Memoirs and Biographies We Love discussion

I like both, just depends on how well the book is written.

It seems to me one difference is that in a biography, you get sort of an "outer view" of the person, and with an autobiography, you get more of an "inner view" -- a look inside the person's mind and a feeling for what they experienced.

I like both.

Sometimes there's no real distinction - the author appears to see themselves, to all intents and purposes, in the third person and to create a fantasy world, taking full advantage of hindsight, that could hardly withstand investigation by an objective outsider - no names!

I like both, but it is important to keep in mind which you are reading when you form your opinion about the person. I have come cross autobiographies where the author has presented his story very favorably, only later to learn that others have criticized its validity. My response to this is: but don't we all see things from differrent angles?! It can be fun to read both the autobiography and a biography. I like to get inside the person, to try and understand the principles that dictated the person's decisions. I want to know what he felt, why he did what he did, for example. Sometimes historical fiction does this well too. Yes, it can be based on supposition, but if the author has a clear author's note, the reader can judge if they agree with the author's suppositions. Smetimes there is not information existing to tell us what went on in the person's head - then historical fiction can be great.

The basic point for me is to get inside the head of the person. Know his preferences, dislikes, motivations and idiosyncracies. I do not want dry facts stating where he was born, educated, married, died....... Yes I want that too, but more!

Often I prefer memoirs since they focus on the most important parts of a person's life. I hate those biographies about celebrities. I want to learn about the person and his culture.

Dutch, I dito your last paragraph! Nowadays everyone thinks their life is worth writing a book about. Books on people of times's past teach not only about their experiences but also the culture they lived in.

If I really want to put the time and effort in to getting to "know" someone, first I read a few of the most current, authoratative biograghies of that person, then an autobiography if it's available, then biographies and autobiographies of the people from thier lives, like reading a biography of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister, as a way of getting another viewpoint on Virginia Woolf.

Since each biographer has to pick and choose what to put in and what to leave out, it really helps to read a few, and then after you've done that, then when you're reading writing by people who knew the person, you know what the relationship was before you pick up the book by the son, daughter, wife, friend, etc.

I think every life is worth writing a book about, if the book was well written and delved into the person's soul and inner life, their suffering, their triumphs, their loves and losses. I really believe that.

Me too! That's why I love memoirs, I feel like I'm inside the person's head and heart.

I think the same as both of you, Lesliue and Dutch. It is silly to repeat what you guys have so well expressed. Dito!

Leslie, Dutch, and everyone else: I completely agree with Leslie that every life is worth writing about, if the materials (memory, interviews, paper trail, etc.) are there and the writer can tell the story well.

I'm fascinated by the discussion all of you have been having because I'm a biographer who's always thinking about how to get inside the head and heart of a non-famous subject and still write nonfiction. I feel strongly that it's important to bring the reader close to the subject, because that allows me to humanize history. At the same time, I feel just as strongly that anybody who writes nonfiction—including memoirists—shouldn't be making things up (scenes, dialogue, thoughts, etc.).

Some time ago, I co-authored a book that was a conscious experiment in writing a life that richly deserved telling but which, for many reasons, had to be written as a kind of pseudo-memoir. The subject was an Iranian woman who brought social work to Iran; the book was both her memoir and my account of the modern history of Iran through her eyes and experience. I wrote our book in the first person, from a 2,000 page transcript of four years of interviews and my own research into the modern history of Iran. To make sure of its authenticity, I insisted that she read and approve everything I wrote as we went along, and if what I wrote didn't reflect her opinion or experiences, I went back and rewrote it. The choice of what to write or what to select from our interviews and my research, however, was up to me.

I believe that in something calling itself nonfiction, including biography (and memoir!), the reader has an absolute right to be able to trust that the writer is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability. When our book was published, many reviewers, including experts, mentioned its accuracy and authenticity. Yet I've never been quite sure about the results of the "experiment" I undertook. If you know the history behind it, the book is hard to classify. Yet it could only have been done--or at least published--as I did it. In order to tell Western readers about a life that surely deserved telling, and bring them a piece of history I believed needed to be told, especially for Americans, was I justified in writing a memoir that wasn't exactly what it appeared to be? I honestly don't know the answer to that question.

