Whether you are a reader or a writer, and especially if you are a biographer or someone writing a memoir or family history, you’ll find much to consider in this conversation with Carl Rollyson, who has stories about many subjects: Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Eve Arden, Joan Crawford, Ronald Coleman, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath. How’s that for variety? And I throw in a tidbit about Valerie Eliot, notable both for the song “Memory” and for her myth making, about her own life and about her marriage to T S Eliot.
In the show notes, I’ve included links to advice on interviewing, too, in case you’re working on a family history, memoir, or biography. Video podcast at this link on YouTube.
"One of the most gratifying things about Reading Chekhov is its quiet, vigorous defense of the prerogatives of criticism against the imperial banality of biography." —The New York Times Book Review
This article in the New York Times makes the case that biography is one form immune to takeover by AI:
In the midst of such minimalism, at least one form bucks the trend. Biography continues to cut a billowing 19th-century profile, trailing its footnotes and family trees, tipping the scales at nearly 1,000 pages — fat, splendid and wholly implacable in the face of our diminishing stamina. Biography feels perennially robust and continues to sell steadily — this year’s offerings include fresh assessments of the well-worn lives of Mark Twain, Paul Gauguin and Gertrude Stein, and even a biography of a biography: “Ellmann’s Joyce,” by Zachary Leader, an account of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce from 1959, long held to be the genre’s gold standard.
Read the whole thing [gift link].
Posts about publishing are generally for paid subscribers, but if you want to read them without paying just drop me a note. I tried to make this one free but Substack isn’t allowing it, and is being difficult in other ways, and I don’t feel like wrestling with technology on a sunny Sunday morning!
Show Notes
Carl Rollyson is the author of many biographies, as well as books about biography, and he only recently stopped adding to his popular podcast series, A Life in Biography. Details about his many biographies and books about the art of biography at Carl Rollyson’s website.
And this may be useful to you if you find yourself interviewing people about their lives or people they knew: Interviewing for biography: interrogation, conversation, and the in-between. Simply closing one’s eyes is said to be a way to elicit memories, too, though in all cases we need to look for corroboration!
Miller suggests appealing to a person’s senses to access memories — strategies such as listening to music from a specific era, looking at photos, preparing and eating food from that time, searching for smells from that time, such as flowers, perfumes, spices; drawing or viewing maps, touching and exploring objects such as jewellery, furniture or watching tv programs from that time. In Doing Oral History, it’s mentioned that Barbara Myerhoff studied elderly Jews and noted that “their memories could be evoked by singing, dancing, smelling, and taste.”
Podcast created with Alitu, a platform that makes it easy to get started, with lots of sophisticated tools, too. Take a look at Alitu (affiliate link)
