Biographer Robert Massie wrote a wonderful piece last year in The New York Times about saying good-bye to his latest subject, Catherine the Great. After eight years of research and writing, the Russian queen had become Massie’s “friend.” The thought of leaving her and her world left him feeling bereft in a way peculiar to biographers.
Sure, other writers get immersed in their projects and feel weird and sad when their babies have to leave the nest and go out into the big world. But a biographer, I think, faces a unique challenge, a stranger sorrow.
Not only do we have to establish and document the verifiable facts about our subject’s life—it’s not fiction—but we have also to live that real life, get behind the eyes of that person who actually walked this earth.
It can be time travel with all the escapist allure of Owen Wilson’s forays with Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. But it can also be—should be—a daunting responsibility that can, often to the biographer’s surprise, make the ending of it all the harder.
A biographer worth the name has to assess and then judge the sum of another person’s life. No less. With humanity. And rigor. Sort of like God, only the person, if dead, has already gone to heaven or straight to hell.
Without that compassionate approach, there can be something predatory about biography. Parasitical. Feeding off the downside of another life to prop up your own.
Which means, for me at least, that when the time comes to say good-bye to the man or woman you’ve spent years getting to know, it’s important to feel that you’ve worked hard to be fair.
Your subject dies a second time, at your typing hands. While you sit at the laptop deathbed of this complicated, infuriating friend, it helps to believe – as it does with a real person — that you didn’t shirk the obligation to understand him or her as completely as possible.
Otherwise, the period of mourning described by Massie, already peculiar, risks becoming something more. The ghost of the biographer’s subject may come back to haunt, challenging the published book’s version of the real life, asking the biographer, with the plaintive tone of Scrooge’s Marley: Why didn’t you think harder? Why didn’t you feel deeper?
If that happens, you are stuck with your subjects until death do you both part.
MWF founding member Kate Buford is the author of two acclaimed biographies, The New York Times’ Notable Books Burt Lancaster: An American Life and Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe. You can learn more about her here and on her website, and follow her on Twitter @katebuford.
Book hyperlinks courtesy of Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, Virginia.
Intelligent and insightful post, Kate! Thanks for sharing~
I guess there is no room for sequels:-)
Best, Irene
As a nonfiction writer who has never taken on a full-scale biography, I’ve always feared that I’d be one of those writers (and I’ve met a few) who plunge in and never emerge. Always one more stone to turn over, one more lead to chase….
It makes me admire people like you who end up with an actual, hold-in-your-hand book!
Great post.
This is so lovely, Kate. I’d always understood the immersement part, the absorption/osmosis part, but hadn’t ever thought much about the grieving, the second death. And even after that, what about the protectiveness of both the book and its subject once they’re out in the world?
But as a collaborator/ghost writer, lemme give you the mixed-to-good news: the subject of your book is in fact dead. So (while somewhat likely to haunt your dreams and your conscience) highly unlikely to repeatedly text you in the middle of the night asking you–in all caps–(1) to “reply immediately” and (2) “are you completely INSANE?” So there’s that. LW
Kate, This is characteristically smart and insightful and eloquent and altogether terrific. It’s funny: been playing around with memoir again in a modest way, and it’s almost like saying goodbye to someone when you’re done, except it’s your own past self. (Life its own self, as Dan Jenkins once observed.) Weird; do you even know that person anymore? But this, that you’ve written, is such a valuable take on a writer’s perspective, and how different projects/assignments/books lead to different final (personal) takes on the matter. Your bios are perhaps so good because you care so much?
PS When we did the book at the day job on Osama bin Laden, didn’t much miss him when he was gone . . .
What a wonderful thread this is!
Thank you, all, for the generous, insightful comments. I feel a Marmaduke event coming on, where we discus all of this, both as fiction, non-fiction and memoir writers.