Cathy Curtis

The other day, I received a book I ordered, And That's Not All, a memoir by the English actress Joan Plowright, who was married to Laurence Olivier. I had wanted to read it simply because I admired her and was curious about her life with the celebrated actor and director. But lo and behold, it turned out that she was a good friend of Edna O'Brien's: the great Irish novelist who is the subject of my forthcoming (September 9, 2025) biography.

 

The two women met for dinner in 1977, when Edna published her novel Johnny I Hardly Knew You. Plowright recalled that Edna "was always sensitive to mood and atmosphere and ready to discuss anything with the utmost candour." Her candour was on display when she remarked that the Plowright–Olivier family (all three children were also actors) needed to become more open to conversations about their feelings, rather than only about aspects of the theatre.

 

Plowright wrote that Edna was a valued confidante—she privately counseled Olivier in the early 1980s, when he had threatened divorce because he was furious that his wife had agreed to play Martha in Edwin Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the National Theatre. Although he was no longer director of the theatre and too ill to continue working, he insisted that Plowright could appear onstage only in a play he directed. After speaking with Edna, he wrote a deeply apologetic letter to his wife.

 

If only I had been aware of this conversation when I was writing my book! I had known of no other event that so perfectly illuminated Edna's qualities of close listening and persuasive argument.

 

While my biography does portray her love of entertaining, it was still a treat to read about the St. Patrick's Day dinner party she gave in 1986 to celebrate the Plowright–Olivier's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Among the guests were the playwright Harold Pinter; his wife, Antonia Fraser, the historical novelist; the novelist Philip Roth and his then-wife, the actress Claire Bloom; and the actors Ian McKellen, Jeremy Irons, and Sinead Cusack (married to Irons)—all of whom appear (briefly) in my biography.

 

Another new-to-me source swam into view recently: an interview Edna gave on October 27, 2015, to mark the publication of her novel The Little Red Chairs. She spoke to Sinéad Gleeson in the Library Voices program. Much of this material was familiar to me from Edna's writing and the many other interviews I had watched, listened to, and read. But there were a few quotes I wish I had known earlier:

 

* Edna had been enthralled as a schoolgirl in the 1930s by an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. She said, "the first time I read about frost and snow. . . . I could feel the loneliness of the landscape that of course was mirrored in our landscape"—a rural village in the west of Ireland.

 

* She noted that "separation"—in her case, from County Clare (to Dublin), from Ireland (to England), and from her devout, narrow-minded mother (who loved her intensely but was deeply suspicious of writing)—was "a great whetstone for some kind of creativity." It "quickens what is lost and the world you hurtle into."

 

* Edna never stopped being oppressed by her mother's condemnation of her writing and her lifestyle, even after the woman's death. She also had married and divorced a bitter, controlling fellow writer. Her many later love affairs, mostly with married men, never resulted in lasting happiness. What I wish I had been able to quote is Edna's pitiless summation in this interview: "I have a longing for nearness and a terror of domination."

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

All of my five biographies are the first, or first comprehensive accounts of their subjects' lives. Perhaps because reviewers are frequently not biographers themselves, I have found that they—and other readers—fail to understand what's involved when a biographer takes a maiden voyage with her subject.

 

Many biographies published today are about a famous person who has been the subject of multiple previous biographies. Because the authors of those books have established the chronology and the facts (as each writer perceived them), the new biographer is free to look at the life in more experimental ways. She can choose to write only about a certain period of the subject's life, to quarrel with the opinions presented in other books, to present a new theory, to focus on the work at the expense of the life (or vice versa), or to write in a more personal, essayistic style.

 

Conversely, first biographies—generally about people who are not widely known—are obliged to hew more closely to the "cradle to grave" model. A responsible biographer presenting a subject's life to the world for the first time presents the entire stretch of that life with a chronological organization (allowing for some forward-looking leaps when necessary), so that the consequences of early actions and beliefs can be understood in context. This biographer's primary role is to be in service to her subject—presenting her as completely and objectively as possible, with the fullest possible awareness of the standards and mores of her era.

