The death of life writing

[Dave Monroe]

The death of life writing

Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and
countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of
biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best
subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn
Hughes

Saturday June 28, 2008
The Guardian

Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with
the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing.
Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes
on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton,
lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.)
Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in
rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly,
not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis"
might be nearer.

Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening.
According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time
high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies
are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market
as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the
exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to
shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite
her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary
Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best
biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.

However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather
than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of
a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of
Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials....

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2287893,00.html

The New York Times
July 1, 2008,  2:47 pm
The End of Biography?
By Jennifer Schuessler

Just about every literary genre has been declared dead. Is biography's
time up too?
Kathryn Hughes, writing in The Guardian, thinks so. Most of the major
figures have been written about, probably more than once, leaving
little more than B-list movie stars, third-string royal mistresses,
and inanimate objects. (Salt, anyone?) "The 19th and 20th centuries
have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or
soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of
serviceable prose," Hughes writes.

On a bad day, I'd call that generous: plenty of the biographies that
cross my desk are 600 pages of less than serviceable prose. But then
again, there are are still some plums ripe for the picking, including
Cormac McCarthy, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Salman
Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon, to keep things confined to the literary
world. And if heavyweights like Claire Tomalin and Michael Holroyd
(both quoted in Hughes's article) are still bullish, well, perhaps
there's life in life writing yet.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/the-end-of-biography/