Middlebrook's Work As A Biographer
Middlebrook once stated why she preferred preparing biographic work to other fields of study: One of the reasons I like working on biographies is that it takes a long time, you don’t have to work quickly. People are going to stay dead. When asked why she had picked Ovid as a subject for a biography, she said, No estates, no psychotherapy, no interviews, no history—I just make it up. She noted that the historical record of Ovid's life is scanty, so a biographer must read the person from the person's literary output - all we know is in his poetry; the biographer is forced to rely on the text itself.
Middlebrook’s debut as a biographer was almost accidental: on her 41st birthday, she received an invitation from the Sexton estate to write a biography of confessional poet Anne Sexton. The resulting effort, Anne Sexton: A Biography spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, which is unusual for a biography of a minor poet. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was awarded a gold medal in nonfiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Joyce Carol Oates called the book “sympathetic but resolutely unsentimental ... intelligent, sensitive, at times harrowing.” The book was somewhat controversial, as Middlebrook was given access to (and freely used) some 300 hours of Sexton's sessions with psychiatrists.
Suits Me was a finalist for a Lambda Foundation Literary Award and a bestselling biography of Billy Tipton, a female jazz musician who lived an entire professional and private life as a man. He/she married (five times) and had children (who were adopted). The wives, and everyone else, were unaware of the disguise. (Said one of his sons, “He’ll always be Dad to me.”) London’s Financial Times wrote, “Tipton may have spent his life fearing exposure, but he/she could not have wished for a more perceptive or sympathetic biographer than Middlebrook.”
Her Husband was a bestseller. It was a 2004 finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in non-fiction. In 2006 the French translation won the Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger. The New York Times called the book “inspiring,” “attentive and clear-eyed.”
Middlebrook was noted for her openness and honest, sometimes "brutal" biographical writing. The more that each of us knows about each of the other human beings in the world, the better off are. It’s true that it is very painful to be exposed to people’s curiosity. But it’s painful in a way that can only lead to self-knowledge, because it’s really not a big deal. In the scope of human endeavor, it’s not a big deal.
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