s catalogues of ruins; these are all INTPs privately ordering their interior. Many of them wrote under pen names or invented authorial alternates, because one identity was never sufficient for what they were trying to do.

And here is the warning I put in the title, which I do not say lightly. A lot of the writers on this list had catastrophic Fe failures. A lot died young, or died slow, or spent their last decade in some version of a meaning crisis. Weil starved. Wallace and Lovecraft died despairing. Pessoa drank. Kafka refused to publish while alive. Beckett wrote plays in which the most reasonable thing a character could do was stop. The INTP brain does not self-regulate Fe; the work is often the outlet, and when the work stops working, the backup plan tends to be not having one. This is not me psychoanalyzing the dead. This is me, an INTP-ish woman currently working on my laptop in Austin with a cat on one foot and a dying plant on the other, telling you that “my favorite writers” and “people whose lives I would actually want” have a disturbing amount of overlap, and also almost none.

If you are an INTP trying to write: let yourself be as strange as these thirteen. The temptation is to sand yourself down into something marketable, Reels-ready, platform-optimized. Don’t. The entire list above is the argument for staying weird. None of them got paid on time. All of them got read forever.

That’s a deal still on the table. I keep thinking about it. I keep not quite deciding.