Parting Words

For biographers, leaving subjects behind is hard.

From a story in the New York Times...

When Brenda Wineapple closed her laptop on “Sister Brother,” her dual biography of the siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, she cried. Stacy Schiff, having written the final words of “Cleopatra,” was still worried. “I lived a little bit in fear of her,” she explains. When Doris Kearns Goodwin finished “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” she built more shelves in her library annex (once the family garage) to hold all the books she had acquired.

Each of these distinguished, prizewinning, best-selling biographers was saying goodbye to a subject with whom she had been living for a long time. For authors of biographies, this intimacy is normal, almost inevitable. Setting out to describe a figure from the past, an author has to reach beyond names, places and dates and try to bring a human being back to life. The author does this by becoming an invisible daily witness, standing at the subject’s elbow, listening to the subject’s conversations, observing smiles and frowns, then using the advantage of hindsight to judge harshly when disapproving, indulgently when understanding. As the months and years pass, it often happens — unless the subject is Hitler or Stalin — that the subject becomes a friend.