Wondering what you favorite celebrity is up to?
Warning: Citizen Kane Spoiler Ahead |
| Published: July 30, 2007, 1:02 pm |
| Tags: i on the news, writers writing |
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In the New Yorker, in his essay about Meryle Secrest’s Shoot the Widow (Knopf) and Nigel Hamilton’s Biography: A Brief History (”Lives of Others“), Louis Menand offers some useful perspective on the biographer’s art. Briefly put: a fact doesn’t explain its subject better simply because it was previously unreported. For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, [ Full article ] |
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