Is Biography Hot?

Since graduating from university, I have been taunted by a single, unhinged objective: writing the first comprehensive biography of Barcelona-based literary agent Carmen Balcells. See, I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Balcells, and every so often, I think I should turn that enthusiastic but ham-handed piece of research into an Influential, Timeless (and Best-Selling) biography. This idea first popped into my mind when I was twenty-two (and clueless). The fact that I was among the only people studying Balcells at the time was an irrefutable indicator of my future success. Six years later, I’m pleased to report that I have not yet written a biography, but I have developed a lot of Strong Feelings about the genre of biography, which I will now attempt to shape into an argument about its Hotness. In this analysis, I’ll flitter between Object (biography), Creator (biographer) and Consumer (reader of biography), and I’m not sure I trust myself to keep them separate. This will likely enrage some (just one?) of you. You’ve been warned. Please fight back.

*

Like any good story, this one begins by accident. When I was first tasked with finding a subject for my undergraduate thesis, I started by looking for a female writer in the middle of the Latin American boom, a period during the 1960s when a lot of (male) Latin American writers “exploded” on to the world literary scene and came together to form a movement. I suspected I might find a woman writing somewhere in the Southern Cone just as good as the Gabriel Garcia Marquezes of the world but who, because of her gender, was hidden away behind the clamour for Macondo. Balcells passed away just around the time when I started hunting for a thesis topic, and I read her obituary on a whim after an advisor mentioned her name as a suggestion for my thesis during office hours. From the moment my eyes met hers—a pair of mischievous, heavily framed beads staring back at me from the screen—I was certain and content to have found a subject.

Balcells was larger-than-life: she was funny, learned, and provocative. She may not have been an author, but she changed the face of book publishing in Latin America by defending the rights of writers before (shark-like?) editors who gained enormous profits on the backs of authors by hiding behind a veil of friendship and camaraderie. Balcells allegedly kept a gun inside her desk and hung a sign in her office that read, jamais avec les clients. In her later years, she wore oversized white tunics and little white boots that appeared to float above the ground as her heels perched, I imagine, on the footrests of the wheelchair in which she was sitting. She is the perfect object of study: a woman with power lodged between some of the most enthralling writers of the Spanish-language tradition. She was a cause, an oddity, and a centre of gravity. And, most importantly, her legacy (su recuerdo) is slippery: she crept into and out of fiction as her authors both shaped fictional characters around her growing mythology while they also pulled characters out of their books to drape around her.

As I wrote my thesis, I became smitten with the idea of rescuing Balcells from history. Not because I was certain she needed rescuing but rather because it felt like a noble cause. No one else in the world had written about Balcells in an extended way. There were magazine articles, profiles, brief mentions in books, and chapters here and there, but there hadn’t yet been A Biography about this literary agent, despite the fact she was Clearly Important. She represented seven winners of a Nobel Prize! She introduced geographical and temporal limits to book contracts, for the first time, ever!! I chalked the absence up to An Injustice of Gender. Had she been a man, there would be no such gap in the literature. I had discovered a magical, mystical and political niche—that thing that academics spend their entire lives pursuing. Though they found Balcells’ contributions to book history intriguing, my advisors and professors fixated on the rarity of finding a subject worthy of study whose memory had not yet been laid to rest below tomes and tomes of biographical text. I savoured the delectable idea that I could be A First.

At times, this flirtation ebbed into mania. I believed there was a “truth” that would explain exactly who Balcells was beneath myths that, to my eyes, hardened and distorted her legacy. And most of the time, I was convinced I was uniquely suited to finding that truth. I convinced myself that I was the one and true medium for Balcells’ story because she and I shared a few traits: a raging ambition and a penchant for mischievous bursts of passionate emotion, tears and laughs alike. If I only had enough discipline and time (and a chunky book contract), finding the “truth” about Balcells would be a breeze, I thought. It didn’t occur to me that pinning down an individual—who they are, how they were—might be a fool’s errand.

*

While I was in England last summer, I read Hernan Diaz’s Trust. This odd (yet outrageously well-received) little novel is entirely committed to the idea of a true and knowable self—a foundational premise that undergirds the practice of biography writ large. The novel begins with a fragment from “a novel” (the first within a series of books within the book) that relates the courtship and subsequent marriage of an unlikely couple: the daughter of a broke but brilliant socialite from Albany and a prodigious financier. That story peels away to reveal a next layer—the unfinished manuscript of the financier’s memoir. Some details between the two “books” overlap, while some notably diverge. The novel, for example, tells us that the financier was the son of a family ensconced in financial institutions, while the memoir portrays him as a self-made man.

After the memoir, the novel’s next layer arrives in the form of a diary. Written by the secretary tasked with ghostwriting the memoir, the diary re-establishes intimacy with the reader after the memoir’s curt, unfinished tone. The financier hired her, she tells us, to compose his “truth” as a rebuttal against the novel we read as Trust began. The novel “grossly misrepresented” his life, he says. However, as the secretary spends more and more time with her object of study, she realizes that the financier only wants to spool his own version of the truth, one that feels just as fictional as the other tale he seeks to attack.

