Biography is a classic, difficult art, and biographers, those torch-bearers of one of literature’s oldest genres, tend to be scrupulous, detail-oriented obsessives. Yet under rigid control there is often a strange and passionate devotion; they might fall in love with a ghost in order to begin their work, but they have to fall out of love in order to finish it.
Aspiring biographers have a thousand reasons not to embark on a biography – these books tend to take a decade or more of work and rarely can anyone survive on an advance for that long. But alongside the more or less conventional authors are those biographers who, for whatever reason, meet their task by changing the rules. These slanted, badly behaved books tend to captivate me, which is why I chose to write a novel in the shape of such a biography. Here are 10 of my favourite such books.
1. After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus
Kraus admits outright that this biography of Acker may not, in fact, be a biography and I would argue that it is, but also that it isn’t – regardless, I couldn’t put it down. Kraus had a front row seat to Acker’s antics and her crowd in a version of New York that only exists now in shadow and legend. After Kathy Acker is as much a book about a scene and a moment as it is about one woman in the midst of it.
