Using the “I” in Biography and Other Writing About Others

Two days ago I wrote about the use of biography in memoir.  Today I want to address the use of memoir in biography—or, to be more exact, writing about others that includes the author as a character.  This is done quite often in profile writing.  Susan Orlean, for example, begins one of her best-known profiles, “The American Male at Age 10,” with a whimsical imagining of how things would be if she and her 10-year-old subject were to marry.  (Spoiler alert: It ends with the boy slingshoting dog food at her butt).  In many profiles, the author isn’t just an interviewer or chronicler; she’s part of the story.

The presence of the writer/interviewer is an expected feature of Q & A’s, of course.  In the best of them, what we witness—what we enter into—is less an interview than a conversation, a give-and-take discussion between two intelligent people.  Yes, the discussion leans toward the ideas and work of one of the two participants, but the interviewer plays a significant role, bringing not only her knowledge but also her thoughts and personality to the interaction.

Even so, there is a curious reluctance among biographers and critics to allow a biographer to appear in his narrative.  One reviewer of my biography of Robert Lax took me to task for doing so, saying dismissively that I should have written a second book, a memoir, if I wanted to write about our relationship.  A more respectful reviewer for a different publication suggested more delicately that “readers will differ as to whether the author’s injection of his own voice in the text adds to or distracts from his subject’s life story.”

Yet it seemed false to leave myself out of a book about a man I’d known well for 15 years, and I took pains to do all of the research any biographer would do to write the full story of Lax’s life.  In fact, those same reviewers who questioned my presence in the text praised the extensiveness of my research.  I felt—and many readers (and reviewers) have agreed—that my intimate knowledge of my subject allowed me to bring him more fully to life. The New York Times’ reviewer, in fact, called my “memoir” sections “vivid and engaging.”  Which shouldn’t be surprising, of course, since they came from direct observation and experience rather than a piecing together of quotes from letters and interviews.

It strikes me as strange that an author’s personal account would be denigrated when biographers regularly use any and all writings in which other people describe encounters with their subjects.  I can understand the suspicion that writing about someone you knew well and even admired might prejudice your account.  And there are any number of questionable biographies written by members of a subject’s inner circle—biographies that betray an agenda.  But why would use of the “I” or first-person observation indicate an agenda or hidden bias any more than any other way of writing about a person?  Hackwork is hackwork, whatever its point of view.

And there is a point of view in biography, whether acknowledged or not.  In recent decades, nonfiction writers, in general, have abandoned the so-called “objective” approach to writing about their subjects, recognizing that all writing is subjective, influenced not only by one’s particular experiences and education but also gender, class, race, sexual orientation, national origin, philosophy, creed, etc.

Despite this more general awareness in nonfiction writing, biographers continue to write in—and in many cases, insist on—a mostly Victorian style, composing their cradle-to-grave narratives as if taking dictation from God—as if the story they’re telling about their subject is simply fact-based truth.  In his book How to Write Biography: A Primer, for example, Nigel Hamilton, who fills his pages with all kinds of good advice for first-time biographers, never discusses the possibility of using the “I,” except when castigating Edmund Morris for injecting a fake “I” into his biography of Ronald Reagan.

What is most curious of all, perhaps, is that virtually all biographers praise a book in which the “I”—and, to some extent, memoir—figures prominently: James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.  One of the main things they praise, in fact, is how fully Boswell brings his friend to life by describing Johnson as he knew him, relating words Johnson said in his presence, and showing Johnson in scenes he witnessed.  In my copy of Boswell’s book, 242 pages cover Johnson’s 54 years of life before Boswell met him (when Johnson was 54) and 1,001 pages are about the 21 years Boswell knew him.  In other words, 4/5 of the book is drawn, to a large extent, from Boswell’s personal relationship with his subject, rendered in text peppered with Boswell’s “I.”

There are biographers who use the “I,” of course—even extreme prejudice among peers against a particular technique can’t keep some brave souls from employing it.   When J.D. Salinger kept would-be biographer Ian Hamilton from using quotes from his letters and interviewing people close to him, Hamilton turned his book into a search for knowledge about his subject, “incorporating within it,” as the book’s jacket copy says, “his own sometimes poignant, sometimes comic, sometimes exasperating quest for Salinger.”

The researching and writing of any biography is a quest.  A personal endeavor.  Not every biography has to include the details of that quest, but there’s no good reason why a biography shouldn’t either.  A biography is a story, an encounter, a vision and version of a person’s life.  I, for one, enjoy when a biographer like A.J.A. Symons, in his book The Quest for Corvo, takes me along on the researching adventure, using whatever material will best engage me and bring his story most vividly to life.

