Throw out your to-be-read list, cancel your pre-orders, let your library check-outs sit overdue and cover the pile of books you got for your birthday with a decorative blanket. Shock everyone. The next time you read, I implore you to do something radical, challenging and downright absurd: Pick up a biography.
To preface, if you have ever had the misfortune of going on a Tinder date with someone who won’t stop talking about how either “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson or “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder changed their life, I’m so sorry. You, rightfully, likely have an extremely negative perception of the kind of person who dedicates their time to biographies and, considering your lived experience, I don’t have much of a rebuttal. Nothing I say will be able to change your mind. Click off and be at peace.
But for everyone else reading: I first want to make very clear the difficulty of the sell I’m trying to make. When I say “biography,” I’m not referring to memoirs, diaries or autobiographies written from the perspective of a person living in a historical period, like “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank or “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Nor am I talking about broad nonfiction books that cover a topic of interest like “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson or “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. I’m also not talking about fictionalized retellings of people’s lives, like Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde” or Therese Anne Fowler’s “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.” I love all these genres, and I don’t mean to diminish the quality of the examples I’ve just given. However, I want to advocate for something separate from all that: dry, extensively researched, birth-to-death biographies.
I’m not even really talking about “important” biographies about people whose lives have fundamentally shaped the world we live in today, like Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” which documents the life of Cudjo Lewis, likely the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade. These books are needed, and they more than deserve to be read. Sometimes, it’s hard to even separate these “important” narratives from the “unimportant.” What, exactly, makes one individual’s life more worth hearing about than another’s? There’s an argument that all biographies deserve reading: Anyone with a life documented enough to fill a book must have touched history in some lasting way, after all. Even further than this, getting a glimpse into the landscape of the past can remind us of the malleability of the human condition. These are good arguments for the biography. You should do useful things that help you understand the world that you live in.
My argument is worse, but I strongly believe it: You should also do absurd things. You should read things that don’t produce “value” for yourself other than the joy of acquiring knowledge, even if it feels useless.
Last summer, I read Anna Whitelock’s “Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen.” I’m not really sure why I did. There was no noble purpose in this pursuit. My aim was not to take lessons from the past, nor did I feel that knowledge of her life would somehow change mine. I was just curious about what drove the so-called “Bloody Mary” to the actions she took during her infamous reign and, by extension, what it meant to be a female monarch in a culture so alien from my own that I needed an entire book to understand her reasons for taking them. It was fascinating. Did you know that, due to her father Henry VIII and his constant marriage troubles, Mary was sent away from court as an illegitimate inheritor of the throne from the ages of 17 to 21, only for another remarriage to deem her the rightful heir? Or that Mary’s husband, Phillip, didn’t speak any English when he wedded her, and they therefore communicated in Latin? Or that, despite her lack of popularity, she revolutionized the English monarchy’s revenue collection system during her tenure as Queen? I sure didn’t. But now I do — and so do you!
This is the simple joy that comes from biography. These books are so full of specificities about these people that they can’t be predicted. In a world of increasingly formulaic media, the biography breaks from expected narrative arcs and tropes. Real people are messy. They’re surprising and they often do things that don’t make much sense. Their stories have holes, and sometimes their lives end without any neat conclusions or growth. In turn, the enrichment comes less from traditional satisfaction and more from the special itch you scratch when doing something interesting with your time.
I understand that there are a thousand reasons that the biography seems like an unattractive genre to invest one’s extremely sparse spare time. I get that these books — often better described as tomes than anything else — are sometimes dense and hard to follow. It’s hard enough to find time to read, let alone commit to a 500+ page text with footnotes. However, if you can manage it, you should. If for no other reason than the ridiculousness of it.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.