 

Writing a first biography involves restraining the impulse to add fanciful suppositions or strained attempts to be "relevant." It means avoiding a style intended to imitate or compete with the cleverness of the subject, and (assuming a general, rather than an academic readership) not allowing a theoretical construct to overshadow the narrative of the life.

 

For these reasons, a first biography of an "unknown" person may seem somewhat less exciting or amusing or contentious than the more idiosyncratic Lives that follow. Yet even in a first biography there is plenty of room for nuanced writing, thoughtful conclusions, and the kind of precise descriptions and well-chosen quotations that make the subject come to life for the reader.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

I was delighted with the new title my agent suggested for my forthcoming book—Fearless: A biography of Edna O'Brien—and I remain fond of its aptness and brevity. But what I hadn't realized is that during the past few years, most books about the lives of individuals have been published with titles that omit the word "biography." There are still some "Life of X" titles, but most provide only a descriptive word or phrase and the name of the subject, or even just the name.

 

Looking at the lists of newly published books that Biographers International Organization publishes every month, I discovered, for example, that from July 2021 to July 2022, among the hundreds of books listed, only thirty-four have a title that include that word, and fewer than ten were published by leading trade houses.

 

What accounts for the endangered life of "biography"? Most likely, publishers' consensus that readers have come to think of biographies as boring: too long, too fusty, with too many strings of dull facts. The young editors who have replaced retired industry stalwarts also tend to be interested only in books that speak to today's trends.

 

I lay the blame for negative views of the necessarily backward-looking genre of biography on social media, which has not only fostered short attention spans but also an overwhelming attention on what is happening right now. Editors have responded with book titles stuffed with adjectives that practically jump up and down to make the case for the gripping, surprising, relevant, even transgressive lives of their subjects. This strategy seems best suited to pop culture figures and for books that don't pretend to be serious treatments of noteworthy lives.

 

Of course, there are plenty of serious Lives that lack the "biography" title. But the lingering association of that word is with sober, nuanced, investigative, in-depth portraits of a life—for my money, the highest form of the genre.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

Women often have a difficult relationship with their mothers. Writers are no different. I've been thinking about the very different mother-daughter relationships of Elizabeth Hardwick and Edna O'Brien, the subjects of my previous biography and the one that will be published this year.

 

Hardwick's mother was an upbeat, pragmatic, hardworking woman who cared for her large family in a small house in Lexington, Kentucky. She responded to her husband's tall tales and indolent disposition with occasional outbursts that were simply absorbed into everyday life. Her education had stopped early, creating a huge gulf with her brainy, restless daugher who believed she was destined for greater things. Elizabeth left for New York to enter a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, eventually dropping out to pursue her writing.

 

During her twenties, when she came home for holidays and summer vacations, her mother was a thorn in her side. Even the decision of what to buy her for Christmas one year became a pitched battle that Elizabeth "had to win." But the mother-daughter relationship faded into the background after Elizabeth's marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, whose self-entitled mother proved far more difficult to deal with. Elizabeth's mature fiction, set mainly in New York, does not feature characters who appear to be based on her mother.

 

Edna's mother, Helena, also had only a basic education. She was a deeply religious Catholic who harbored a great hatred of books and writing as instruments of evil. Helena was very close to this daughter, her youngest child. In Edna's youth in County Clare, Ireland, the two spent nearly all their time together, sleeping in the same bed and uniting to ward off the worst of her father's drunken rages. This closeness left a legacy of guilt. Living in London, where she threw parties mobbed by drinking, pot-smoking friends and hangers on, and had serial affairs with married men, Edna knew her mother would be grief-stricken with disapproval.

 

Helena wrote a constant stream of letters with unchanging themes: she missed Edna terribly and she hoped Edna was being "good." It was not until after her mother's death in 1977 that Edna discovered a copy of first novel, The Country Girls, hidden away near the family house, with black marks obliterating passages Helena found repellent; she had even crossed out Edna's dedication to her.

