The pleasures and perils of writing biography

Writing biography is not an easy discipline to pigeonhole because it has changed so much over the years. The basic plot of a biography - the story of a life from birth to death - of course is true for us all. But those elements can be moved around in so many ways. A biography can be the story of a life from grave to cradle, like the English writer Alexander Masters' Stuart: a life backwards, his life story of a young man with mental health issues. The actual investigation can be part of the biography, and the American writer Janet Malcolm has made a speciality of this: her books are as much about her own practice of biography as they are about her subjects. There are even books about not writing biography: I'm thinking of Geoff Dyer's Out of sheer rage, a very funny discussion about his own inability to write about D.H. Lawrence.