I have been thinking a great deal about biography recently: how to write about lives. The most immediate reason is an essay I published last week about my mother, Pearl Kazin Bell. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever written, and one of the hardest things as well. But writing about someone who was such a huge part of my own life also made me more acutely aware than ever of what I’m tempted to call the impossibility of biography. How can a life, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its years and years of actions and thoughts and feelings, ever be captured in a document, however long and nuanced? (The average human heart, it is said, beats 2.5 billion times). Of course, this is a problem of history itself. Historians can never capture anything but an infinitesimal fraction of what has been said and done in this world, hardly any of which was ever recorded in the first place. But life-writing adds an ethical dimension to this empirical problem. The limitations of the sources, and then the need for the writer to select among the sources available, mean that any life portrait, however thorough and well-intentioned, will always be partial, incomplete, lopsided, and misleading in many respects. It won’t do justice to the whole person. But, then again, could anything? And faced with the choice between an imperfect, incomplete portrait and oblivion, who would choose the latter?
Writing About Lives
Writing About Lives
Writing About Lives
I have been thinking a great deal about biography recently: how to write about lives. The most immediate reason is an essay I published last week about my mother, Pearl Kazin Bell. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever written, and one of the hardest things as well. But writing about someone who was such a huge part of my own life also made me more acutely aware than ever of what I’m tempted to call the impossibility of biography. How can a life, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its years and years of actions and thoughts and feelings, ever be captured in a document, however long and nuanced? (The average human heart, it is said, beats 2.5 billion times). Of course, this is a problem of history itself. Historians can never capture anything but an infinitesimal fraction of what has been said and done in this world, hardly any of which was ever recorded in the first place. But life-writing adds an ethical dimension to this empirical problem. The limitations of the sources, and then the need for the writer to select among the sources available, mean that any life portrait, however thorough and well-intentioned, will always be partial, incomplete, lopsided, and misleading in many respects. It won’t do justice to the whole person. But, then again, could anything? And faced with the choice between an imperfect, incomplete portrait and oblivion, who would choose the latter?