There's a debate going on right now among biographers in the US and elsewhere about what direction biography "should" take. Now that anyone can get information from Wikipedia, what's the value of writing biography? I'd like to know what any of you think. What do *readers* want from biographers—that is, what do *you* personally look for in biography, and why do you read it? For history? "Mind and heart?" Both? Should biographers go on writing long books about well-known figures, or should they experiment with ways to write about unknown ones (or new ways to write about the well-known ones)?

I think there's room for all kinds of life-history in our culture, but writers don't often have a chance to find out what good readers (no pun intended) think about such things. If anyone would like to chime in, I'd love to hear anything you'd like to say about any of this!

I'm looking for mind and heart and history--both. I love learning about history and different places by reading the lives of the people who were actually there.

Your book sounds really interesting. It's important to get stories like that out into the world. What is your book called? It sounds like one I would like to read.

I think that it's a good thing for new books to come out about well-known figures, especially as new primary sources become available. Also because what one biographer chooses to include in his\her book is something that another biographer might choose to leave out, so reading more than one biography gives a clearer picture of the subject of the book.

I also think it's a wonderful thing that so many "regular" people are telling their stories. And the popularity of many of these books shows that people want to read them. I want to read them. I want to read about people surviving and exploring and growing and thriving and doing amazing and mundane things.

I admire your dedication to accuracy--it's so important.

And by the way, thanks for asking!

It's so interesting to me to hear you describe why you read biography! I really feel that people read biographies not just to find out more about figures they've heard of, but to have the information given to them as a story, not as a Wikipedia article. There's just something about "being told a story." I also feel--and what you say certainly confirms this--that people read biography as well in order to experience someone else's life, to see the world through their eyes--"surviving and exploring and growing and thriving and doing amazing and mundane things," as you say. (Can I quote you, by the way? I'd really love to put that on a blog I write about biography.) Actually, I think it's the same reason we read fiction: to experience the world vicariously, through the writer's eyes and sensibility; only in biography and memoir we know it's "real."

I didn't mention the name of the book I wrote because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to. I also belong to the History Book Group on Goodreads, and they have a rule about not promoting yourself, so I'm trying to keep my nose clean. :) But if you Google me, it's there. I also have a section on it on my website. The name of my co-author (she's the primary author, of course) and the lady I wrote about is Sattareh Farman Faramaian. She's had quite a life--"becoming" her for four years was an amazing experience.

I would so appreciate if the book was made available on Kindle. My vision is poor. Please try and do what you can to make this available in the Kindle format.

I have just read the conversation. I am an active member of this group, but I feel that I have nothing to add. As all the rest of you, I want accuracy and I want to get under the skin of the main character. I want to learn how history affects the people living through the events. Real life is more interesting than any fiction. And I like learning about different cultures.

I would love to read Daughter of Persia: A Woman's Journey from Her Father's Harem Through the Islamic Revolution if I could.

Chrissie, A Kindle edition may come out next year. There's never been an audio edition, either. I'll let the publisher know of your interest!

Personality is important for me. The whole idea of receiving history, individual perspective, and the little nuances of that person's personality and character traits is what excites and motivates me to read autobiographies. I still love biographies and even historical fiction. But, when you have an individual with whom you're truly interested in exploring their subjective circumstances and historical details, there's nothing like an autobiography.

I also agree with Leslie, in that a little bit of research from different vantages on the individual will be a valuable investment towards your decision of whether or not to continue onward on your journey with a particular individual.

Thank you, Dona! Please point out to the publisher that I live in Belgium, not the US.

I will. And "real life is more interesting than any fiction" reminds me that writing the book convinced me of that. It permanently spoiled me for writing fiction.

Fiction is practically always "fake". Few authors can create characters that are as nuanced as a real human being.

Thank you Donna!

Something else that may be interesting is that good writers often are not the best oral communicators. What they would say openly about themselves may not be how they truly feel or think. Their internal meditations seem to come more effortlessly and naturally in an autobiographical writing...whether valid in the eyes of the rest of the world or not.

I would love for you to quote me on your blog, Dona--thank you for wanting to! :)

I clicked on the title of your book--which I'm really glad Chrissie "revealed" and I already have it on my to-read list and my wish list! Wow! I'm going to make a point of getting it, instead of just having it sit on my lists.

