Cathy Curtis

Throughout most of my life, the study of history was never of much interest to me. At age nine I was fascinated by We Were There with Richard the Lionhearted [sic] in the Crusades, because the book's narrative is related by a young boy who was part of the campaign and includes fascinating details such as the Muslim leader Saladin's kind gift of ice to his enemy, the ailing Richard I. Yet I had no context for this information and failed to understand what these armies were fighting over.

 

In school I was bored by what was then known as "social studies," which largely involved memorizing uncompelling, disconnected bits of information—causes for various wars, major accomplishments of U.S. presidents. The history of countries other than the U.S. was barely mentioned.

 

My parents took me to see Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, about the last days of Sir Thomas More, as a treat for my twelfth birthday. I had never heard of More. Listening to a lot of meaningless (to me) rhetoric batted back and forth onstage, one thing seemed clear: his refusal to act against his conscience was not going to end well. I remember hoping that his enemies would hurry up and execute him so that my parents and I could go out for dinner.

 

As a college student studying philosophy and literature, my awareness of the past came mostly through novels and plays. In graduate school I specialized in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art history, but this field was still mostly about the history of styles and aspects of iconography. I knew, for example, that the Netherlands was still engaged in the Eighty Years War with Spain, but my ignorance of the particulars was not held against me.

 

What I cared about was the way aspects of everyday life were reflected in works of art. Happily for me, there was a new emphasis in the 1970s on social history that centered on the middle-class (and the peasantry, insofar as their lives were documented). Dutch 17th-century painting, so inherently middle-class in most of its themes (domestic scenes, church interiors, city views, portraits of the mercantile class) was ideal for this form of inquiry.

 

My choice of a dissertation subject—the life and work of one of the few women painters of the era—did not pan out (a graduate student at another university had already chosen it). Yet it seems to have percolated under the surface of my thoughts until, many years later, I wrote my first biography. It's significant that that book and my four other biographies are about 20th-century women. The immediacy of the decades I had lived through, or had heard or read about, was so much more alluring than the distant past.

 

                                                                        * * *

 

Until recently, I had thought of historical fiction as novels necessarily set in some distant era, such as 18th-century France, Tudor England, or ancient Rome. Leafing through a few of these books, I was left with impression that they were larded with potted history—pages recounting the succession of kings or emperors, battles won or lost, and so forth—and stuffed with details only a specialist would care about. Lacking my own grounding in the worlds of these books, I found my attention drifting.

 

And then  . . . I discovered historical fiction set in the already-familiar 20th century. Because the larger landscape is known territory, I find it much easier to connect intellectually and emotionally with the characters in these books.

 

I had already immersed myself in modern Irish history to write my biography of the author Edna O'Brien. Having an urgent personal reason to read history—something entirely new to me—fired up my interest. Curiosity about other contemporary Irish writers led to my discovery of the extraordinary novelists Joseph O'Connor and Christine Dwyer Hickey, as well as one of Iris Murdoch's novels that is set in Dublin in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising.

 

O'Connor is the author of Star of the Sea (about a motley group of people escaping the Great Famine of the mid-19th century on a ship bound for the New World), Shadowplay (set in the theatre world of Victorian London, with characters that include the actress Ellen Terry and Bram Stoker, quietly gathering material for Dracula), and Ghost Light (in which an elderly woman in seedy 1950s London recalls her time at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, when she had an affair with the playwright John Synge).

 

Hickey's Dublin Trilogy consists of three separate novels (The Dancer, The Gambler, and The Gatemaker) that follow the declining fortunes of a (fictional) family from 1918 to the mid-20th century. This engrossing narrative probes the way alcoholism and gambling ate away at the self-worth of the men and forced wives and children to live lives of desperation. Her style is contemporary in its directness and gritty realism, yet it reminded me of Dickens' compelling narrative sweep and memorable characters from different walks of life; Hickey's beguiling way of giving inanimate objects a quirky human quality also recalls an aspect of the great 19th-century novelist.

 

The Red and the Green (1965) is Murdoch's only historical novel. Anglo-Irish on both sides of her family, she was reared in England. Her biographer, Peter J. Conradi, has described the intensive research she conducted for this book, including an attempt to add Irish to her many foreign languages.