Memoir Monday #6 — What Do We Owe the People We Write About When We Write Our Own Stories?

I suppose I should admit that my “experiment” has been a failure.  I set out to post one blog entry a week on memoir writing and one on writing about others during the months of April and May.  I haven’t written about writing about others for two weeks and this week my Memoir Monday entry is two days late.  As I often say to students, life trumps writing.  Work, illness and family matters interfere with our best-laid plans.

Maybe it’s appropriate then that today’s entry is about both memoir writing and writing about others—or, more accurately, writing about others in memoir writing.  This may be the least-discussed aspect of memoir writing.  We teach budding memoirists to examine their lives, to separate the contemplating consciousness from that of their earlier self, to dare to go deeper into pain and shame, but we don’t talk enough about how they should think about writing about the others in their lives.

In many memoirs, family members and others who have had relationships with the writer end up as collateral damage.  Parents bear the brunt of the character blows.  Sometimes they are the heroes of memoirs but more often they are the villains.  They are portrayed as drunk or drug-addled, abusive or negligent.  Some are psychotic, some autocratic, and some narcissistic in the extreme.  The scars left by their behaviors are real and, judging by what many memoirists have written, they are life-altering, character-warping, ineradicable even with therapy.

But memoir writing can inflict damage and leave scars too.  This coming week my Memoir Writing students will read essays from a book called Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, edited by Joy Castro.  Some of the essays make clear how wounding words and stories can be.  Others talk about the usefulness of letting family members read what has been written about them in advance of publication.  All of them, in one way or another, raise the questions What do we owe the people we write about when seeking to write our own stories? and How can we make sure we’re being fair to others as well as ourselves?

There are no easy answers, of course.  But the book my students read this last week, John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, suggests some approaches.  Wideman’s book looks at the differences and similarities between himself, a widely respected writer and professor, and his brother Robby, who is serving a life sentence for his participation in a robbery in which a man was killed.  The book is, in essence, a biography as well as a memoir, and the sections on Robby are based on interviews Wideman did with his brother.  But Wideman goes to great lengths to show that he bears sole responsibility for what the book says.

In his Author’s Note, Wideman tells us his book is a “mix of memory, imagination, feeling and fact.”  Because he wasn’t able to use a tape recorder during his prison visits, he had only inadequate notes from his conversations with his brother.  He used those notes in conjunction with his lifelong knowledge of Robby, their family, their neighborhood, and the societal conditions at play in the lives of young American black men to write from Robby’s perspective, giving Robby a voice in the book.  The voice in these sections is a voice of the streets, using slang and informal patterns of speech.  Wideman makes it clear to his readers that he has constructed this voice but tells us, too, that Robby has read and approved and, at times, corrected it.  You might call it a collaborative voice, one writer’s attempt to write about someone else while giving that person the opportunity to make sure the depiction of him reflects his own understanding.

Even then, Wideman is careful to tell us that his picture of Robby (which he uses as a mirror to reflect an essential part of his own nature) is his picture—limited and fragmentary, warped by his own partial view and understanding.  “There will necessarily be distance,” he writes, “vast discrepancy between any image I create and the mystery of all my brother is, was, can be.”

It is this mystery every memoir writer needs to keep in mind when writing about anyone, even herself.  We know people only partially and our views are distorted by our own needs, desires, emotions and experiences.  If we respect the mystery of others—all that we don’t know about their inner and outer lives—and try, in the process of examining our own lives, to see from their perspectives, we have a better chance of being fair to them on the page.

We need to remember, too, that including them in our story means using them and their stories for our own purposes.  “Though I never intended to steal his story,” Wideman writes, “to appropriate it or exploit it, in a sense that’s what would happen once the book was published.”

“Don’t I have a right to tell my story?” someone will ask.  “Of course you do” is the only appropriate response.  But rarely are our stories ours alone.  Each of us lives at the center of a vast web of associations and relationships, families and communities.  Every movement we make reverberates down the web’s delicate filaments, risking rifts and detachments and damage we can’t even see.  We need to move carefully and respectfully, weighing the possible ramifications—on ourselves as well as others—of everything we say and do.

Writing About One’s Self and Others: Embarking on an Experiment

A few years ago, one of the external evaluators who supported my promotion to full professor wrote that I was among those rare writers who look inside as well as out.  Most writers, he said, focus exclusively on personal writing or on writing about the world beyond them.  I didn’t think much about his statement until I decided to add parts of my personal story to Pure Act, my biography of poet Robert Lax.  I did so for three good reasons: My personal connection to Lax gave readers who had never heard of him a reason to care about him; I could use scenes from our times together to bring him more vividly to life; and it seemed false to write from a distance about a man who had greatly influenced my life.