I agree with you 100%--a Wickipedia article will never take the place of a being told a story about a person's life. It's the story we want, not a list of facts. I might start with Wickipedia, but if the person interests me, I won't stop there, I'll go on and find some well-written books about the person.

I'm really glad you spoke up on this thread, giving us the perspective of a biographer herself is very helpful. How do make decisions about what to leave out and what to include? It must be difficult. Also, dealing with contradictory information about your subject. Are you working on a new subject? I'd love hear about it!

It's often quite difficult to make those decisions, Leslie--almost as difficult as getting yourself to stop researching some wonderful little by-road your subject has taken you down.

I think you have to be very certain of what the story is that you want to tell, or what main point you want to make as you go along, and then be ruthless about excluding everything that doesn't advance the story in some way.

But that's not as simple as it sounds. For one thing, there may be more than one "story" within the main one that you believe is important. For another, a biography is a moving target, if only because it takes so long to write--most biographers expect to spend at least two to three years, and many (slow ones, like me!) take far longer. You include something--or cut something--and a few years later, you know a lot more and you see the story in a different or more subtle way, and you take it out or put it back again.

Moreover, the biographer can change, too. For various reasons, I've been working on my present book for more than a decade, and I now see my subjects differently than I did when I started--more sympathetically, but also, I think, more accurately and also more deeply. I've changed and grown, and in a way that enriches the people I'm writing about.

Oh, you asked what I'm working on: I'm writing a biography of a woman named Sara Bard Field. She's one of those people you've never heard of. Briefly, sort of: she was a Baptist minister's wife who fell in love in 1910 with a wealthy and much older atheist and philosophical anarchist (they were introduced by the lawyer Clarence Darrow). She left her husband and became a national suffrage crusader and later a rather good poet, but before that she had to wait eight years for Erskine, her lover, to make up his mind to leave his wife. While she was waiting and crusading for suffrage, they wrote each other about 3,500 letters. I'm reconstructing her life, their relationship, and the story from the letters and a number of other first-hand sources.

Oh, boy. You should never have gotten me started talking about writing biography and my book. It makes me want to go and blog about it, which is a lot easier than actually writing the book, so I'd better stop. I have a page about "Sara and Erskine" on my website. As I say, I don't know if it's kosher to give the address here, but you can easily find it by googling either the title of the book and my name or the title of my blog, which is "Stalking the Elephant." There's also a page on "Daughter of Persia." (Since the cat is out of the bag.)

Fortunately, it will be ages before I finish the book, so I don't think Goodreads need construe this as self-promotion! :). And believe me, I, too, really appreciate the opportunity to be part of this discussion. I love talking to "regular readers," not just other biographers, writers, and editors. Not that it isn't fun to talk shop--try and stop me, as all my friends know--but it's rare that writers get to listen in on what a group of intelligent readers thinks about biography/autobiography/fiction in general, as opposed to what the writers themselves have written.

I recommend your blog to anyone on this thread--it's really interesting.

What you said about being ruthless--killing your darlings, is hard to do sometimes, isn't it? Eric Larson had his darlings in his footnotes at the back of the book, some of which were as interesting as the book itself.

How did you choose your subjects for your books? I've wondered before how biographers do that, if you just click with the person or what goes into that process. You know you'll be spending a lot of time together for at least a few years.

I enjoy biographies that do a bit of modern psychotherapy about their subjects, like one I read recently about Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter. She was considered schizophrenic in her day and lived most of her adult life in an institution, but the author put together a credible arguement that in another time and under different circumstances she could have had a very different life and that she didn't have schizophrenia at all. How do you feel about biographers doing that?

I think biography is really an art form. Memoir, too. All writing, of course, but in my opinion biography and memoir are extra special.

Interesting discussion. I actually prefer reading a memoir that gives me insight to the persons heart and soul. I'm more interested in getting to know them on a deeper level than in who they knew, where they ate, who they slept with etc. (not that there's anything wrong with that if that's what others like, I just like the deep soul searching type of stuff).

I like biographies that give me insight into the inner life of the person. That can come through a biographer's passionate insights into, and interpretation of, the person's life, as it does in Lyndall Gordon's recent LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: EMILY DICKINSON AND HER FAMILY'S FEUDS. Or it can come because the biographer loves and feels close to her (or his) subject but is also objective enough to stand back a little and reflect, as in Claire Tomalin's SAMUEL PEPYS: THE UNEQUALLED SELF, which is my very favorite biography.

