All learning is senseuristic, and I find that biographies in particular allow me to benefit from mainlining other people’s experience; for example, Cole Porter advised me to be patient with my failures, since he wrote over 1,500 songs and had fewer than 50 hits, plus he persevered after his legs were crushed. Natalie Barney’s life is a cautionary tale that illustrates the isolating consequences of sultanism; in other words, you won’t catch me squandering any more of my vast fortune in pursuit of a harem. And instead of learning helplessness, Carrie Fisher folded her challenges into her considerable accomplishments, tracing a path whose pattern brought me to consider chaos theory as a useful metaphor for certain types of lifetimes. In the lines below, I have distilled each such set of life lessons into an aphorism (of sorts).
Some of these homilies represent lessons that someone learned to their benefit (Rosemary L. Bray), while others are haunting patterns from which someone never escaped (Nat King Cole). If you want to know which of these lessons caricature the person, and which of them encapsulate their world instead (including the lives of other people around them), then you’ll have to do some extracurricular reading.
And why resort to aphoristic reduction? Well, pith takes up less space, it’s an entertaining challenge for me, and the resulting homilies end up as puzzles for you; for example, when I write only that “Muses are seductive,” I mean to say that your art will do its level best to draw you away from your family and friends, which means that you have to be careful to maintain your priorities when it comes to your time and love. Just like a human partner, a Muse is not a light switch, and flirting with an Art involves just as much risk as dallying with a person. That’s what I learned from the comments made by Turner’s acquaintances, and from descriptions of his erratic affability… his Art kept him on a short leash. I could go on and on, and in fact Turner’s biographers and researchers have already done so for thousands of pages. How much easier for me to simply digest, even if it is a lossy compression.
I have included the titles of those books that I particularly enjoyed (and a couple that I did not), although I should warn you, they stand out for a variety of different reasons. (If no books are listed, then either I don’t remember, or I learned about the person through some other set of sources.) The style of Rosemary L. Bray’s writing sets a standard against which I will forever measure my own efforts, and the living value that I got from reading her autobiography supports my contention that you should always choose some library books at random (while remembering the Cole Porter rule, of course). Tom Arnold’s book, in comparison, is a classic example of the clown laughing when the only other alternative is to cry your throat raw. His advice contains episodes where I cringed (more or less) in the face of TMI, but then again, what’s the point of a Tilt-a-Whirl where every rider has a handbrake? In short, if you use these titles as a reading list, caveat lector.
And without further ado, I give you The List:
Aalto, (Hugo) Alvar (Henrik): We are more than what we do. [Sketches]
Aaron, (Henry Louis) Hank: Home runs are only part of total bases. [I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story]
Alexie, Sherman Joseph (Jr.): Colors, emotions, memories... spectral complements enhance intensities. [The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me]
Arnold, (Thomas Duane) Tom: What you do is less important than who you do it with. [How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years]
Bacon, Francis: Don’t be only a fair weather friend.
Barney, Natalie Clifford: You can’t buy love, but a wealthy dominatrix can afford many slaves. [Adventures of the Mind: The Memoires of Natalie Clifford Barney]
Barrows, Sydney Biddle: Don’t keep any diary that you wouldn’t publish.
Bechdel, Alison J.: Analysis risks objectification. [Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother?, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For]
Behn, Aphra: We guess that the creation reflects the creator.
Bray, Rosemary L.: The right mentor makes a world of difference. [Unafraid of the Dark]
Byron, Ada: Creativity resists compression.
Chapman, Graham Arthur: A little exaggeration never hurt anybody. [A Liar’s Autobiography]
Coates, Ta-Nehisi Paul: Some scions are born to houses struggling to recover. [The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir, Between the World and Me]
Cole, (Nathaniel Adam) Nat King: Trust is earned. [Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole]
Crystal, (William Edward) Billy: Every god has a silver lining. [700 Sundays]
Dickens, Charles John Huffam: Your better self cannot be won, no matter how hard you strive, if you are off saving the world while your lesser self torments your family. [Charles Dickens: A Life]
Fisher, Carrie Frances: In adapting to the edge of chaos (per theory), identify your attractors (and write postcards). [Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic, The Princess Diarist]
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand: Consider the lowly virus. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Harris, (Everette) E. Lynn: Be one of the valued people in your life who values you. [What Becomes of the Brokenhearted: A Memoir]
Hearn, (Patrick) Lafcadio (aka Yakumo Koizumi: 小泉 八雲): Before crusading against tyrants, check your reflection in the eyes of your loved ones.
