Is a certain amount of infatuation necessary for a good biography?
Leon Edel, who wrote five volumes on the life of Henry James, said that writing biography was a little like falling in love. “Of course,” he added, “it’s a one-sided love affair since the love object is dead or, if alive, relatively unwooable.” In other words, a proper biography is an exercise in safe stalking: no one gets hurt, and the subject is too busy or dead to care. Without the passion it’s a chronicle of schooldays and grocery lists and letters to insurance adjusters. But if we end up learning as much about the author (and his obsession) as we do about the subject, the story can come alive. The best biographers end up as stealth characters in their own books: they fall in love, they follow the trail, they fall out of love, they lose their way, they find their way, and the subject is revealed almost by accident. The story is the search, not the discovery. And if the searcher is motivated by love—even a weird, obsessive, cockeyed, never-to-be-resolved love—even better.
The Dish 