I agree that there's no substitute for the intimacy of a memoir, just as there's no substitute for the multi-level insight you can get from a good novel through the interaction of the tension between the characters' points of view and the author's. But some biographers (mostly British, as far as I can tell) are trying to move away from the traditional 20th-century notion of what a biographer has to be and find ways to probe someone's inner life--and give their own feelings some rein--without relinquishing their responsibility to stay within the bounds of nonfiction.

I haven't read the Lucia Joyce biography, but I understand that it's very good. Lyndall Gordon, by the way, argues that Emily Dickinson had epilepsy, and she makes a good case for the idea that some of Dickinson's most powerful imagery was the result of what she felt was happening in her own brain.

I'm not sure she really succeeds in proving that, and it's a controversial aspect of the book. But it's not (in my opinion, anyway) the most important thing Gordon's book offers. I studied Dickinson in graduate school but felt no empathy with her at all. After reading LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS, though, I was all set to re-read every Dickinson poem I own.

Hm. I guess I should put Gordon's biography on my bookshelf, shouldn't I? I'm so new to Goodreads that I'm still stumbling around. Maybe it would be a good idea if I took a week or two off from this discussion to go and read the rules. :-) Till then....

PS: Didn't mean that Lyndall Gordon doesn't "reflect"--she does, a lot. But the tone of her book is different than Tomalin's; more urgent and emotional.

That book about Emily Dickinson sounds really good. I've read at least one book about her, I don't remember how long ago, but a new perspective on an interesting person is always good. I wonder if she did have epilepsy and that's part of why she was so reclusive. I like to speculate about people.

What is it about the book about Pepys that makes it your favorite bio? I'm curious.

All your varied comments and observations are very interesting and sometimes a little unsettling for someone like me who has written their autobiography. Mine, in its present format, covers three generations consequently the narrative style does change from section to section. For my grandparent's story I am able to repeat what my grandmother told my sisters and I when we were very young. My parents story required me to piece together the little I had gleaned from my mother and my own observations.

When it came to my own life I decided to write as if I and the reader were having a discussion, admitted rather one sided. Some of you have emphasised your dislike for this style; I had played with different formats but in the end concluded the style I have used was most suitable.

One thing I would like to point out is though my tale does contain a considerable amount of unpleasantness I did not write from a 'poor me' motivation. Having listened over the years to many peoples accounts of their lives I came to appreciate how unique the lives of my ancestors and myself were. As the last member of this branch of the family I did not think it right to let the tale die with me.

For reasons I will not go into the time scales for getting the book published were tight and the manuscript went to print before being fully revised. As a result there are some textual, punctuation and grammatical errors. A revised version is being worked upon but will take a little while to complete.

Excuse me for asking here but I have been unsuccessful in obtaining any reviews of the book. Despite the errors mentioned I would like to have other peoples opinions about the actual story as a whole. Therefore if anyone is interested in reviewing my book please let me know. If required I should be able to provide a copy in either .mobi, .PDF or ,html format. It is an e-book published in Kindle and I intend to make it free for a couple of days sometime over the next couple of weeks.

Thank you for your patience in reading this post.

I suppose I like autobiographies a tad above biographies, but both categories along with memoirs are great. My favorite autobiography is “RICKENBACKER” by Edward "Eddie" V. Rickenbacker. What a man and what a life.

by Edward V. Rickenbacker

I just finished reading “Old Gimlet Eye” by Lowell Thomas, Jr (copyright 1933), a biography of USMC Major General Smedley Butler, who through good fortune was twice awarded the Medal of Honor. Folks may remember Lowell Thomas as the media personality whose first book “With Lawrence in Arabia” (copyright 1922) brought the legendary T.E. Lawrence to public light for the first time.

What was so unique about “Old Gimlet Eye” is that Thomas mentioned in the final paragraph of his Forward: An Opening Salute that: “From this point on the narrative will lapse into the first person in the hope that it may reflect the spirit of a fighting man whose career has been one of the most dazzlingly adventurous of our day”. A biography written in first person was new to me and Thomas with his credentials certainly pulled it off.

& by Lowell Thomas, Jr. (no photo)