 

Unlike Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna remained haunted by her mother. A mishap—a glass breaking in Edna's hand after someone at a party said that Helena wouldn't like to see her daughter drinking—struck her as a major portent. It can't be coincidental that the mother of Caithleen in Edna's first novel, The Country Girls (1960) is conveniently dead. Helena's alter ego makes an early appearance in a radio play, Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To? produced by the BBC in 1967. A mother brings two freshly killed chickens on a visit to her daughter in London and is scandalized by the attitudes of the friends she has invited to her dinner party. Edna's short story "Green Georgette," first published in 1978, also has a character clearly modeled on Helena.

 

After her death, Edna's own experience of motherhood—she had two sons—began to inform her writing, especially in the character of Nell in Time and Tide (1992). Yet she once described Nell as "conscious of her mother, in all the actions of her life"—an apt description of her own experience. Edna was seventy-five when The Light of Evening was published in 2006, in which a dying farmer's wife muses on events in her past and on her wayward novelist daughter. The novel is steeped with Helena's influence; it contains quotations from her letters as well as imagined scenes from her life as a young woman working in Brooklyn.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

People who have only a passing acquaintance with the book world hear about the large sums that a few super-famous writers receive as advances and assume this is the norm. But the vast majority of authors of literary fiction and nonfiction know that if they were to divide the modest amount of money they receive from the publisher before publication by the number of hours spent working on the book, the hourly amount would be far less than the minimum wage—maybe as little as a few pennies.

 

So why do we keep writing? Because we must, because our lives seem empty if we are not sitting at a keyboard for at least a few hours a day, trying to make more headway on our book. We tend to be micromanagers of our work, perfectionists who can't resist returning to tinker with sentences and paragraphs that still don't work as well as they should. While we're working we don't think about "making a profit" or "breaking even." Our minds are too wrapped up in the details of what we're doing to worry about the number of hours we're putting in.

 

Publishing companies, on the other hand, are businesses that need to make money to stay afloat and—increasingly, in the age of corporate ownership—to satisfy shareholders. The recent spate of mergers has resulted in leaner staffs populated by younger, less experienced people whose university English classes were heavily theory-based, who tend to lack interest in traditional narrative forms—and who can be hired for much less than the middle-aged people who formerly held these positions.

 

What was once, at best, the undivided attention of an expert editor deeply invested in the author's conception of the book and a skilled production staff patiently working on the cover and interior design has devolved into a much more slapdash enterprise. Editors on their way out bequeath their books to the next hire, a person primarily committed to authors she has chosen herself. Manuscripts can remain in limbo for months. Photographs can be reproduced at a fraction of their original size, rendering them nearly unreadable. A jacket design can be too similar to other books on different topics, in an attempt to capture the attention of readers in a particular demographic.

 

At the same time, increased automation of activities that once took many hours has streamlined the publication process. (Not that this is necessarily a good thing. An ideal index, for example—the kind that contains not only proper names but also entries for subjects like "feminism, opinions about" or "religious beliefs"—can be compiled only by a human being familiar with best practices in this field.)

 

One aspect of trade (commercial) publishing that has not changed is the lack of fact checking. While nonfiction published by university presses is subjected to "peer reviews" by specialists in the field who point out factual errors and faulty generalizations, trade books make their way into the world with their errors serenely unchallenged. The editor is primarily looking for a clear and lively writing style likely to be enjoyed by the largest possible readership. The copyeditor is looking for typos, grammatical errors, agreement with house style, and so forth. If a writer is lucky, the copyeditor may know some useful facts—say, that Cole Porter's song is "Night and Day," not "Day and Night"—and make the necessary correction. But no one is double-checking dates or questioning why the author reports that a person is doing something years after that person has died on an earlier page.

 

While a book is in production, the wheels of promotion begin to turn. Any book that is not judged to be a big seller is likely to receive cursory treatment: a few likely podcasts are proposed; a list of bookstores that host author events is presented; copies of the Advance Readers' Copy (ARC) are sent to media outlets. Biographers with the requisite financial resources try to spin the PR wheels faster by hiring their own publicists, at prices ranging from the low five figures. Some of us apply to be presenters at book festivals, where we wind up sitting in glum solitude behind a stack of our biographies, watching the long lines of readers waiting to have Famous Authors sign their books.