Hitler, (Adolfus) Adolf: See Hoover, J. Edgar.
Hoover, (John) J. Edgar: Power attracts blowflies.
Jones, Cleve: Advocacy can renew the life lease not just of its objects, but its subjects as well. [When We Rise]
Kahlo (de Rivera), (Magdalena Carmen) Frida: Sometimes, only saturation suffices.
Kazantzakis, Nikos: The destination is the journey. [Zorba the Greek]
Kimmel, Haven “Zippy": What doesn’t kill me makes me stranger. [A Girl Named Zippy; She Got Up Off the Couch]
MacMurphy, Peter: Only misery likes miserable company.
Mar, Man Yee Elaine: Escape is an art. [Paper Daughter: A Memoir]
Margaret (of Wessex), Saint and Queen of Scotland: Teach your kids some family history.
Marshall, (Carole) Penny: Mixed nuts, mixed blessing. [My Mother Was Nuts: A Memoir]
Martin, (Stephen Glenn) Steve: Beware the zero-sum gain. [Steve Martin: The Magic Years]
Massaquoi, Hans-Jürgen: Americans live in a glass house. [Destined to Witness]
McBride, James: Know your People. [The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother]
Monroe, Marilyn (born Norma Jeane Mortenson): Ornamentation is camouflage.
Oates, Joyce Carol: Sunglasses don’t make the world dark.
Ōba, Sakae 大場 栄: Brains are local; brawn is global. [Oba, The Last Samurai: Saipan 1944–1945, Love Letters from the Fires of War]
O’Brian, Patrick (born Richard Patrick Russ): Friendship is not worship. [Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist]
Porter, Cole Albert: For every success, be patient with fifty failures. [Cole Porter]
Schindler, Oscar: Sometimes your only choice is which lifeboat. [Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List]
Sellers, (Richard Henry) Peter: “Sorry” is subject to semantic satiation. [P.S. I Love You!, Mr Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers]
Shapiro, Susan: The common factor in all of your life’s recurring patterns is yourself. [Five Men Who Broke My Heart: A Memoir]
Szpilman, Władysław: Parents can’t live as if they have nothing to lose. [The Pianist]
Taklha, Namgyal Lhamo: “Home is where your heart is.” [Born in Lhasa]
Turner, Joseph Mallord William: Muses are seductive.
Utley, (Clifton) Garrick: Life waits for no one. [You Should Have Been Here Yesterday: A Life Story in Television News]
Vance, (James David) J. D.: Limited experience projects without confidence. [Hillbilly Elegy]
Walker, Morris Wayne: It’s all about your loved ones. [Steve Martin: The Magic Years]
Watts, Alan Wilson: Organism = Environment. [In My Own Way]
Wilder, Gene (born Jerome Silberman): “A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men.” [Kiss Me Like a Stranger]
X, Malcolm (aka el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz: الحاجّ مالك الشباز): Periodic personal reinvention is well worth the cost. [The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley; Malcolm X: The Man and His Times]
Ziglar, (Hilary Hinton) Zig: Tell them now. [The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar]
Zyskind, Eliezer: Might wins; right endures. [Struggle]
(Plager-) Zyskind, Sara (שרה פלגר-זיסקינד): People who share caring remain people. [The Stolen Years]
I know that there aren’t all that many bios here, but I started this project years ago and soon got distracted, so you’ll have to be patient. (See Note 1, below.) My reliance on books biases my exposure, as there are all manner of interesting people to learn from who will not have had their lives recorded in this way. And of course my impressions about these people are influenced by whatever I learned about them outside of books as well.
Autobiography enjoys a long tradition of reality drift. Sometimes an author bends the facts of a particular event to preserve the emotional accuracy of a portrayal, changing some of the things that they did to better communicate what they felt. Or an author might introduce some darts and accordion pleats in the fabric of their life to more accurately portray the sense or the fashion of the time in which they lived. (My favorite movie about these notions is Big Fish.) There are also cases where moderate embellishment simply makes the story more entertaining, and I appreciate that. Sherman Alexie (Jr.) is marvellously semitranslucent about his variable reliability. After all, there’s a lot to be said for encouraging an author to portray their persona as they perceive and interpret it, because an autobiography is by definition subjective. Not that a person couldn’t write a wholly objective account of their own life, but as far as I’m concerned, that would be (an autoless) biography.
Having said that, I think that an author can stray so far from their persona as to create a fictional character, as happened with the pedophile Tim Burrus pretending to have been Nasdijj (clearly), or Alex Frey pretending to have been Alex Frey (perhaps less clearly for some folks, such as Alex Frey). Works that cross that threshold (for me) are not included in this list.