I knew some traditionalists would call this decision a mistake, but artificial boundaries between personal observation and supposedly objective research strike me as silly and generally false.  Even a piece of writing based primarily on research is saturated with the writer’s personal viewpoint.  It is the writer alone who decides what subject to write about, what material to include or exclude, and what tone and approach to use.  The personal is always there, whether we recognize it or not.  Fortunately, as our thinking about narrative nonfiction has evolved, more and more writers are loosening up—showing their work, so to speak, by making their methods of fact collection and even their preferences and biases clear.

With the biography birthed and the initial publicity done, I’ve begun two new projects that have me thinking again about looking inward and outward at the same time.  One is a memoir about a year my wife and I spent on an island off the coast of Washington State.  The other is a book about writing about others.  Am I Janus-faced enough, I wonder, to work on these two books at the same time?  And if I can, what might my efforts reveal about the similarities and differences between these two types of writing?

In some writing circles, primarily in Britain, biographical and autobiographical writing are grouped together under the title Life Writing.  Having written short pieces of memoir as well as biography, this grouping strikes me as overly baggy.  Yet there can be no doubt that writing about yourself is akin in some ways to writing about another.  In writing a memoir, for instance, you must be able to see yourself as a character, and in writing about someone else you must establish an empathetic connection.  In both cases, you need to create a world around your subject and bring that subject to life.

In order to explore these connections further, I’m embarking on an experiment: For the next two months, I plan to post two entries a week on this site, one on memoir and one on writing about others.  Since I’m teaching memoir writing this term, some of the memoir material will come from class preparations and discussions, and some of the material on writing about others will come from classes I’ve taught on that subject.  But my intention is to be more speculative and contemplative than academic or, God forbid, didactic.  I want to think on the page about what I’m discovering and share it with anyone interested.

Generally, the first entry each week will be devoted to memoir and I’ll write it on Monday, so let’s call this the first Memoir Monday.  That having been said, this introductory entry is quite long already, so instead of deep contemplation, I’ll leave you with just a few memoir thoughts.  These are drawn mostly from comments made at the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference I attended over the weekend.

  1. In an AWP panel on memoir, Cheryl Strayed, author of the best-selling memoir Wild, said that a memoirist needs to “let the bottom fall out,” writing “into the deepest truth,” the one you didn’t know until you started writing. “We go into the darkness,” she said, “we go through the darkness, and we come out of the darkness changed.”
  1. Another panel member said that a memoirist is the protagonist in her story but not the hero. This comment deserves more musing, of course, but in the interest of brevity I’ll say only that the panel member was calling for a true examination of one’s self—one that goes beyond and below self-glorification, self-centeredness, and even self-doubt. In her new book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes:  “Once the reader identifies a vain or self-serving streak the writer can’t admit to with candor, a level of distrust interferes with that reader’s experience.”
  1. Memory studies have shown that the least-durable type of long-term memory is factual memory and the most-durable type is episodic memory, which is primarily scene-based memory with a personal component, the kind of memory most conducive to memoir writing.
  1. And finally, a quote from poet Marie Louise Kaschnitz especially applicable to memoir writing:

You cannot write

To save your soul. 

Given up, it drifts and does the singing.

 

And so the experiment begins…

Last Portland PURE ACT Reading at 6:30 p.m. This Tuesday, February 23…and Future Plans

After over 30 readings and other appearances over the past few months, I’m down to my last scheduled talk.  It will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 23, in room 333, Smith Memorial Union, on the Portland State University campus.  If you live in the Portland area, please join us.  To mark the occasion, we’ll have copies of Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax available at a discounted price.

A big thank you to those who came to last week’s readings in the Bay Area, where a standing-room-only crowd listened to poet John Beer, author S. T. Georgiou and me talk about our friendship with Robert Lax at City Lights Books in San Francisco, and another good crowd heard me read from Pure Act at Pegasus Books in Berkeley.

Among those in attendance at City Lights were Gerald Nicosia, one of Jack Kerouac’s biographers, and Mike Antonucci, a Bay Area journalist who is the nephew of Lax’s first publisher and close friend, Emil Antonucci.  It was fun for me to read a passage from my book about Lax’s friendship with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in a space where their spirits lingered.

My readings around the country have kept me from writing as much on this blog as I would have liked, and now that they’re over, I hope to write more.  Starting some time in March, I plan to try a unique experiment.  I’ll be teaching two courses in memoir writing while working on a memoir of my own AND a book on writing about other people.  I’m planning to make two posts a week from my research and thinking, one on memoir and one on writing about others (biography).  It will be interesting to contemplate how these two types of writing, one looking inward and the other outward, parallel and diverge.