 

I think the only way we can carry on is to care only about being true to our biographical subjects, giving them the most scrupulous and heartfelt treatment possible. Biography is not popular today; fewer people want to read about lives that cannot properly be understood in contemporary terms. As Patrick Joyce writes in his new book, Remembering Peasants, people today consider the past to be "simply a continuation of the present backwards" and "do not recognize its radical otherness." 

 

But for biographers, delving into hitherto unknown lives remains a great challenge and a great joy, and we can only hope that some readers may be interested in what we have written.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

I am no stranger to published criticism, either as the author or subject of it. (I wrote art reviews for many years, and my books have been widely reviewed.) Hardly a day goes by when I'm not reading reviews in the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, and other publications. My remarks in this post are the result of a lifetime of thinking about criticism—how it is generally practiced, what causes it to read the way it does, and why fair-mindedness is on the side of the angels.

 

Faced with a work of art or a book, a critic's impulse is generally to compare it—perhaps to the creator's previous work or to the works of others, or more dubiously, to a notion in the critic's mind. (I was often guilty of this in my youthful art reviews.)

 

Whether as a result of editorial pressure, the critic's personality, or both, the tone of reviews is often aggressive. Rather than addressing the value of the creator's actual work, the critic begins by complaining that it doesn't adhere to the critic's notion of the correct way of proceeding. Why did the sculptor work on such a small scale? Why didn't the biographer employ a thematic format?

 

Sadly, reviewing is widely regarded as a form of competitive sport. You don't get points for evenhandedness or effusiveness, or even for clarity. All too often it seems that the goal is to become a prosecuting attorney, to find the holes in the witness's testimony and demonstrate your superior wisdom. As you "prove" the weakness of the creator's "case," you pounce on the smallest error as proof that it indicates wholesale sloppiness.

 

The glory of this approach is that is allows the critic to propound a new theory, ever so much cleverer than the creator's, and thereby to demonstrate the critic's standing as a public intellectual. The creator's work thus becomes merely an elevator, a device that boosts the critic's own career. I find this approach highly objectionable.

 

A fair-minded critic begins by finding an aspect of the work to praise. Surely there is some quality that honestly can be said to be worthy, or at least valid. This critic also attempts to understand what the creator was trying to do, whether or not it appears successful, and grants that there are many ways to achieve meaningful results—not necessarily the one the critic might have chosen.

 

The fair-minded book critic devotes ample space to discussing the contents of the actual work and does not appear to present information gleaned from the text as if it were prior knowledge on the critic's part. Rather than pursuing a "gotcha" vendetta against the author for any factual or interpretive errors, the critic aims to enlarge the knowledge base of readers of the review. By taking the high ground, a critic can write even a largely negative review in such a way that she neither glorifies her own acuity nor disparages the intelligence of the author, while providing readers with information that enlarges their view of the world.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

My new biography, FEARLESS, which will be published later this year, is a comprehensive life of the great Irish novelist Edna O'Brien. Researching this book involved a rather daunting number of roadblocks.

 

In early 2020, after requesting a draft of my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna declined, in an email exchange via her London agent, to make herself available for an interview. She did not give a reason, but I imagine that her decision was due at least in part to concerns about my approach. It was clear from remarks made during her last years that she sought validation for the seriousness of her body of work and had grown impatient with rehashes of her eventful personal life. She had recently received a brutally negative profile in The New Yorker, and she saw that my Hardwick biography delves into that author's fraught private life with her husband, the poet Robert Lowell. 

 

According to Edna's agent, there was to be an official biography; Edna would choose the author from among several candidates. I was also informed that I was not to contact anyone who knew Edna (when I tried to do that anyway, most potential interviewees either failed to respond or declined to speak to me), and that my book could not be published until after Edna's death. As I pursued my research, I learned that I was also forbidden to consult her archive at University College Dublin.

