Biography on my mind

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 don't know that that's possible or even why people read biography. 

I'm not really sure about biography at all, actually.

I just reread Roald Dahl's Boy so I've been thinking about how he approached autobiography. He says autobiography is full of boring details, so he just tells a few of the notable moments he remembers from his childhood. Excellent way to go about it! The stories are great. He goes: this was cool. This was terrible. Look at the crazy things these teachers did. Here's where my nose got cut off! Here's how we tortured our older sister's annoying boyfriend. Here's what we had for breakfast at our grandparents' house. It's all so interesting to me! I want to know everything!

Also he's probably responsible in part for my Norway obsession. You can't read that book and come away not thinking Norway is paradise, or was a hundred years ago, anyway. I mean, dour Calvinism aside. 

I'm not really here for facts so much as attitude and experiences, so for me it's autobiography yay, biography yawn. Diaries are especially good because they're not for an audience, so the truth is more likely to come out. Truth that is entirely subjective, of course, but it always is. 

Sometimes you have to come at the truth a little sideways. Or you might tell stories that you think are saying one thing, while they are saying something else entirely. There's also what's left out. 

I got the diaries of Pepys from the library, volumes 1-4 of 11. I was already sick and in a lot of pain from my legs I think due to a particular pair of boots that I had put my trust in but shouldn't have, plus a weird dude kept pestering me and I had to be rude to make him fuck off. I got the reference librarian to help me find them. He had never heard of Pepys. Lots of people have never heard of Pepys! It's okay!

Well, you can look him up in Wikipedia. Diarist! I think that sums it up. He lived through interesting times, as do we all. 

I have got to read all of the diaries of everyone ever. I love them so much. 

I probably have COVID based on having no sense of smell or taste suddenly, as of Friday afternoon, though it was waning in the morning when I went to Denny's and had flavorless eggs, pancakes, and sausage, along with flavorless coffee with flavorless vanilla creamer in it. Hmmmm. But it took making spinach dip and cutting up a whole flavorless scentless onion and five cloves of unsmellable garlic to clue me in. 

I kept putting cloves of garlic up to my nose and sniffing them. Nothing. Weird!

The spinach dip tasted like nothing at all but was cool and creamy so I ate it. 

I've been having a constant medium grade panic attack since Wednesday. I researched whether that's a thing with COVID and discovered: yes! Cytokines etc. I don't claim to know. But yes, it can definitely give you the major freakout. Phew! So that's what's going on. 

Wednesday I thought I was BAD and if I cleaned up my whole house I might escape RETRIBUTION. I fully panicked. Like hyperventilating and all. It has made it impossible to focus enough to record a podcast episode, not to mention that I'm super short of breath. 

Hang tight. I will get through it. 

It's very weird and gross to have food not taste like anything. I sniffed the bag of coffee and could distantly smell that. The bottle of iced tea tastes gross. Regular tea tastes just astringent. This has all been covered by everyone everywhere, huh? What a good example of experiences not being interesting to others despite being fascinating to myself.

However: in a month I won't really remember what this was like, not vividly, not with details, so it's great to write it down as an example of what I'm talking about. See what I'm doing here? Okay.

So I need to go through that absolutely massive block of text, truly millions of words, and pull out the interesting pieces. I don't think it tells a story, which bothers me as a novelist. But it does tell a life story and that's something, surely, depending on whether that life interests anyone. I think if it's the story of how someone got to be the writer they turned into, that could be very cool. Story of becoming! My favorite! Which would mean going back to get even earlier journals and finding the writing days there. 

I love Roald Dahl's story about how he started writing. He had lunch with an editor who basically said: give us the events but give us all the sensory details, what you saw, smelled, felt, heard. And go!

But that's not actually how he started writing. He says in Boy that he was required to write a letter home every single Sunday. He kept up the practice his entire life, writing home to his mother, who kept every single letter. So he had an incredible resource for writing autobiography, yes, but also he had all that incredible practice. Practice matters! Sometimes I message three people about something and watch how my way of telling that thing gets better each time, more vivid, more concise, funnier, improving every possible way. Which is why rewriting matters, obviously! But also it's practice in how to phrase things. 

Sensory details. The Olympics are on! I'm watching women's soccer, France vs. Canada. I expect France to win but it's been very equal. I gave the dog a bath before the game, then weeded the wildly overgrown garden while she dried off in the sun. I'm eating Tostitos and drinking that bottled iced tea because salt and sugar are things I can taste, just not flavor. 

Why in the world would that be? Why can't I SMELL anything? Not even wet dog! Or her shampoo! Not food, not fresh-cut grass, not tea. I love tea so much but it's just not there. The dog's food smells like chocolate to me. (It isn't, I promise!) I want to make chocolate chip cookies but a friend said not to bother as the smell is a major part of the appeal.  

The windows are open and the sun is shining in. The dog keeps lying on the blue bench under the windows to dry in the sun. I put the pink fleece on the giant ottoman so wet dog doesn't become a feature of the atmosphere, presuming my sense of smell returns, which it had best. 

Do tortilla chips ever taste like anything? Is there actually a flavor to them? I can't think what it is. Sticking with the crunchy foods. Celery, carrots, tortilla chips. Though I have cherries and lettuce in the fridge. 

Promise me the ongoing constant panic attack will go away. 

Editing that massive blog is going to be a work of CHAGRIN but also I find a lot of things in it extremely funny and want to share them. And unlike in real life, I get to leave out the boring or stupid parts. I suppose everyone who assembles an autobiography takes out anything that makes them look bad. I probably didn't write it in there in the first place. But if I go to the journals, I can do a very fun thing where I have two versions of the same event. That's worth doing, huh? 

SO MUCH WORK. But it feels a little like my containers of quilting fabric. Make it into a quilt! Go go go!

Walking around the biography section of the bookstore, I kept seeing biographies of people I'd met, which made the whole thing seem much more plausible. They're just people. I'm just people. I realize there's a logic gap there, but so what? It works. Turn it into books. Do your thing. 

All you really have to do is do your thing. 

Cobalt blue sugar bowl and creamer I had forgotten existed, surely packed away in the basement somewhere, plus of course bonus Eleanor content and slightly too much table.