Biography is a classic, difficult art, and biographers, those torch-bearers of one of literature’s oldest genres, tend to be scrupulous, detail-oriented obsessives. Yet under rigid control there is often a strange and passionate devotion; they might fall in love with a ghost in order to begin their work, but they have to fall out of love in order to finish it.
Aspiring biographers have a thousand reasons not to embark on a biography – these books tend to take a decade or more of work and rarely can anyone survive on an advance for that long. But alongside the more or less conventional authors are those biographers who, for whatever reason, meet their task by changing the rules. These slanted, badly behaved books tend to captivate me, which is why I chose to write a novel in the shape of such a biography. Here are 10 of my favourite such books.
1. After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus
Kraus admits outright that this biography of Acker may not, in fact, be a biography and I would argue that it is, but also that it isn’t – regardless, I couldn’t put it down. Kraus had a front row seat to Acker’s antics and her crowd in a version of New York that only exists now in shadow and legend. After Kathy Acker is as much a book about a scene and a moment as it is about one woman in the midst of it.
2. Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly by Joshua Rivkin
What happens when your subject’s estate turns from ally to foe? Rivkin’s book becomes part detective story, part history, entirely thrilling. Fans of Cy Twombly’s huge abstract canvases and sculptures often have big feelings about the work and the mysterious person behind it; Rivkin is no different and his tender attention to Twombly is what makes the estate’s eventual lack of cooperation with him all the more painful.
3. Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds by Reiner Stach
The life of Franz Kafka, who has been so wide in his influence and holds a somewhat mysterious reputation, has obviously been written about plenty already. Stach’s approach, as translated by Kurt Beals, was to make the biography fragmentary, a kaleidoscopic portrait of an unpredictable mind. It works brilliantly.
4. My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
When you love and know a writer’s work well enough that the lines between their words and their life and your reading and your life begin to bleed, you might have invented your own version of that writer – entirely yours and yet entirely inaccessible. Howe is able to make something of her relationship with Dickinson’s work and life that is much more than the sum of its parts. A magical book, even for those unfamiliar with the legendary American poet at its centre.
5. These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy
It’s an essay, or is it fiction, or is it an essay? Biographies always contain and element of hypothesis anyway – a guess, a theory, a set of theories, and Jaeggy, a living saint of literary style, elaborates on this fact in These Possible Lives. The book, translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor, takes the biographies of three writers, Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob and blends them into story, myth, biography, essay, or something in between.
6. Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez
After Nunez was a hired to work as an assistant to Susan Sontag, she met and began dating Sontag’s son, David Rieff who, at that point, still lived with his mother. Soon all three of them lived together, and Nunez’s account of that time is at once loving and baffled and a little annoyed and a tiny bit awed. I could not put it down.
7. Now, Now Louison by Jean Frémon
Frémon, a gallerist and writer who worked with the artist Louise Bourgeois, published this portrait of her a few years after she died in 2010. In an afterword, he claims the book was not even trying to be a biography, but rather a “life imagined”, translated from the French here by Cole Swensen. Short and strange and hypnotic, I also had the sense that the voice at its centre, Bourgeois, would have both despised and quietly appreciated the existence of such a work.
8. My Life As a Godard Movie by Joanna Walsh
Well this isn’t a biography at all, or rather it’s a biography of the feeling that a lifetime of watching Godard films have left in Walsh. It’s a book about being burdened by the aesthetic vision of an auteur. It’s a book about being born female and average. It’s a book about being beautiful and not being beautiful and feeling that something is missing from your life and that that missing thing might be somewhere in Paris.
9. Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger
Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in one of the best and most overlooked works of American cinema ever created: the 1970 classic Wanda. Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon) is part ode to Wanda, part biography, part essay, part autofiction, and entirely honest. It led me to watch the film and the film led me to read the book again and the book led me to watch the film again and it’s been going on like that for some time now.
10. My Pinup by Hilton Als
I absolutely love how elegantly Als steps into everything he writes. He could write about the contents of his cupboard and I’d be hooked, but here he’s trying to give words to the otherworldly allure of the musical genius Prince and Oh my God. A brief book, a religious tract, really. If there was church on the other side of it I’d go every Sunday.
