Meet Your Heroes: A Case for Reading Author Biographies

I’m going to archer you a story. It’s astir me, and my favourite author, and however I learned to clasp her successful each her messiness. It’s a communicative astir however I met Shirley Jackson. (Not literally! She died 13 years earlier I was born.) I’m telling you this story, which is precise circumstantial and reasonably personal, to marque a broader claim: you should work a biography of your favourite author. But! You should work the right biography of your favourite author.

When I was 20 years old, I moved successful with my boyfriend. This progressive each of the accustomed increasing pains and delights progressive successful merging households, including the astir absorbing 1 for a bookworm: combining libraries. In summation to each the westerns and sci-fi you mightiness expect a 23 twelvemonth aged dude to ain successful the precocious ‘90s, helium had 3 books I’d ne'er heard of: The Haunting of Hill House, which looked scary; Life Among the Savages, which did not; and We Have Always Lived successful the Castle.

Reader, I work them. (It’s a communicative for different day, but speechmaking The Haunting of Hill House successful a haunted flat gathering was possibly my slightest astute determination of each time.) Then I walked up the thoroughfare to the utilized bookstore and bought everything other I could find with Shirley’s sanction connected the spine. At that time, respective of her books were retired of print, and utilized was the lone mode to get them; 1 publication I ne'er recovered for merchantability astatine all, speechmaking astir fractional of a room transcript earlier I had to instrumentality it and finishing it 20 years aboriginal erstwhile Penguin Classics reprinted it. I wanted to work each connection she ever wrote, and I wanted to cognize everything astir her. Honestly? I wanted to be her.

A twelvemonth oregon truthful aboriginal I recovered the beatified grail: a biography of Shirley Jackson. I had work some of her books of household stories by past (Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons), truthful galore times that I practically had them memorized, but I besides knew that the stories ranged from embellished to downright fabricated, and they had mostly been written for women’s magazines. I wanted to cognize who the existent Shirley was, and yet I could bash that! (Remember, this was earlier Wikipedia existed! If we wanted to look thing up we had to find an encyclopedia and anticipation we knew however to spell it.)

I americium atrocious to accidental that the biography of Shirley Jackson I work — which, you mightiness notice, I haven’t named — was not great. In fact, I judge the writer hated Shirley Jackson, and I cannot recognize wherefore she wrote astir her. The publication painted her arsenic a disgusting, abdominous alcoholic, and blamed her for her hubby Stanley’s infidelity (or astatine slightest suggested that she was excessively whiny astir it). For the pursuing astir 20 years, I filled successful the gaps arsenic good arsenic I could, grateful each clip a caller nonfiction oregon effort appeared online.

And past I recovered retired that Ruth Franklin was penning a caller biography of Shirley Jackson. I was nervous, but not too nervous. I signed up for her newsletter and work astir her hunt for letters from Shirley to a pistillate named Anne (seriously, spell work it) and I knew the close idiosyncratic was penning this biography. I knew I would yet get to conscionable Shirley, to work astir her beingness arsenic written by idiosyncratic who cared astir her the mode I do.

Reading A Rather Haunted Life is similar speechmaking astir your champion person — astatine least, it was for me. It is similar learning each the secrets astir the mode she is astir different people, and however precise acquainted she is to you, but her own, concealed person, too. Franklin gives discourse and extent to the galore aspects of Shirley’s life, and does not shy distant from her little affirmative qualities, but neither does she fto the satellite (or Stanley) disconnected the hook.

You should get to work astir your best friend favourite author, too.

The 2010s and ‘20s truthful acold person fixed america a wealthiness of women’s past told by women. To beryllium sure, women person ever written astir women — I have, for example, a biography of Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark, from 1987, and 1 of Dorothy Parker by Marion Mead, from 1988. Valerie Boyd wrote astir the beingness of Zora Neale Hurston successful 2003. But I besides person a dual biography of Shelley and her parent Mary Wollstonecraft, Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, published successful 2015. Imani Perry wrote Looking for Lorraine successful 2018, astir playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

There are truthful galore astonishing looks backmost astatine authors happening close now! I americium not saying that you should lone work biographies of women writers written by women writers, but I americium not not saying that.