 

Fortunately, there is a voluminous archive of Edna's papers at Emory University, and it is open to all researchers. A few items within this massive resource—including Edna's journals and correspondence with certain individuals—are closed to researchers until August 1, 2034. But she had spent some sixty years speaking to members of the press; appearing on talk shows and in documentaries (often available online); corresponding with family, friends, and people in publishing and the theatre; and writing published and unpublished essays on a variety of topics. Of course, I also read her many novels, nonfiction books, and short stories, as well as her film scripts, playscripts, and poetry.

 

As luck would have it, I benefited by not being allowed to publish while Edna was living. Additional information I obtained from various sources helped me better explain aspects of Irish history and politics, and I was able to conclude the biography with a description of Edna's funeral. I also read many books by the excellent young contemporary Irish women novelists who owe their writerly freedom to Edna's example, which I briefly discuss in my final chapter.

 

Meanwhile, Sinéad O'Shea, a Dublin-based documentary filmmaker who had interviewed Edna in 2016 for a Publishers Weekly article, decided to put Edna's life on film. After her attempts to interest Edna's agent failed, serendipity came to the rescue. At a party, O'Shea chatted with an American film producer, Barbara Broccoli, who turned out to be a good friend of Edna's. Broccoli coaxed Edna, who was initially hostile to the idea, to agree to the documentary.

 

O'Shea interviewed Edna at her home in the spring of 2023—an exchange that had to be cut short after forty minutes when she was too ill to continue. (Edna was being treated for pancreatic cancer.) In succeeding months, she recorded voice messages about her life from her hospital bed and suggested that O'Shea read her journals. (There was one final videotaped session in the hospital three months before Edna's death in July 2024.) Apparently, the fact of Edna's agreement to the documentary superseded the archive's embargo of her journals.

 

The documentary, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (not yet in release in the US; I was able to stream it last autumn) is very well done, providing an entertaining and sympathetic narrative of Edna's life. Both her sons are interviewed as well as a number of other people for whom she was a friend and inspiration. Passages from the journals, read by the actress Jessie Buckley, form the backbone of the film.

 

I must say that I wish I had known someone who could have interceded for me with Edna, so that I could have spoken to her and her sons, read the journals, and assured other people in her life that she was happy to have them tell me what it was like to know her. But it seems that the authorized biography will not appear after all, whether because Edna had trouble choosing the right author, or for some other reason. So I am pleased that my biography will not have a rival and that it will provide a much fuller account of Edna's writing life than is possible on film.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

Looking for a particular book on my crowded shelves, I came across a catalogue of the work of the artist Jay de Feo. It sparked a recollection of the day when the head of the Jay de Feo Trust told me that she would not allow access to the artist's archives for my planned biography. This person, who had known my writing during my years as an art critic in the San Francisco Bay Area, initially agreed to meet with me in Berkeley, where the archive is located. I purchased an air ticket and looked forward to starting my new project. Then, about forty-eight hours before the flight, I received an ominous email requesting a phone call—during which she informed me that I was not sufficiently "scholarly" to write the de Feo biography.

 

At the time, I was in shock and just muttered something to get off the phone. Now—with the hindsight of having written four more biographies and having weathered many other biography-related disappointments—I see what the problem really was. What this person wanted was a critical endorsement of de Feo's body of work, presented as a series of aesthetic triumphs and written in the detailed, measured style of an academic monograph. After she read my Grace Hartigan biography, a narrative that traces the ups and downs of the artist's personal life and finds fault with the late work, it was clear that I was not going to deliver the book the Trust wanted.

 

I am hardly alone in this dilemma. Gatekeepers of various kinds are always trying to keep biographers from presenting a fallible human being whose work, however significant, was sometimes lacking, and whose personal life must also be documented as fully as possible. When the subject is an artist, the gatekeepers' underlying motivations include not only maintaining a reputation but also boosting future auction sales and encouraging museum acquisitions.

 

The monetary value of a unique artwork at any particular time is based in part on the fashion of the day, the artist's previous sales, her fame or notoriety, and the size, medium, and subject matter of the work. But as a biographer, I am indifferent to the commodity value of art beyond its ability to keep the artist afloat during her lifetime. What matters to me is the journey—the artist's attempts and failures and occasional successes, the responses of critics, the tussles with dealers, the effects of soured romances and financial troubles.