 

The Rising occurs in the final pages, when two cousins on opposite sides—an Irish officer in the British Army and a fervent Irish nationalist—are swept up in the conflict. As in all successful historical novels, the sense of place and the language and attitudes of the characters all seem convincingly authentic. There is a rather bizarre, farcical scene involving a woman and several male characters who slip in and out of her room under cover of darkness, but Conradi remarks that such goings-on were actually common in Murdoch's own romantic life.

 

A detail that puzzled me was Murdoch's description of the General Post Office (GPO)—which the nationalists had commandeered for their brave but unsuccessful attempt at severing Ireland from the U.K.—as being on Sackville Street. The GPO is actually on O'Connell Street, where I saw it on a trip to Dublin. Well, silly me. It was not until 1924, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, that the street was renamed after Daniel O'Connell ("The Liberator"), a revered 19th-century political figure. Such are the benefits of historical knowledge . . .

 

 (c) Cathy Curtis 2026

Hours after emailing a biographer friend about the dearth of opportunities for me to talk about my new biography (about a writer famous in her home country of Ireland but virtually unknown in the U.S.), I received an email that made me smile.

 

A book club in a nearby community wanted to feature my book at their upcoming meeting. I could choose to participate in "an informal Q&A," or "drop in for a casual chat," or "simply have [my] book featured during the session." The signature included a slightly blurry photo of the book club's "organiser" (yes, I should have noted the British spelling) and a plausible email address.

 

I will confess that I began writing a grateful response. But the first name of the person who wrote to me was so odd ("Colln" rather than "Colin") that I decided to google him. Sure enough, he didn't exist.

 

Then I reread the email. While "Colln" seemed excited about my book, he mentioned only the first word of the title and employed such generic terms that it sounded like a self-help manual. Other red flags: the rather odd time of the meeting (1:00 p.m. on a Wednesday) and the unnecessary addition of the time zone.

 

The book club, it turns out, does exist but meets on a weekday evening and of course has chosen a different book for its next discussion. On the club's website, the real Colin warned authors about the scam. Had I shown interest, I would have learned that payment via bank transfer was involved for the privilege of . . . being scammed.

 

Writer Beware [https://writerbeware.blog], a website I hadn't known about, has more information about Nigerian AI-generated "book club" invitations and other scams. These include the constant proposals I receive—couched in delirious praise for my biography—asking for a PDF to be sent to a supposedly vast community of book lovers eager to write a review for a "tip" of 20 to 30 dollars.

 

Of course I am not about to send a PDF to an unknown group of people. So I always dispatch those emails to my spam basket without a second thought. On Writer Beward I learned that had I been asked to send a copy of the published book instead, this would have been just fine . . . because the object of this scam is not dissemination of the text but getting me to pay for the review "opportunity."

 

What is especially troubling about this experience is the panopticon effect of constant surveillance—in this case, nefarious bots scanning every blog post, website, and email for potentially spamable information. So, yes indeed—writer, beware!

 

©Cathy Curtis 2025

 

[A version of this post was published in the December 2025 issue of The Biographer's Craft, a newsletter distributed by Biographers International Organization (BIO).]

I can barely keep up with the extraordinary output of today's Irish novelists. What strikes me is that, despite the diverse themes and settings of these books, they are all rooted in a moral understanding of the world and its problems. Even when characters are transgressive figures, they are reacting against beliefs about sin and redemption that were inculcated in childhood.

 

Great literature has always dealt with questions of good and evil. My theory is that Ireland's difficult yet protracted relationship with the Catholic Church — a nationwide dominion unique in the Western world — is the driving force of this literary efflorescence.

 

Operating somewhat analogously to the basso continuo that provides the baseline and chord progression in Baroque music, the Catholic religion grounds Irish literature in a pervasive awareness of moral strictures. The improvisation that is often an aspect of the continuo can be compared to the way each author alludes to, welcomes, grapples with, or forcefully condemns elements of the religious orthodoxy that had the entire country in its grip.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

This long essay started out with a premise that I realized needed a great deal more amplification as well as a change of emphasis. So often, in the activity of writing, an initial thought takes on a life of its own as fingers press on the keys and a typed passage is read, considered, and revised.

