Interesting New Yorker article on the prying prurience of biography, even in this age when people spend half their day putting their private lives online for one and all. Extract:
The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one
realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the
duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies
are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically
forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened
later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is
renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what
happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the
reader’s.
The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one
realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the
duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies
are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically
forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened
later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is
renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what
happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the
reader’s.
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