The books of life
Three not-boring biographies, brought to you by my friend, Samanth!
This issue of EELS is written it its majority by my friend,
, writer of , and the most delightful genius you’ll ever meet. I associate biographies with irrelevant and/or falsely worshipful minutiae—and therefore am bored by most of them—but he swears I am wrong, and as I believe this kind and funny and generally correct man in all things, let us bestow upon him our raptest attention.Actually, I do have a handful of biographies I love, so I’ll throw my own bonus rec at the end. See you next week when I’m back from a trip! — S
Almost as soon as I started reading biographies, I got sick of them. Or, to be more accurate, I got sick of their most orthodox format: soup to nuts, birth to death, "So-and-so was born in...." (In one pandemic year, I was part of the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Memoir. I cannot explain to you how it numbs the mind to read book after book that meekly follows that format.) What I really craved was the function of a biography—the ability to render a life in rich and vivid and thought-provoking strokes—but not the form.
Dear reader: they're out there, these kinds of books! I present here a selection of three, but I'm eager as blazes to hear about your own favourites (Susan: stet the English spelling!) (Samanth: I will do this but in retaliation I will leave in your note) in this genre.
🎷 But Beautiful
Geoff Dyer, 1992
Maybe I'm already cheating? Dyer subtitles his slim volume "A Book about Jazz," and strictly speaking the book is about jazz more than it is a biography. Rather, it is a collection of biographies: chapters on great musicians, each one extracting and lightly dramatising episodes in their lives. The details of their days, and the swift arcs of lives, are all grounded in fact (which is why I feel I should include it here). But Dyer manages the difficult feat of making this enterprise of prose feel jazz-like, riffing off those real details to give us something deeper and entirely his own. "Write a book about jazz that also feels like jazz" is one of those ideas that a writer gets at 3 am on an insomniac night. Somehow, Dyer gets there.
Recommended for: Jazz fans, naturally. Also for people who like Dyer's loose, impressionistic writing style—which can be frustrating on occasion (I'm looking at you, "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi") but works so well here.
🌇 Sandfuture
Justin Beal, 2021
Nominally, this is a biography of Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese-American architect who built the World Trade Centre towers (as well as Pruitt-Igoe house, a housing complex also destined for disaster). Yamasaki's life and thinking are both fascinating, and what's not to love about great architecture writing?
Beal's book, though, is also a memoir of sorts, and a meditation on building buildings in an age of climate change. He gets sidetracked often, and enjoyably, and he goes deep down these rabbit holes. Did you know that the late 19th century/early 20th century craze for sanatoriums in Europe—the kind that Hans Castorp visits in The Magic Mountain—inspired its own particular styles of architecture, the relics of which are still around us today? Did you know what the economics of the average, mid-sized art gallery look like? Sandfuture will tell you.
Recommended for: Everyone? Like, who hasn't heard of the WTC? Readers like me, who looooooove little doses of "trivia" (I hate that word—how it trivialises nuggety knowledge!) administered every now and then.
🥕 Orwell's Roses
Rebecca Solnit, 2021
This book raises, and answers, the eternal question of biographers: How do you write about someone who has been written about exhaustively already? Do you even add to that corpus? The answer is always: Yes, if you have found a new avenue into the life. Solnit focuses on George Orwell as a gardener, but she offers his love of beauty as a counterpoint to his otherwise staid, scold-y, socialist image. "Outside my work," Orwell wrote, "the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening" —and so we should care about his gardening too.
Solnit's own excursions beyond Orwell are wonderful as well. At one point, she goes to Colombia to visit Big Roses: the horticultural-industry complex that farms roses for sale by the millions, using cheap and un-unionised labour. Her prescription, such as it is, is gentle and unforced. Orwell looked to his garden and to nature for hope and beauty during difficult times. We might want to as well.
Recommended for: Orwell fans, who have perhaps read the oeuvre and the other biographies and wish to know more. And devotees of gardens, of course.
And now, a bonus recommendation
💋 My Story — Marilyn Monroe and Ben Hecht, published posthumously in 1974
“I have read this twice, and am annoyed at the glossy coffee-table feel of the edition that’s currently in print, with its sexy photos of Marilyn and totally crucial foreword by the son of the photographer who took the pics. The whole vibe totally belies the point of the auto-ish-biography: Life as Marilyn was hard-won and hard-lived, and, if you live it, you’re not only a commodified object for film viewers, but you bodily belong to industry people, too. There’s no escape. Or maybe, the edition perfectly and bleakly nails the point. Try to talk all you want, Marilyn, but we’re just here for the pics!
Anyway, I love this book. It’s an easy read, and an eye-opening one. I’m so sorry, Marilyn! This role could only destroy!”
Recommended by: Susan, the writer and sender of EELS. The last three books she loved were, I don’t know, the ones you hear about all the time and a few you’ll hear about next week.
Special thanks to Samanth! If you want a really gut-twisting nonfiction to read this summer, check out This Divided Island, which he wrote, and I talk about in EELS: Stop making plans)
That was the forty-fourth EELS! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan
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