Though our gaze is fixed on her husband and his crazed zeal for accurate representation, it’s really the chimeric presence of the financier’s wife, Mildred, that drives each of these accounts. The book(s) bring Mildred’s childhood to life, relate how she and her husband met, and explore her role in her husband’s philanthropic efforts. We’re lulled into complacency—Mildred fades in and out of view, but we’re given just enough to feel satiated and to willingly return to her husband. It isn’t until the secretarial protagonist pulls Mildred into focus, as she wrestles with her discomfort around the incomplete portrait she produces for the memoir, that we realize Trust is really just about Mildred (as are all of the books of which it is composed). Unable to gather more information from the financier, by the end of the diary, the secretary commits to a life-long pursuit for Mildred. She suspects there’s more to her than the mythology the financier has crafted and becomes convinced she can discover who Mildred truly was. Trust ends when the secretary finally finds and reads what it purports as a final, unequivocal source of truth behind our slippery Mildred: her diaries.*

*

For six years, I have been bitterly and hopelessly stuck with the Balcells biography. Three months out of college, I landed a job as an editorial assistant inside the stolid walls of book publishing. Like my professors, my publishing colleagues remarked how incredible it was that there wasn’t a biography. They were unbelievably generous, nudging me along on my mission. A literary agent mercifully intrigued by my project connected me to people who could become invaluable sources for the book. But even as contacts were handed to me with little golden tassels, I felt incapable of interviewing anyone to gather data (I would choke up! I became so obsessed with saying the right thing, with proving that I had a right to pursue this investigation, that all sense flew out the window, and I disintegrated into a senseless mob). I was invited to talk about my work at an international book fair and, later, at an academic research conference. But though I had a magisterial confidence in talking about the project in those settings, I suffered from a crippling lack of confidence in the writing of the project. I began conversations, which were well-received, to publish some of my writings about Balcells in a magazine or two, and after initial contact, I failed to follow up (blubbering in fear, mostly). As I recount these missed opportunities, I cringe.

At each fumble, I’d tell myself, let’s give it time. I would tuck Balcells away in the depths of my sock drawer with a promise to return, hopefully with renewed energy and vision to finally write the book. I do return. Often. In November 2021, for example, I blew the dust off my notes and applied for a researcher’s permit to the New York Public Library. The day before Thanksgiving, I waltzed through rain to sift through the archives of Farrar, Straus and other assorted New York publishing houses housed at the NYPL’s main branch with an expectation that I might find hope in Balcells again. Like many others, that search didn’t really lead anywhere, though I enjoyed every second I spent peering through old letters and diaries. I came home that night and re-read a clumsy draft of a book proposal I wrote earlier that year. I couldn’t stop staring at the gaps in the story. I shut my laptop, and, with a sigh, put the project away.

*

In one of the many returns to the Balcells Project, I decided that what I had been missing was an understanding of the biographical genre. By learning how other biographers approach the task, I hoped to unearth a guide on overcoming this enduring stalemate. Brilliant, I thought, and I went off to buy books by Robert Caro, Hermione Lee, Dierdre Bair, and, most dangerously, Janet Malcolm. It started off great: I was emboldened by Caro’s “turn every page” approach, soothed that my problem might simply be “not enough time” and “not enough archives”. I was humbled but encouraged by Hermione Lee and her brilliant marriage of literary analysis with biographical study (specifically in the opening chapter of her Virginia Woolf biography)—if only I could write something like this! Bair claimed she was just as nervous as I when she first sat down in front of Samuel Beckett to interview him, and the fear returned in greater magnitude when she confronted Simone De Beauvoir. Great! Between those books, I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and enrolled in a course about creative production, both of which earnestly encouraged me to keep on going.

Most of all, I was reassured by what I read as an endearing attentiveness in how biographers write about their craft. Each of Caro, Lee and Bair appears to be driven by a dignified commitment to an insightful and honest representation of whoever has landed under their gaze. Caro acts in pursuit of a deeper understanding of power, as it was embodied by Robert Moses, initially, and later Lyndon B. Johnson. Lee is “fascinated by how books get put together and how people do that work.” The sense of care and responsibility that emanates from these well-known biographers hangs in the air whenever their names are spoken. It teeters on the edge of Hot. One almost forgets, however, that these individuals have dedicated their lives to learning all they can about a person (or two or three). Which, when considered from a different angle, begins to look less innocent. Or, at least, that’s what Janet Malcolm has to say.

*

And here it is! The great break! Some of you will be familiar with this spiel. In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm bemoans the biographer’s curiosity. In the same way that she deplores all journalistic endeavours in The Journalist and the Murderer for being unethical, Malcolm comes out guns blazing, condemning the biography as nothing more than a glorified gossip rag. It’s brutal. She notes how the biographer must snoop around, like a burglar, in the moral equivalent of an underwear drawer in search of glimmering nuggets of information about their subject for no reason other than to satisfy their and their readers’ curiosity. Have we no shame? The only difference between biography and stalking, Malcolm retorts, is the veneer of intellectual and academic pursuit. This all happens within the first ten pages of the book.

