Louis Menand on biography

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.

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Women and fiction

The title "Women and Fiction" might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write, or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback: I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer - to hand you, after an hour's discourse, a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions; women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Part of a great lecture (given in two slightly different forms on two separate occasions, it says here) by Virginia Woolf in 1928. Reprinted, I know not why (other than perhaps Why Not?) here.

Birthday

Jerome, Jerome Klapka (1859–1927), novelist and playwright,
was born on 2 May 1859 at Bradford Street, Walsall, Staffordshire, the
fourth child and younger son of Jerome Clapp Jerome (1807–1872),
nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner, and
Marguerite Jones (d. 1874), daughter of a Swansea solicitor.

from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's daily lives.

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Different strokes

The greater part of valor was choosing what to leave out. It's not a memoir in the strictest sense, because it's not really about us, it's about food production and local economies. The largest emotional events of the year, for us personally, are hardly mentioned, if at all: the death of Steven's sister; my slow recovery from a crippling accident; our family's adjustment after Camille moved to college -- these were not the domain of the book.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them. "Because it really happened" is the worst reason to write anything, leading directly to ramshackle prose and the painful American custom of oversharing. I suppose 10,000 bloggers would disagree with me on that point. Perhaps here we've hit upon the distinction between blogger and author.

Barbara Kingsolver commenting on her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, in Salon.

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Obituary: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood (her Mum)

globeandmail.com: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood:

"LIVES LIVED
Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood
Mother, dietitian, ice dancer. Born June 8, 1909, in Kinsman's Corners, N.S. Died Dec. 30, 2006, in Toronto, of natural causes, aged 97.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Someone said to me recently, 'You must have had an unusual mother.' True enough.

Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Her father was a country doctor, and she grew up as a socially shy but physically brave tomboy. Unlike her academically brilliant sister, Kae, she was not a natural student. Her father refused to send her to university because she was 'frivolous,' so she taught school, saved the money for her own fees, and won a college scholarship, just to show she could.

More at the above link.

Spotted on Google's blog

In addition, we've just added our most important location yet: an online home at google.com/talks/authors with a video archive
of our events on YouTube. Just this year, we've hosted a great variety of authors, including Martin Amis, Strobe Talbott, Bob & Lee Woodruff, Jonathan Lethem, Don Tapscott, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina. The subjects of their talks range from literary fiction to science fiction, sociology to technology, politics to business.

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Literary birthday

Oxford DNB: Lives of the week

Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), author and magistrate, was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, the eldest of the seven children of Colonel Edmund Fielding (1680–1741), a veteran of Marlborough's wars who would rise to the rank of lieutenant-general, and Sarah Gould (bap. 1682, d. 1718), daughter of Sir Henry Gould (1643/4–1710), judge of the king's bench, and his wife, Sarah (c.1654–1733), daughter of Richard Davidge, a wealthy London merchant with property in the west country, whose estate at Sharpham she inherited.

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