Episode 12: Roald Dahl's Boy and Autobiography

Biography is fascinating because: who cares? Who cares what happened in your life? It might be because you've done something interesting or terrible and we want to know how you got to that point. It might be because you lived through something major and cool or alarming and we want to know what it was like to be there. It might just be because you're funny and tell about things nobody else would have paid attention to, but you make them cool and interesting. That's the only way my millions of words of blog will turn into a book so I hope this one flies. With older autobiography, particularly diaries, I'm endlessly fascinated by the minutiae of daily life, but with modern biography, that's just not interesting to me at all. Excruciatingly boring, even, if the person is from the same culture as me. If not, tell me everything! It might be because your work is cool and we're interested in how a person created such things. Why? To replicate that process, maybe? I...