Unsettling Narratives: Problems in Memoir and Biography

What had begun with the two stacks of writing paper at Osco Drug, with the meager Great Biography series on famous women, took me on a search similar to those whose diaries and novels I had read. Nothing, I’d found, showed that shift from private to public voice, from eye to I, more dramatically than a writer’s diary. Often a diary is not only a writer’s first work, but the first draft of creative identity. A living record of what shaped him or her—experiences, reading lists, literary tastes—it’s above all a barometer of confidence. If, as Saul Bellow observes, a writer is a reader moved to emulation, what kept writing underground? What in the writer allowed it to stay hidden? —Alex Johnson

The notion is this: that the great flowering of the biography genre that we have been witnessing over these past few decades has been prompted by more than just a happy convergence of cultural and scholarly circumstances. That the public’s growing fascination with the lives of the famous and notorious correlates directly with the steadily depreciating sense of subjective coherence many of us are feeling—correlates, that is, in an inverse way. That we turn to biography as compensation, to gather in vicariously what we are losing in the private sphere. —Sven Birkerts