‘I don’t care about your life’, the title of poet and critic Jason Guriel’s 2016 article for The Walrus lamented the use of the first-person pronoun as a conspicuous ‘handy prop’. A ‘selfie stick’ aimed at the essayist, his account of the surge in ‘confessional criticism’ claimed that ‘relating works of art to one’s life […] is easy’ as ‘no reference library is required’. Citing writers such as Leslie Jamison and David Foster Wallace as ‘indecently self-interested’ and ‘who can’t seem to keep themselves out of their sentences’, his accusation calls for dutiful paid passage to boundaries between intellectual project and subjective experience, foregrounding the belief that the public ‘I’ can only ever be narcissistic and that ‘others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves’ (Joan Didion, 1968). Contesting Guriel’s position, and extending Michel Foucault’s ethos of critical and theoretical work as ‘always on the basis of elements of [his] own experience [and a] fragment of autobiography’ (1981), this paper examines private-made-public and critical memoir as rhetorical forms of art writing through which observation, inflected by affect, intimacy and the everyday, can be understood not only as a countercultural trend but a radical intervention in the means and production of art and its discourses. Focusing on writers including Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion and Leslie Jamison, the radically intimate is proposed as an ethics of attentive research, a discursive form of reference and practice of writing where the critical gaze includes and extends beyond oneself.