I'm reading a biography on Joy Division's Ian Curtis, (more on the book in a future post), and I realize that in the last few years I have been totally obsessed with reading biographies. Much earlier, in my formative years, it was fiction I was mad about.
I think it kind of goes with that idea that "truth" is stranger than fiction. Or that the "works of imagination" and "real-world" events are both fabulous and confounding. And really a biography is an act of imagination too, with some markers along the way.
A life has a trajectory bounded by "born" here, "died" there, but then how the middle space is filled seems infinitely malleable. And the other appealing thing about a "well-written" biography is there is a coherence, there is some through-line forged from the accumulation of seemingly random events.
Maybe this is reassuring in some way, that the raging flow of experiences that wash over us, can be sifted down and the nuggets of meaning can be extracted to add up to some coherent story. We do this all the time, try to make stories of our own lives.
It's sometimes hard to do on the fly. What is significant, and what is just noise? Does everything count? Is there an invisible hand? Are we really conscious of all that we do? How did I get here? What the hell is going on?!
So the biographer distills it down and hammers it all into paragraphs and chapters. In a way a biography really is a fiction, just like any other act of imagination. And really you are guided by the unseen hand of the writer.
And then there is a weird pleasure associated with knowing something about the subject before you even crack the book. Suddenly seeming random events, chance meetings, odd coincidences, background noise of a life all accumulate into some kind of narrative and grand tale of "destiny." There is a satisfaction knowing what we know, and finding out what we didn't and thinking that somehow we understand something about life and how it is lived.
It's all really an elaborate lie. But an enjoyable lie. It usually doesn't end well. But then you put the book down and move on to another.