A boring life story

If somebody wrote the story of my life before James (and it would be a short book, repetitious and unillustrated), I would not buy it; I would not have it on my shelf. It would be a waste of the budget. 

Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House (NY: Avon, 1997), p. 25.

What made Margaret Atwood a writer?

In biographies there is usually some determining moment in early life that predicts the course of the future artist or scientist or politician. The child must be father to the man, and if he isn’t, the biographer will do some cut-and-paste and stick on a different head, to make it all come out right. We do so wish to believe in a logical universe. But when I look back over he life I led until I began writing, I can find nothing in it that would account for the bizarre direction I took; or nothing that couldn’t be found in the lives of many people who did not become writers.

Margaret Atwood, “A Path Taken, with All the Certainty of Youth” in Writers on Writing Vol. II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times (introduction by Jane Smiley) (New York: Times Books, 2003), p. 11.

Obituaries are full of life

And obituaries, as anyone who reads or writes obituaries will tell you, are really not about death. They’re occasioned by death, and they almost always wrap up with a list of those separated from the beloved by death. But they are full of life. The good ones are as intoxicating as a lung full of snowy air, as clarifying as the glass the ophthalmologist drops before your eyes, that brings the world into sudden sharp focus. The great obits aren’t the products of jackknifed tractor-trailers and hurricanes—the obits are released by such disasters.

Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 195-96.

A reading biography

"A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read."

Joseph Epstein, "The Noblest Distraction," in Joseph Epstein, Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (London: Norton, 1985), quoted in Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 5.