I was reading an article the other day about the difficulty getting biographies right. It is rare that anyone does. There are over 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. As a kid I read every book about him that was available in my branch of the Akron, Ohio Public Library. Even those elementary level books didn’t agree amongst themselves. Did the Lincoln’s really have a three-sided cabin, and if so, for how long?

It took me years but I finally slogged through Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. Lin Manuel Miranda not only made his way through it, he wrote a musical about it. That’s biographical dedication. Not sure the musical or the biography have done as much for the nation as Miranda and Chernow would have liked.

While children’s books, young adult books, and novels get shorter and shorter, biographies keep getting longer. Chernow’s new book about Mark Twain is over1200 pages and if the reviews are right, they give us all the sordid details of his life and none of the fun stuff.

In the musical, Hamilton, the final song is Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. The anthropologist and philosopher René Girard reminded us that it is the victors who get to tell the story. They are the ones who create the “truth” of their generation. Doesn’t sound very objective.

I respect Chernow’s effort to get it right, or Jon Meacham’s, or any of the other respected biographers. Objectivity, however, is an illusion. If it is a subject perceiving the information, then it is no longer objective, no matter how hard the author tries to make it so. I suppose the best we can hope for is a biographer who has done his or her best to get out of their own way as much as possible.

Autobiographies don’t get it right any more than biographies do. I know a little something about that. My autobiography, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned, was published by Simon & Schuster four years ago this month.

I tried to be as honest and truthful as I knew how to be. Yet today, just four years later, I wonder why I chose to include some stories and not others. And of course, all of the stories are told from my perspective. As I did with my TED Talks, I verified the information in the book. The fact checkers at Simon & Schuster did their part as well. But still, someone with another perspective would tell a different story.

Do any of us really know who we are? If we sat down for an interview with a biographer on a Monday, would we give the same answers we would have given the previous Friday? I mean, the weekend intervened between the two interviews. Who knows what insights we might have gained during that weekend? I am constantly changing, growing, unfolding into the next iteration of me. Unless I choose to stop growing, that process will never end.

James Hollis says dogma represents the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is afterthought, and afterthought turns into dogma.

Our experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. Rilke said something similar, “We are not much at home in the world we have created.”

We have lost the great metanarratives that grounded previous generations. In postmodern life the only metanarrative allowed is the one that says there can be no metanarratives, no big stories that explain the meaning of life.

The old myths are being crowded out in our postmodern age, but we need them to thrive. As a species, we impose order on chaos to bring meaning to life. Whether it’s Oedipus, Odysseus, or Beowulf, these stories all have patterns that are consistent throughout history. Jung called them archetypes. The same is true of the great religions. The Hero’s Journey is one such archetype. These patterns (archetypes) come to us through what Jung called the collective unconscious. We form these stories because, as Pascal said in Pensées, “The silence of these empty spaces frightens me.” We desperately want to make sense of our lives. That is ubiquitous to the human experience. Whether hero, accomplice, or acolyte, we want to place ourselves in a grand story.

That’s why biographies and even autobiographies always get it wrong, because making sense of one’s life is a shifting target in an ongoing story. You can’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. Even the Lone Ranger can’t do it. You can peel off layers, but the real you is not at some inner core. It’s being created as you peel off the layers.

I have a hard time reading my own autobiography without wanting to edit it. Interestingly, I can listen to it without a similar compulsion. I think that’s because my voice held all the things for which my left brain could not find words. Listen to the book, you’ll see what I mean.

I was fortunate to have an excellent sound engineer. I recorded the audiobook during the pandemic, and because he lived nearby, Simon & Schuster assigned me their top engineer. Steve used to be a rock and roll engineer who worked on Pet Sounds and Graceland, two of the most iconic albums in rock history. He knew how to get me beneath my ego and into my soul.

We finished the recording in three and a half days. It just about wrecked me. It was early April and before we recorded I had to turn the heating system off so there was utter silence in my study. After a while it’d get too cold and I’d take a break and turn the heat back on. The night after I finished I slept for ten hours. It wasn’t the temperature variations that got to me, it was the emotional yoyo I went through reliving the stories as I read them aloud. If you decide to read my book, and I hope you do, I’d suggest the audio version. It gets closer to the silence of the empty spaces.

I have another book with my agent right now. The working title is When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, Receptive Spirit, and Curious Soul. The book will explore how to live when a culture has decided you are its enemy. So yes, it will also be autobiographical, and even finishing the proposal is hard interior work.

The more deeply you live into it, the easier life becomes. Yeah, that’s not true, not true at all. I was messing with ya. Life is hard. Frederick Buechner said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”