Malcolm’s argument floored me. But it also provided air cover. Maybe, I thought, I haven’t been able to write because I am morally opposed to Biography as a genre. There was something a little off about the way that biographers obsess over their subject. Diaz’s secretarial protagonist in Trust makes palpable the disputable nature of biographical study—isn’t it odd, crass even, for a person to be driven by an obsession to learn all they can about someone else? Isn’t it weird that someone seeks refuge in the papers of a dead person framed as a hunt for “truth”? The only way to satiate the secretary’s curiosity is to delve as deeply as she was allowed into the intimacy of journals penned under illness during the final days of a life.

And it wasn’t just the biographer who is driven by an obsessive curiosity. In the final pages of Trust, while I, as the reader, engulfed the riveting revelations that Mildred’s diaries fed me, I skimmed over her complaints of pain, discomfort, and fear. I didn’t care about the terror she felt as she faced the end of her (granted, fictional) life nearly as much as I wanted to absorb all I could about the scintillating insights she provided into her relationship with her husband’s fortune. Does the biographer pursue her quest because of the reader’s curiosity or vice versa? Whichever of the chicken or egg comes first, the clucking is the same—in Trust, protagonist and reader both become obsessed with milking a truth that we’ve convinced ourselves only our subject can provide.

Malcolm gave me words to express a discomfort I didn’t know I already felt. Turn every page? Five volumes to capture the life of Lyndon B. Johnson? If it weren’t illuminated by the light of the genre, Caro’s work could be interpreted as criminal. And to what end? Curiosity? Malcolm’s was a compelling argument; she urged me to think more critically about my motivations. That said, she didn’t get me to stop—I just flipped the task on its head.

*

Since October, I’ve been writing an inverted biography: rather than try to tell Balcells’ story, I’ve decided to tell the story of my attempts to write the damned biography. I’ve called it the Balcells Project, and if you want to be pedantic about it, I guess we can call it a memoir.

The answer was more straightforward than I made it out to be: Balcells has always been a proxy for understanding myself. I look up to Balcells. She was an unconventional woman who succeeded in a world of business. She was ambitious, cunning, and tough. She made enough money to buy the town where she grew up, revenge for the fact that she couldn’t inherit land because she was a woman. More importantly, she was a successful woman in publishing, which, when I first embarked on this task, I also aspired to be. Perhaps, I thought, if I learned her secrets, I too could excel in the field. Is biography’s allure tied to a desire to live vicariously through another?

Both in the reading and the writing of biography, you’re driven by a compulsion to understand another person, to see them as no one has seen them before. Early in my time in New York, I had lunch with a journalist who had studied many figures of the boom and who, in classic needly journalistic fashion, asked me why I wanted to study Balcells. I wandered around my answer for a little bit, and then suddenly something slipped out: not only did I think I was similar to Balcells, I wanted to study Balcells because she reminded me of my mother. My mother also manages talent, I squeaked, but rather than writers, she works with musicians. I don’t think that was entirely wrong—there are real parallels between these two central women in my life, and I’ve always been motivated to better understand my mother through others—but, in all honestly, this is the kind of answer one always hopes to give a journalist. It was really all about me. To tell my story instead of Balcells’ has been, in many ways, freeing. I am finally fully in control.

*

Alright, so where does this leave us? Biography is not Hot. This isn’t because it lies, effaces, or distorts. Nor because some try to approach it with thievery and trickery. I’m not opposed to biography because it gives us false models and idols that flatten, distort, and deceive, nor because it’s impossible to know a whole self. Biography is not Hot because it encourages you to sidestep your own life, and, for a moment, release the agency that you have been gifted. Why look at what’s in front of us when we could project out to someone else—someone more successful, more colourful, more desirable—and spend some time in their shoes?

About a year ago, when I started this deranged newsletter, I didn’t imagine that I would be sitting here today, older, wiser and hotter than ever, feeling, most of all, that I am. For the first time in my life, I feel like I am inhabiting my self. I am (mostly!) making choices and standing behind them. Though I have an eye on the future, it isn’t distracting me from who I am. And, most of all, I feel at some semblance of peace, or more so than I have in as far as I can remember. Maybe I’ve started to allow myself to be, have, and want. Maybe I’ve started to learn how to charge through conflict, obstacles, and change. Maybe, though, it’s that I finally allowed myself to see myself as an equal to my dearest Balcells, so much so that I’m now the subject of the writing rather than she.

I don’t know, but it’s nice.

xx

*The biography that seeks to unearth truth from the diaries, archives, and primary material seems to argue that truth doesn’t really reside in the being but rather in the papers surrounding that life. Why would paper hold more truth than breath?