Book Review: How to Do Biography, A Primer

Nigel Hamilton’s tome is much more entertaining than I expected it to be. I mean, 400 pages! How could that be, well, fun?

Weighty topic. Weighty in weight. So it was a delightful surprise to find myself enjoying, as much as I did, the sections I read.

Full disclosure. I did not read the entire book. Yet. There were sections I’m not interested in even a tad. Autobiography and memoir? Meh. I don’t ever want to write those. And this exploration was about improving what I write.

Even the sections I am interested in, I didn’t get all the way through. I’ll be dipping into this book as I continue my quest to learn about writing better biographies.

How to Do Biography, a Primer is, as I told you last week, one of the few available texts on biography writing how-tos. So what sections did I find helpful thus far?

First, let me tell you what’s here. The book is divided into three sections comprising sixteen chapters. Chapter titles are:

The Task of Biography

What Is Your Agenda?

Defining Your Audience

Researching Your Subject

The Shape of a Life

The Starting Point

Birthing Your Subject

Childhood and Youth

Love Stories

Life’s Work

The Twilight Years

Ending Your Story

Autobiography and Memoirs

Memoir

Truth—and Its Consequences

The Afterlife

Now tell me you didn’t find some of those chapters intriguing! I dipped in and out of sections and chapters, letting my interests lead me.

He begins the first chapter with this:

You wish to write or produce a “life”, but wisely pause to think about the task. I have no wish to hold you up; but no would-be biographer, in my view, should embark on the depiction of a real life without bothering to know something about how—and why—previous biographies have addressed the real individual in the past—and with what results.

He goes on in the following chapters to talk about successful and unsuccessful biographies, and what made them that way. In the chapter, Researching Your Subject, Hamilton makes a clear case for understanding historical methodology and biographical research. The bottom line for him is ethical. You cannot exclude information that doesn’t fit your bias, nor accept iffy research that does. You cannot partially use quotes to fit your bias. In this chapter he also discusses research sources, and he makes it interesting.

In “The Starting Point,” he shows myriad ways biographers open their books. He compares writing biography to writing a musical composition. Both have notes that must be arranged in pleasing, satisfying, cohesive, and coherent ways. When successful, they both sing.

At the end, there is a chapter, “Truth---and Its Consequences”, that is very informative. We don’t always consider the impact of truth-telling, or in some cases the word choices we make to tell truth, and how our work can hurt feelings or harm reputations. Telling the truth isn’t always admirable. He raises some very interesting points with his examples. I am not an apologist for his perspective, but what he wrote should be considered by every biographer.

There is much more for me to garner, so I’ll probably be writing again about Hamilton’s book. But why wait for me? If you are writing biography, buy your own copy of How to Do Biography, A Primer.

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