 

* * *

 

After writing the first biography of Edna O'Brien, I've become interested in the life and work of another notable twentieth-century Irish writer, Mary Lavin (1912-1996). Both were widely acknowledged masters of the short story, and both published in The New Yorker. Both revered the work of Anton Chekhov.

 

Yet the women's styles and most typical subject matter were markedly different: O'Brien's lyricism vs. Lavin's storyteller's cadences; O'Brien's urgent, emotionally raw depictions of women's sexuality and dashed hopes vs. Lavin's matter-of-factly detailed studies of friction between siblings, married couples, mothers and daughters, and neighbors, and accounts of family tragedies.

 

The receptions they each received during the years of their greatest fame (1940s–1970s for Lavin; 1960s–1990s for O'Brien) were also very different. Part of this had to do with changing expectations of what fiction could be. The 1970s were a watershed; as the British novelist Barbara Pym discovered when her publisher rejected her new manuscript, books about genteel unmarried women were considered hopelessly old-fashioned. While most of Lavin's characters are far from genteel, we do not witness their couplings.

 

Younger readers probably always found it easier to appreciate O'Brien's approach; Lavin's is more of an acquired taste. There are narratives delivered by a single speaker who goes on and on in the oral tradition until every tiny aspect of an event is accounted for. There are stories about sisters' rivalries over suitors, long-held grudges, impossible loves, misunderstandings between people of different social classes, and individuals whose behavior has caused them to be whispered about by neighbors. As befits eras when Irish lives were more precarious, many stories involve a death—in the past or soon to occur.

 

Lavin has been praised for her ability to convey the feelings and motivations of a wide variety of people, and for her fine-grained attention to detail. On the other hand, some of her stories are so long and detailed as they describe lives tightly bound by convention that a modern reader may struggle to maintain her interest.

 

The driving force of Lavin's stories is character, not plot: she spun her tales out of skeins of conversation and characters' thoughts. Aiming to be true to life, she did not allow the tensions in her stories to be neatly resolved. Even when her stories take place in Dublin, they often have a claustrophobic feel seemingly more suited to a tale of life in a village. (For Lavin, who lived there, Dublin was a village in those days.)

 

Her writing was critically esteemed and published in several leading U.S. magazines, (a new book documents Lavin's relationship with her sympathetic editor at The New Yorker), as well as in several collections. Yet her public profile was muted, especially as compared to Edna's. To be fair, Lavin had many problems with her publishers, and their failure to agree to print paperback editions of her work lost her a critical mass of her potential audience.

 

Yet it seems to me that another factor was at play. Especially during the decades when male domination of the literary world was virtually exclusive, women were (however unfairly) described by their looks and style as well as by their work. Even today it is a peculiar truism of biographical commentary about a women writer that she is inevitably described as "beautiful" — no matter how much of a stretch that may seem — or at the very least, as a "belle laide," connoting an unconventional attractiveness.

 

Edna O'Brien was an attractive young woman who turned herself into a beauty. She watched her diet, favored trendy, ultra-feminine clothes, and ensured that her hair always retained its bouffant waves. She also had an ebullient public personality. This combination of good looks and charm made her the darling of TV talk shows during the 1960s and 1970s. So pervasive was her media fame that some literary types wrongly doubted her value as a writer.

 

Mary Lavin was a stocky woman whose stern face was dominated by thick, dark eyebrows. Granted, money was tight for her and her three daughters (her first husband had died young), but she was so oblivious of her appearance that (as her biographer explains) she would wear the same dowdy black outfit even after it showed significant signs of wear—a trait that might have been seen as endearing in a man ("he is thinking of higher things"), less so in a woman.

 

it is hard to imagine a Mary Lavin in today's literary landscape. Perhaps it's no wonder that the period of her greatest fame occurred at a time when a writer's public engagement could consist solely of giving lectures at universities and other serious public forums, and sitting for a solemn book cover photo. Her lectures were said to be down-to-earth and engrossing; her dignified presence was somewhat like that of Eleanor Roosevelt.

 

To return to the substance of her short stories: I wonder how much patience today's readers would have for tales of long-ago village life, with all the minutiae of daily life they contain and the almost unimaginable constraints governing their characters.