 

Also, although I have an academic background in art history, I write for people who may never have taken a single course in the subject. My goal is always to bring readers back to the work, and I would hate to have academic language become a barrier to understanding. Of course I hope that people in the art world don't have too many quibbles with my biographies, but my allegiance is only to the facts I uncover, my own sense of appropriateness, and the goal of telling these stories in an involving way.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

My next book (due later this year) is Fearless: A biography of Edna O'Brien. This great Irish writer shockingly never even made the shortlist for the Booker Prize, Great Britain's major annual literary honor. Despite more than sixty years of publishing novels and short stories that explored, in gorgeous prose, broad and deep realms of women's experience, Edna was constantly overlooked.

 

She was appointed to the Booker committee that awarded the 1973 prize to J. G. Farrell for The Siege of Krishnapor, a sign that her literary judgment must have been deemed sound. But this acknowledgement did not carry over to her own work, which some leading critics rejected on the grounds of passages of supposedly florid writing or heroines too much in thrall to their lovers. But other factors may have been at work as well.

 

As an Irishwoman living in London, Edna was always something of an outsider. Although she had many good friends in the British theatre world and among leading American and Irish writers, she was not a member of the inner circle of mid-twentieth-century British literati. A major reason for her exclusion is that she never attended any institution of higher learning, whereas most of her peers were Oxbridge graduates.

 

Historically, judges of literary awards have tended to look more favorably on writers like themselves: people with the right educational pedigree whose books are about familiar and acceptable subject matters. Writers of color have always known this. (Note that I am not comparing Edna's struggles to theirs, just pointing out one area of overlap.) Yet it is a truism that many past winners of major literary prizes are no longer read while ignored works by some of their contemporaries have become classics.

 

There was another issue that set Edna apart. As a passionate defender of the Irish Republic who hoped that the six counties of Northern Ireland (part of Great Britain ever since the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) would one day join the twenty-six counties of the Republic, she was looked at askance by English people who found such political demonstrations excessive and misplaced.

 

For Edna O'Brien, the failure of her country of residence to acknowledge her writing with a significant award was finally ameliorated when, at age eighty-eight, she received the David Cohen Prize for Literature honoring her life's work. Of course she was delighted. But a major award would have meant so much to her decades earlier, when she struggled to maintain faith in her vision despite a literary climate that too often trivialized and deplored her efforts.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

The other day, while reading a short story collection, I found myself turning to the back cover of the paperback, which has brief descriptions of the themes of three of the stories. For some inexplicable reason I tried to match up these descriptions with the stories I had already read. Only one of the summaries sounded familiar.

 

These stories are not mysterious, and their themes were apparent to me as I read. But some peculiar need for validation led me to find out what they were "supposed" to be about. Or, let's face it, what someone in the publisher's publicity department decided they were about.

 

After reading the last two stories, I felt that at least one of them didn't quite fit with its supposed theme. Paging back through the rest of the book, I tried to see if that theme described a different story. But that didn't seem to be the case.

 

Readers are accustomed to learning from another source (a review or the flap copy) what a book is about before actually turning to page 1. Of course, the flap copy is meant to interest a potential book buyer. But what if we already own the book and are still in thrall to the content of those brief paragraphs?

 

They give us certain expectations—of a particular style, of the particular trajectory the plot will take and the type of characters we will encounter. If we fail to find these elements as we read, we will feel deceived. Might we feel that the problem is ours—that we don't understand what the author is doing? In the case of experimental work, this may well be the case. Otherwise, the fault is the hype machine of publishing.

 

Imagine a scenario in which someone gives us a new book with an unrevealing title that was published without any descriptive information on its cover—a book whose author is also unfamiliar. What would we do? Read the first paragraph? See if the chapters have titles? Check to see how long it is? Surely we would be strangely at sea with no guidance about what's between the covers. Our experience as readers would be akin to that of a nineteenth-century explorer venturing upon an uncharted land. The experience might be upsetting or disappointing or captivating, but we would have no one with whom to compare notes. Entirely on our own, we would have to judge the writing purely for itself.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025