Great post this week, Lisa, although you might give yourself more credit for your tendency to stick to the vertical: it's really a different philosophy of the writer's (journalist's) relationship to the subject being written about, and an effort to steer as clear as possible away from molding truth into a pleasurable story -- and by "pleasurable" I don't mean a happy story necessarily but one that pleases both the writer and reader in its form, its satisfying tying of loose ends, its precise editing out of non sequiturs and ambiguities that don't easily fit into the overarching tale. Lives are complicated and humans' actions don't necessarily gel into a single streamlined trajectory of causes. This is where the analogy of playing a piece of music (which is already written by someone else) to writing a narrative about a life or lives might fall apart: the emotional arc, the editing, and the thematic cohesion have been pre-made, by and large, for the performer of a finished piece (leaving room for the nuance of individual performances, of course), whereas for the writer of non-fictional lives there's a different sort of care involved in respecting the truthiness of verticality and research-based journalism while also understanding the need to tell a particular and engaging and meaningful story on the basis of all that research and all those fragmented facts. And with a memoir it's also a function of accepting that what you write is as much about you, and your desire for cohesion and coherence, as it is about the family members you're trying to document and understand.
In today's NY Times there's a very thoughtful essay by Parul Sehgal on the genre of biography which resonates a bit with the vertical/horizontal opposition you describe. A passage of particular interest: “'The effort to come close,' [as Joyce's biographer Richard] Ellmann puts it, 'to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.'
"Why is that?...The subterranean drama of the biography, as the critic and practitioner Janet Malcolm has written, is provided by the biographer’s own motives and masks — the choices the biographer might make when confronted invariably with the gaps in the archives, the burned letters and lost diaries.... A biography is less a portrait than a record of an encounter. This 'effort to come close,' to apprehend, is what we track, what gives the life its pulse. Biography may be built on facts, but a fact, as Saul Bellow wrote, 'is a wire through which one sends a current.”
Hi David, all good points. And thanks for the NYT link, the line about the "biographer's own motives and masks" has been resonating while I work on the memoir...
Oh, yes, I remember that note and yes... you, ARE onto something. I love setting it up in opposition vertically as compared with horizontally. Keep going, you've got something by the tail.
I love this particular post. So much that resonates with my own experience, both with writing and with the piano. My issues were and are different, but the need to find a different process is the same. And your expression of the dilemma is beautifully written.
Great post this week, Lisa, although you might give yourself more credit for your tendency to stick to the vertical: it's really a different philosophy of the writer's (journalist's) relationship to the subject being written about, and an effort to steer as clear as possible away from molding truth into a pleasurable story -- and by "pleasurable" I don't mean a happy story necessarily but one that pleases both the writer and reader in its form, its satisfying tying of loose ends, its precise editing out of non sequiturs and ambiguities that don't easily fit into the overarching tale. Lives are complicated and humans' actions don't necessarily gel into a single streamlined trajectory of causes. This is where the analogy of playing a piece of music (which is already written by someone else) to writing a narrative about a life or lives might fall apart: the emotional arc, the editing, and the thematic cohesion have been pre-made, by and large, for the performer of a finished piece (leaving room for the nuance of individual performances, of course), whereas for the writer of non-fictional lives there's a different sort of care involved in respecting the truthiness of verticality and research-based journalism while also understanding the need to tell a particular and engaging and meaningful story on the basis of all that research and all those fragmented facts. And with a memoir it's also a function of accepting that what you write is as much about you, and your desire for cohesion and coherence, as it is about the family members you're trying to document and understand.
In today's NY Times there's a very thoughtful essay by Parul Sehgal on the genre of biography which resonates a bit with the vertical/horizontal opposition you describe. A passage of particular interest: “'The effort to come close,' [as Joyce's biographer Richard] Ellmann puts it, 'to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience.'
"Why is that?...The subterranean drama of the biography, as the critic and practitioner Janet Malcolm has written, is provided by the biographer’s own motives and masks — the choices the biographer might make when confronted invariably with the gaps in the archives, the burned letters and lost diaries.... A biography is less a portrait than a record of an encounter. This 'effort to come close,' to apprehend, is what we track, what gives the life its pulse. Biography may be built on facts, but a fact, as Saul Bellow wrote, 'is a wire through which one sends a current.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/magazine/ai-biographies-books-genre.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ok8.EFpO.mPKqwXPji8ek&smid=url-share
Hi David, all good points. And thanks for the NYT link, the line about the "biographer's own motives and masks" has been resonating while I work on the memoir...
I’m a firm believer of finding the story organically.
Yes, and sometimes it takes a looooooonnnnnngggg time!
Oh, yes, I remember that note and yes... you, ARE onto something. I love setting it up in opposition vertically as compared with horizontally. Keep going, you've got something by the tail.
Thank you, Barbara.
As natural as the sound of the ocean waves.
What a lovely exploration of this vertical/horizontal theme from your earlier Note.
Thanks, Jill.
I love this particular post. So much that resonates with my own experience, both with writing and with the piano. My issues were and are different, but the need to find a different process is the same. And your expression of the dilemma is beautifully written.
Thanks, Perri.