 

For example, in "Lilacs" (published in 1942, in Lavin's first story collection) a man has discovered that collecting and selling horse manure can provide his family with a good income. But their house stinks — the piles are right outside the window — and the two daughters are understandably distressed. They know that local people can smell the stench on the girls. After their parents die, one sister marries and moves away. Left at home, the sister whose hopes of planting sweet-smelling lilacs had been dismissed by her parents arranges to have the manure removed. The story ends with the family's financial advisor asking her pointedly what she plans to live on.

 

Readers are left with the inference that this young woman has absolutely no other options. It's not clear in what era the story takes place, though rural Ireland remained extremely backward well into the mid-twentieth-century. But the situation is so awful to begin with that the sense of hopelessness at the end seems contrived.

 

Compare this story to Edna's "Irish Revel" (published in The New Yorker in 1962), another tale of a young woman's crushing disappointment — in this case, dashed hopes of encountering at a party a young man she had met by chance. It turns out that she was not invited to the party as a guest but as the help. Not only is the young man not present, but a male guest tries to seduce her. The woman lives an isolated rural life; the party was possibly her only opportunity to find love. Surely any reader can sympathize with her feelings of hopelessness, underlined by the discovery that a tire on the bicycle that is her sole means of transport has gone flat.

 

Now, it's possible that I am simply more willing to grant credibility to a story about a lonely young woman longing for love than one about a young woman entirely dependent for her livelihood on sales of manure. Of course, not all of Lavin's stories are so extreme. But she seemed to have a compulsion to write about especially dreary aspects of Irish life, and to emphasize their misery in flatly descriptive detail poles apart from Edna's animated and engaging prose. It is not surprising that in Lavin's own life she suffered from depression and was eventually hospitalized for a time.

 

"Happiness" (a story by Lavin first published in The New Yorker in 1968) is about a perpetually restless woman remembered by her daughters for her idiosyncratic notion of the meaning of happiness. In Vera's opinion, it was not about pleasure; in fact, "even illness and pain" could coexist with it. The daughters wondered if she really meant some other quality, like courage. Widowed after a happy marriage, she had taken her girls on a European tour, rejecting the mourners reminding her that life was a vale of tears. But she was so deeply upset that the daughters worried when she swam too far out to sea.

 

Years later, as Vera is semi-comotose after a bout of frantic gardening, she becomes agitated at the thought of facing the impending death no one has actually mentioned to her. She speaks as if revisiting the time that she was carrying an armload of daffodils to her husband in the hospital, only to be stopped by a nun who grabbed the flowers, which fell to the floor. One daughter, in an effort to soothe her mother, reassures her that there is no need to worry about this, because she is now "finished with this world." Her mother seems to accept this verdict and sinks back into the pillow to die.

 

There is a strong link between Lavin's own life with her three daughters and that of the woman in the story. Like her, Lavin suddenly had to provide for her girls after the untimely death of her (first) husband. While the woman in the story does not seem to have a career, her whirlwind activities replicate the author's habits. The priest in this story, a friend of the family whose opinions tend to be rebutted by the mother, was surely inspired to some degree by the priest Lavin knew as a young woman and married in middle age, after he was released from his orders.

 

I think the story is about self-delusion as a (possibly unconscious) strategy for carrying on with life after experiencing tragedy and trying to serve as an example to one's children. But, as with most of Lavin's stories, there is something obdurate about "Happiness" that resists a reader's attempts to parse it. I can't imagine identifying with her characters, or even being able to fully understand them. They dwell in a sort of hermetic space, akin to the unique environment of a fable, and even the universal human emotions they express somehow seem alien. So it seems unsurprising that Lavin's one-time fame — in itself a puzzle — has been eclipsed. Still, I have to confess that I am also not the best reader of Chekhov's short stories, much preferring the larger canvas of his plays.

 

 

©Cathy Curtis 2025

 

Virtually every account of the reception of Edna O'Brien's 1960 novel, The Country Girls—which was outspoken for its era about the sexual lives of young women—includes the information that a priest in the County Clare village where she grew up burned the book. At the time, Edna lived in London; she learned of the burning in a letter from her mother. Helena O'Brien was what a novelist would call an unreliable narrator. (Edna, who had unwittingly dedicated her book to her mother, was horrified to discover years later that Helena had hid her own copy of the book in an outhouse after blacking out the dedication and every offensive passage.)