And then, to top it all off, there’s the problem of memory. (See Note 2, below.)
Eventually, I will reduce this list of reductions to come to the broadest overgeneralization of all. It will likely embody such notions as identifying and taking control over your reflexes, being kind, and so on. It is sort of like searching for the meaning of life, I suppose, but it does grow out of some very specific fundamental assumptions, and I am not sure how well I can speak to those, such as that life is something to optimize according to certain parameters, such as the happiness of self and others. And so on. So this finale will be a work in progress for a long time.
Endnotes
Note 1: Among many others, I still have to reduce material that I have already gathered about the following people (where I assume that the list will always grow faster than I can absorb): Douglas Adams [Salmon of Doubt], St. Augustine [The Confessions of St. Augustine], Pearl S. Buck [The Child Who Never Grew], Marie Curie, David Eggers [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius], Tina Fey [Bossypants], Richard P. Feynman [Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!], Jim Gaffigan [Dad is Fat], Indira Nehru Gandhi, Temple Grandin [Emergence: Labeled Autistic; Thinking in Pictures: Other Reports from My Life with Autism], John Howard Griffin [Black Like Me], Thupten Jinpa [A Fearless Heart], Paul Kalanthi [When Breath Becomes Air], Maxine Hong Kingston [Woman Warrior], Henrietta Lacks [The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks], Frank McCourt [Angela’s Ashes], Joseph Merrick [The True History of the Elephant Man], William Chester Minor [The Professor and the Madman], Henry Molaison [Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets], Anaïs Nin [The Diary of Anaïs Nin], Sherwin B. Nuland [The Art of Aging], Martin Pistorius [Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body], Amy Poehler [Yes Please], Oliver Sacks [Gratitude; On the Move: A Life; Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood], Marjane Satrapi [Persepolis], David Sedaris [Me Talk Pretty One Day], Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn [Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life], Art Spiegelman [Maus], Alice (Babette) B. Toklas [The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas], (Eliezer) Elie Wiesel (אֱלִיעֶזֶר וִיזֶל) [Night], Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde [Oscar Wilde; The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde; Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius], Richard Nathaniel Wright [Native Son; Black Boy], Paramahansa Yogananda (পরমহংস যোগানন্দ, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh: মুকুন্দলাল ঘোষ) [Autobiography of a Yogi], and Barry Yourgrau [Wearing Dad’s Head]. I will have to find out more about certain of these people before feeling confident in hazarding any summary (or I have yet to identify the typically favored source work).
Note 2: In the Introduction, I talked about burning a toothpick sculpture. To avoid muddying that story, I did not bring up some aspects of the tale that have become fuzzy to me. For example, I seem to recall that my friend Daren Primack was there as well, and the sculpture might have been a shared project (taking off from one that had been started at school, maybe in sixth grade), but while my memory skills are really strong in some ways, there are others in which it faces significant challenges. So he might have been there, or my brain might have thrown that in just for the hell of it. And Jeff remembers my dad pissing on the blaze, but that might be apocryphal.
One time a girlfriend claimed that I had (months before her retelling) been to a beach party with her. I said that it must have been someone else. She was adamant, though, bordering on angry. The thing is, she was raised there in San Diego and had been to all sorts of beach parties with numerous other people; in contrast, I had never, ever been to a beach party, so if I had ever deviated from that pattern, I would be very likely to remember the only beach party that I had ever attended. So which of the two of us was more likely to have been mistaken? Logic would suggest that she was inaccurate. I think that what was making her so insistent was some (unnecessary) embarrassment around the likelihood that she had been there with a different boyfriend. I was equally insistent because I didn’t want to give her retconning permission. I didn’t have the experience at the time to understand that conflict in those terms, but I know that I didn’t trust her enough to let her rewrite our history. We learn some of these dynamics from slippery slopes (that sometimes have quartz embedded in the red clay.
Anyway, my worst memory disability is that I can’t remember people’s names well at all, or call them to mind readily even when I have known them well for years. Typically, a name close to the target blocks the retrieval of the actual name. Two names in particular used to plague me when I was a kid: Jim Brown (football player) and Julie Newmar (not football player). I also used to have a hell of a time trying to remember the name of my kindergarten therapist (Tod Anton) even though by the time I was in high school he had become the district Superintendent.
And I can remember that (back around fourth grade) I used to have a penpal named Julie Arndt who lived in Ames, Iowa. So how come some of those names are so easy to access, while others consistently hide behind other names that act as distractors? If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.