Themes
Meade’s approach to the practice of life writing springs from her journalistic training, in which success depends for the most part on meticulous investigation, regardless of where the trail may lead. She does not believe there is anything to be gained by tiptoeing around a subject’s personal life. Only a long comprehensive gaze at a human being’s life—inner as well as outer, the messy and the glorious—can account for the person’s accomplishments.
Meade stated in a 2006 interview:
Biography was traditionally written by people who had lots of money and didn’t have to do anything. Or—when I first started out—by academics. Most of these people had very strict rules for what they thought was appropriate for a biography. They thought you had to be very circumspect. You couldn’t really pry into a subject’s life, which to me sounds insane, because that is what I do: pry into people’s lives. So I am perfect for what biography has become today because there is nothing I wouldn’t investigate. That is the way biography has changed in the last 20 years. It was a kind of white glove type of writing, now it’s anything goes.
Read more about this topic: Marion Meade
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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