 

In recent years, some doubt has been cast on the book burning. An article in The Irish Times reported that the book was not burned in Scariff. Edna wrote to say that the burning took place in neighboring Tuamgraney, but another letter writer refuted that assertion. Compare the hearsay account of this burning to a documented event that took place forty years earlier: the seizure and burning by the U.S. Post Office of three issues of The Little Review that contained episodes of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, on the grounds of obscenity.

 

Of course, it is not out of the question that a priest in Ireland burned a copy of the book. Book burnings had taken place in the past. But of much greater importance and influence was the Irish government's ban on sales of the novel, on the grounds of its sexual content. Book banning had been instituted in 1929 with the Censorship of Publication Acts, and it continued for an extraordinary sixty-nine years. Banned along with Edna's first novel and its successors were novels by major, established authors, including John McGahern, Brendan Behan, Aldous Huxley, and even Balzac. (Joyce was not among them, but only because no efforts were made to import and sell Ulysses.)

 

A precedent, established centuries earlier, was the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books—volumes condemned on the grounds of heresy or sexual content, or because their authors were Protestants—which included works by writers in many fields of knowledge; the Index remained in force until 1966.

 

Returning to The Country Girls: while many citizens of this overwhelmingly Catholic country would have thought twice about buying a book burned by a priest, the ban meant that even people whose curiosity overcame their religious scruples were unable to read it. Yet the burning is what is constantly referenced, not the banning.

 

This does make a kind of sense. The denigration of a work of art in a specific public way—a priest consigning The Country Girls to the flames; the rioting of the opening-night audience for J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World—creates an indelible image. Whereas a book normally sits quietly on a shelf or in a reader's hands and a play is normally greeted with applause, such unusual events allow us to picture a bonfire with flames licking the pages and theatergoers rising from their seats to protest the play's perceived insults to Ireland, womanhood, and the filial duties of a son.

 

On the other hand, the decision by a committee of men to ban the sale of a book takes place behind the scenes. There is no unique, startling event, no image to latch onto. There is at least one reported public event connected to the banning of Edna's books, however: in 1970, authorities on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland seized one of Edna's novels, in a traveler's luggage. Also confiscated was a package of condoms; birth control was not legalized until nine years later.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

When I finished what I believed to be the final draft of my biography of Edna O'Brien, several unforeseen events obliged me to wait several years before the book could be published. At first, I was irritated at the delay, but the additional time proved to be a godsend.

 

Whereas academics generally write biographies of people after a lengthy study of their works, my background is in journalism. I was accustomed to producing a story about a person or event I knew little about in a matter of hours or days. So perhaps it is not surprising that my practice as a biographer is simply to jump in and trust that my years of experience as a researcher and writer will serve me in good stead.

 

I had decided to write about Edna O'Brien because I had enjoyed reading her novels, because a major archive was available, and because there was no previous full-fledged biography. The book I had just completed is about a twentieth-century American woman author, so I felt confident embarking on the life of another twentieth-century woman author who happened to have spent her youth on the west coast of Ireland and her working life in London.

 

I knew that I would need to read all of Edna's works—not only the novels and short stories, but also the plays, film scripts, and nonfiction—and become familiar with their critical reception. I would need to learn about her childhood, her personal life, and her professional struggles and successes. But I hadn't yet realized that writing about the life of someone from a culture whose history was virtually unknown to me would involve another layer of research . . . as well as a great deal more thought about what it meant for Edna to revolt against the deeply entrenched values of that culture.

 

During the years that it took to find the right publisher for what I had thought was my completed manuscript, I began to read more about Irish history, including the reasons for and repercussions of the famine of the mid-nineteenth century. I familiarized myself with Ireland's twentieth-century politics—especially important because Edna was fiercely wedded to the eventual union of the six Northern Irish counties (which are still part of the United Kingdom) with the Republic of Ireland.

 

I had read James Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses decades ago. Now I became more familiar with other examples of modern and contemporary Irish literature. This led me to discover the brilliance of today's young Irish novelists as well as to refresh my memory of books by writers from earlier generations, like John McGahern and Samuel Beckett, who was a friend of Edna's.

