Ideally, you end up with your own biography, something to build on for the rest of your life.
When I couldn't find the answers in her biography, something happened that I still don't fully understand.
As I went in, I filed past a giant print of "Dovima with Elephants," the 1955 photograph that Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson, in their capacious and valuable new Avedon biography Something Personal, call "incontestably the most celebrated single image in the history of fashion photography".
To him, biography is something of a confection: "You live your life prospectively and tell your story retrospectively, so it looks like everything is converging".
In quite a different vein, Olivia Laing's debut, To The River, has a Sebaldian edge to it that lifts it out of memoir and biography into something far more tantalising and suggestive.
She started out as a reporter for local papers, in Canada and England, a job calling for a continual sacrifice of literary refinement in the interests of filling the page and meeting the deadline, and she approaches biography in something of the same spirit.
Big enough for Gérard Depardieu to offer to learn English to play the role eventually given to Mr. Woods, and (according to Christopher Frayling's excellent biography, "Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death") for Norman Mailer to lock himself in a Rome hotel room for three weeks, consume several bottles of whiskey and emerge with an early, unusable stab at a screenplay.
Doug: I don't know this song, but isn't that the line that titles Brian Wilson's biography or something?
Enfield's biography has become something close to hagiography at this point.
Frayling's biography of Leone, Something To Do With Death, is released next month, and FilmFour is running a season featuring Leone's Clint Eastwood movies.
– but all this magical speculation is rather undermined when you read a Tinder biography that says something like (an example from just this afternoon): "Travel, treehouses, festivals, food, sun, skiing, sausage dogs, steel drums, bike rides, canal boats, desert islands".
