Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The American Scholar

    A Biographer Looks Back

    Dec 02, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Ann Jefferson

    PARISIAN LIVES: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me

    BY DEIRDRE BAIR

    Nan A. Talese, 368 pp., $29.95

    ONE OF THE QUESTIONS confronting biographers is the extent to which they should write themselves into the lives of others. Like an accompanist playing too loud alongside a musical performer, an intrusive narrator runs the risk of drowning out the star. And yet, biographers are implicitly called upon to demonstrate that they are the right person for the job—a requirement usually met by a brief preface and an acknowledgments page. This is precisely the material that Deirdre Bair scales up in her new “bio-memoir,” in which she recalls the writing of her biographies of in 1990 as one of the year’s best books), and more particularly the effects of that work on her own life.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The American Scholar

    The American Scholar12 min read
    My Name Is Emily
    Emily Bernard is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in
    The American Scholar3 min read
    Ollie Ollie Oxen Free
    The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described play as the engine of creative growth in children. In its earliest forms, play takes place in the presence of the mother, who provides a “holding environment” for the child. Hide-and-seek is a model for the
    The American Scholar17 min read
    Tramping With Virginia
    Emily Fox Gordon is the author of two memoirs, two novels, and a collection of essays, Book of Days. Her second novel, Madeleine and Jane, was published last September. I’m a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf ’s essay “Street Haunting.” For many years, I

    Related Books & Audiobooks