Four opinionated panelists -- two biographers (one new to the game, one seasoned), a book editor, and a book reviewer now writing a biography -- came together on Saturday morning to talk about "Biographies -- Life Stories and Much More" at the recent ASJA national conference.

The two published biographers were Robin Marantz Henig, who swerved from her science writing with her most recent publication, The Monk in the Garden, about the 19th-century scientist Gregor Mendel; and Patricia Bosworth, recognized celebrity biographer, whose recent books are on Marlon Brando and photographer Diane Arbus and who is currently writing a biography of Jane Fonda. Robert Weil, executive editor at W. W. Norton, spoke from the acquiring editor's point of view, having worked on biographies at both Norton and St. Martin's Press. Michael Anderson, one of the literary power brokers who edits the New York Times Book Review, has now switched places with those he reviews and is on leave, intending to finish his biography of the dramatist Lorraine Hansberry.

Several points came through loud and clear. A biography is not a long magazine profile. A profile comes out of a single interview with the subject, while a biography comes from long months, even years, of research. A profile hits on personality, while a biography tells a story. While biography is a standard, traditional genre, there is a new wave of biography -- called by Bob Weil a "minibiography" or "microhistory" (Longitude or The Professor and the Madman, for instance), structured around a key event rather than across an entire lifetime.

"I wish I could be hugely optimistic," said Bob Weil, looking out at a meeting room full of would-be biographers. "Writing biography is not easy. It is not lucrative. A biographer is underpaid and underloved. The market is limited and the work is exhausting." Despite such warnings, attendees stayed put as Weil advised them to pick a subject that is interesting to you and to the public. Celebrity biographies do well, but you must have some special link to the person. Weil emphasized the importance of using primary material in a book-length biography, but he warned writers not to "regurgitate every detail" they discover and to "resist the tendency to write chronologically." He used the Henry Mayer's biography of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, All on Fire, as a model for a winning biographical structure: begin with a dramatic story, tell it through one individual, use flashbacks to fill in the history that comes before, and end with drama, such as a speech or a sermon.

"I didn't decide to become a biographer," said ASJA member Robin Marantz Henig, whose books before The Monk in the Garden were science nonfiction, explaining medical challenges and advances, such as premature babies, senility, and new viruses. "In fact, I resisted the idea of biography. I told myself I was writing narrative nonfiction, not biography." But her editor told her to find material that she could model after Longitude. "That book was an icon," said Henig, "an obscure story that became a bestseller. Suddenly everyone was looking for something like it -- a true-to-life story that could be told novelistically." The writer's task was no longer to learn everything on a subject and find a structure to explain it; it was to find the story in science and tell it.

Once she adjusted to story-telling, said Henig, the book took on life. Gregor Mendel became "a little creature sitting at my typewriter with me," and the process of writing felt more compelling because of the energy in the story she had to tell.

For Michael Anderson, since 1998 working on a biography of Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, the hardest part has been ascertaining the simplest facts of what happened when. "At a certain point, you have to admit that you will never know this person you are writing about," he said, "and you start running away scared."

His standards as a book reviewer mean that he expects an author to have full command and understanding of his subject, but his experience as a biographer shows how hard that task can be. On the other hand, he is discovering the difficulty a biographer has in discarding telling details, just because he cannot include them all. "You have to know everything, but you don't have to tell everything," said Anderson. Mocking himself and other biographers, Anderson suggested that their underlying agenda must be, "I have this notecard and, damn it, you're going to read it."

Ultimately, though, the task is finding the story within all the details and telling that story well. Andereson quoted W. E. B. DuBois, who admitted at one point in the process of writing, "I have finished the book. I have not yet turned it into a work of literature."

Patricia Bosworth, the author of six biographies and her own family memoir, grew up in Hollywood circles, the daughter of a show business lawyer, so she certainly has fit Bob Weil's requirement of being someone who knows the life she is chronicling. Using Diane Arbus and Marlon Brando, she contrasted the experience of writing the life of someone that has not yet been chronicled and the life of someone whose biography has been written many times before.

The task of writing about Diane Arbus (whom she had met long ago and remembered, having been a photo subject of hers once) required interactions with family and friends who knew the now-deceased artist. Arbus's daughter, the holder of the family archives, wanted her mother's work to speak for herself and did not help Bosworth with her biography. Arbus's brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, was helpful, as were Arbus's friends, who supplied Bosworth with all sorts of mementos, letters, and postcards, now the heart of a Diane Arbus archive at Boston University.

"It is so exciting and so challenging to establish a body of research," said Bosworth. "My goal was the describe a woman who was a woman, a wife, a mother, and an artist. I wanted to explore her world, both the world of her family and the world of fashion." The book took more than six years to write. "You have to be really patient and hardworking," said Bosworth, to write a biography.

When an editor asked Patricia Bosworth to write a 150-page book on Marlon Brando for the Penguin Lives series, she realized there were already 11 Brando biographies in print. Given the assigned length and the field of existing books, she narrowed her focus to Brando's acting accomplishments. "How did he become one of our greatest actors? How did he revolutionize acting?" were the questions she posed for herself. Now, as she embarks on a biography about Jane Fonda, also featured in books already, Bosworth recognizes that she is the first woman writing a book on Fonda and will capitalize on that connection. "I'm interested in the cultural history we can see through Fonda's life," she said -- "her metamorphoses."

"You can have a hell of a life researching other people's lives," said Patricia Bosworth, summing the panel up. "It's like solving a puzzle. I'm very excited about the craft of biography."

by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
April 20, 2002