If it’s true that by age 50 we all get the faces we deserve, it is also true that no such grimly satisfying rule applies to biography. There and there alone does the hapless subject, living or dead, remain uniquely at the mercy of whoever chooses to tell his tale — and hence uniquely at the mercy of the biographer’s motivations, high and low.
Some such storytellers, for example, strive to elevate themselves by throwing great men and women down (a genre that Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography”). Others, such as those specializing in celebrity tell-alls, sort the dirty laundry of their subjects for more straightforward reasons: to pay their own rent. Then there are the closet narcissists who thrash out their own selves between the lines of the stories of others — as when melancholics are drawn to interpreting the life of Lincoln, say, or professional political enemies to rewriting the lives of their adversaries.
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