 

I subscribed to The Irish Times to keep track of today's news and watched Irish-themed films from decades past, including one of my longtime favorites, Odd Man Out (1947), with James Mason, which I now understood as more than simply a tragic story of love and heroism. I paid more attention to attitudes and turns of phrases that are typically Irish and learned that the perplexing diacritical mark (which looks like the French accent aigu) used on certain vowels is known as a fada.

 

Then I encountered a new problem: how much background information to include for American readers. While biographies published by university presses include copious amounts of such material, as an author who prefers to relate a life in chronological order rather than according to preselected themes, I risked derailing my narrative and thereby losing readers' interest. So I erred on the side of caution, leaving out details that arguably should have been included for a fuller understanding of context. (I do use endnotes for additional information, but I realize that non-specialist readers rarely consult them.)

 

To take a small example, when I wrote about Edna as a teenager in Dublin in the mid-1940s, discovering a book that would become all-important to her writing life—T. S. Eliot's Introduction to James Joyce—I failed to mention that Joyce had recently died (in 1941, nearly thirty years after he had left his native country for good).

 

Another complication arose after I decided to launch my biography of Edna in Dublin with a talk and reading at the Irish Writers Centre. I chose to do this because I would be speaking to people who were already familiar with Edna's writing, rather than facing a tiny audience of Americans who had never heard of her. The complication is that, as an American author published by an American press, I included "translations" of British and Irish terms, currency conversions, and explanations of Catholic practices and Irish customs that an Irish or British writer likely would omit as unnecessary. I shall have to hope for understanding on the part of Irish readers.

 

The months of rethinking and rewriting has resulted in a new way of dealing with the "afterlife" of a biography. When I completed each of my other books, I stopped paying much attention to their subjects. But one of the rewards of having immersed myself in all things Irish for several years is that I remain intensely fascinated with this country, and continue to read its writers, stay abreast of its news, and admire the wit and grit of a people with a tragic history that has left its mark even in times of peace and relative plenty.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

 

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 the great Irish novelist who is the subject of my forthcoming (September 9, 2025) biography.

 

Plowright and Edna O'Brien 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 entails 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

It seems to me that there is widespread confusion among general readers about what a biography can and cannot do. It is driven by the immense popularity of memoir and amplified by today's social media-driven demand for full disclosure, coupled with the peculiar notion that a person can make her own "truth."

 

The author of a memoir obviously has access to her innermost feelings as well as to every remembered detail of her life. Whether she chooses to recount them all is, of course, up to her. Memoirists also are not obliged to consult any sources beyond their own, often deeply flawed memories. Facts can be ignored. Dates can be omitted. Fantasy versions of the life—whether created deliberately for the book or established so long ago that they have come to seem like the truth—can be offered to readers without apology.

 

The author of a biography, on the other hand, must contend with built-in constraints. Most obviously, we are not supposed to make up anything. We cannot invent dialogue or manufacture (or embellish) an event in our subject's life. If we want to suggest what our subject might have been thinking at any given moment, we have to build a plausible case based on known facts. For every element in the book there must be available documentation.

 

If the subject is deceased and there is no letter, no journal entry, no official document, no media coverage, no remark by someone on the scene that has been preserved on paper or film, or recounted to us, our hands are tied. (A further complication: there actually might be an existing letter or a diary entry, but we have to be able to read it. Letters may be stored in the attic of someone unknown to us—or someone who refuses to give us access. A key journal may have been stolen or destroyed, as was the case with one of my subjects.)

 

In a memoir, no one is looking over the writer's shoulder to point out omissions and errors. No matter how gifted a writer she may be, the memoirist remains inside the solipsistic bubble of her own life, usually not bothering to double-check facts. Biographies are written based on extensive research, with a more nuanced, contextual and (often) judgmental view of the life. A biographer may find some of the subject's remarks about herself and others—Person X, a friend with whom she quarreled; Person Y, a lover; Person Z, a critic who failed to appreciate her work—to be contradictory or too self-serving.

 

The women I have written about made their mark as creative people. I write about them to interest readers in their accomplishments and to discuss some of the ways their lives affected their work. I try to present a coherent and comprehensive narrative that looks honestly at their misapprehensions and errors of judgment as well as at their brilliant perceptions, loving relationships, and lasting importance in the worlds of literature and art.

 

That there is a place for both memoir and biography goes without saying. But I wish more readers understood these genres' different aims and constraints.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025