Jessica C. Lieberman
                           The University of Michigan

Are all people difficult to pin down, to define, to characterize completely and without contradictions or irregularities? Can we ever really understand the "truth" about someone? How do we know if appearances are not the result of pretending, falsifying or misinterpretation? In distinguishing evidence from assumption, will all investigators arrive at the same version of truth, the same sense of a person's identity?

As our Cases have illustrated, these are the kinds of questions and issues that trouble and inspire biographical narrative. As you investigate this art you will come to realize that it is more than a chronicle of events, experiences, accomplishments and failures. Beyond the generic categories of biography - popular, historical, literary, reference, fictional - lies a wealth of complex motivations and approaches. In order to discover the biographical subject's secrets and beliefs, you must avoid facile and lazy assumptions that conflate his or her experience with your own, that overlay the relevant contexts with contexts you prefer simply because they are familiar. Even as you (like Richard Holmes) remain aware that you really can't do it, TRY to get inside the subject's skin. For a biography is a portrait of a life: an idiosyncratic recreation that is not fiction but shares many traits with fiction and requires similar powers of imagination. A biographer not only acquires facts through careful research; she must also distill such evidence into a gripping story for readers.

Exercise 1:

This is an opportunity for you to test these difficulties for yourselves. Select a subject of your own to research and write his or her biography. Two possibilities:

a. Narrow your search to the archives of your College or University Library, Town Hall or Historical Society. Your mission is to find a subject who is an alumnus of your school. With the evidence you find, compile a history and write an authoritative account of the identity into which your subject was born and the identity he or she acquired.

Choosing a Subject and Finding Sources:

Think carefully about your options and investigate broadly. Personal interest is often a good way to start. Ask yourself: What kind of person attracts me? Is there a career choice or particular experience that makes a subject intriguing to me? Who might make for "good company" in a project of sustained research and reconstruction?

Be conscientious in your survey. Find someone who excites you, someone who shares your interests, background or outlook. Or do the opposite--maybe you will find the life of a subject who is decidedly unlike you to be the most engrossing, someone from whom you feel a sense of detachment. Do not simply leap at the most obvious subject. Is there a much-maligned person whose reputation you might hope to salvage? Or an over-rated figure whom you would love to take down a peg or two? Maybe there is a person or type of person who has always captured your fancy though you have never been sure exactly why. These are the kinds of subjects you might consider. You may find the first athlete or graduate of your race, religion or gender. You may be inspired by a subject whose appearance to the world is nothing like your own but whose private documents on file spark your compassion and empathy.

Focus on an individual who has a substantial or at least provocative file in the archive. Ask your local librarians about various resources available and be sure your subject is feasible. You may have a great-great uncle who attended your school and who captures your interest, but on whom you simply cannot find sufficient material to fuel the project. But if your school has been around for some time, you will be astounded by the materials archived. For example, you may find a "dance card" that tells you the name of a gentlemen who invited a lady to the floor for a four minute dance a century and a half ago. Maybe you will find the name of this partner in other sources and can piece together their role in the life of your subject. Archives often have substantial information that will truly surprise you: diaries, journals, scrapbooks, photo albums, private letters, personal statements, assignments, publications, applications, yearbooks, necrology files (including obituaries, notices of death and death lists), questionnaires, surveys, newspaper articles, etc. Be creative and see if you can dig up telling but less frequently thought of sources such as old class lists and term schedules. Knowing what your subject did each day, scholastically and socially, can draw you deeper into his/her world and allow you to better surmise regular routines. Place these schedules into the relevant contexts of the time and next to topical subjects you find in newspapers and you are on your way to imagining (with due concern not to stray into fiction) the conversations your subject may have had on street corners. Use all the resources available to you and really plumb the
possibilities: learn everything you can about your collegiate predecessor.

Be thoughtful: keep close track of what you know and what you do not know, of appearances, of perceptions, of what is claimed, of what can be discounted. Try to spot the relationships between facts that appear to have no connection whatsoever and flex your imaginative muscle in the spaces where there is less information. This is different than writing fiction--make imaginative but educated guesses in order to produce a plausible, though inevitably subjective narrative of depth and density. Remember that "factual" evidence and historical materials are often riddled with errors and evasions. Be aware of how you surmise and refashion truth with educated and selective decisions. Your subject was once a living, breathing agent in this world and your job is to breath life back into the complexities and ambiguities that are ever-present in our lives.
 

b. Apply the above strategies, with suitable adjustments, to writing the biography - or at least part of the biography - of a relative. The key here is to a have a rich source - perhaps a diary, a set of letters, short stories or poems the person left unpublished, papers from his or her professional life - around which to build and amplify. If possible, interview the subject and people (including other relatives) who know or knew him or her. The more informed you've become in advance, the more valuable material the interviews are likely to yield. Keep in mind that the information you acquire in interviews has been shaped and perhaps reshaped in the process of memory; and that an interpretation of that process can be an integral part of your story.
 

Try to convey a sense of the places - the physical environments - through which the subject has passed, including those different from the ones you have passed through. How do you do that?

You may face the privacy issue. Assume that your biography will be published and ask yourself: how much ought I to reveal, and who has the right to make that decision?

Keep asking yourself: Does the fact that I am related to the subject (as her grandchild, or son or daughter, or niece or nephew, or whatever) give me advantages as a biographer trying to "get it right"? How may it put me at a disadvantage? How can I minimize the disadvantages?

Exercise 2:
 

Now imagine the kind of biography you would like to have written if you had had sufficient time and, more important for our purposes, the right materials for it, and construct a dossier of the materials. The dossier should include all the biography's research documents and other sources of evidence - e.g., photographs, photocopies of private papers and archival documents, print-outs of microfilm, quotes from other biographies. The material should be both "real" (what you have actually found, at home, in archives, libraries, etc.) and "false" (from your own hand, invention, forgeries, whatever might - if it existed - solve mysteries and explain puzzling turns, give your character portrayal greater depth, provide missing links in the narrative, give more density to contexts). Make the inventions and forgeries as convincing (true to what you already know) as you can. Use your particular skills and interests and invent documents that you can use to fill out the account of your subject. For example, you may want to reconstruct sections of a diary, or a letter to a lover or a parent, or the report of an investigation the subject might have conducted. Ask yourself: What evidence is missing? What holes do I need to/ wish to fill in? This is your chance to create a history from evidence and from your own exercise of imagination, using both fact and "fiction" that matches the fact and could extend our understanding beyond it. Have fun (but work at it).