I find a humility and openness in Mark Oppenheimer’s work that makes him incredibly likable.<\/p>\n
Elisabeth Egan writes in the New York Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n Janet Malcolm, whose papers are also at the Beinecke Library, famously compared a biographer to a burglar, \u201cbreaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer didn\u2019t appear triumphant during our interview, just well intentioned and matter of fact. He\u2019d been invited into the house, so to speak; Blume had given him the key.<\/p>\n \u201cShe asked me to tell the story,\u201d he said…<\/p>\n Oppenheimer\u2019s biography is earnest and dogged, as if he were so intent on wrangling the big subjects \u2014 divorce, parenthood, sex, sexism \u2014 that he rarely captures the lightness that put Blume on the map.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most salient information in \u201cJudy Blume: A Life\u201d is buried on Page 415, in a three-paragraph section called \u201cSources.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAfter I wrote a draft of this biography, I sent it to Judy,\u201d Oppenheimer writes. \u201cAfter several months, she returned it with hundreds of comments in the margins; she also attached a separate memo, 40 pages long, offering suggestions, disagreements and assorted thoughts, covering every era discussed in the draft.\u201d<\/p>\n Recalling the exchange, Oppenheimer said: \u201cIt was hard for me to click \u2018open\u2019 on that PDF. Once I did, I realized there was a lot of wisdom in it.\u201d<\/p>\n As he described it, there wasn\u2019t a particular revelation or section of the biography that Blume objected to, but a constellation of concerns she wanted addressed.<\/p>\n Choosing his words carefully, he said, \u201cIt really felt like a close edit by someone who could have had a career as an editor.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer took some of Blume\u2019s suggestions, rejected others and fixed the errors she had caught. In the book\u2019s \u201cNotes\u201d section, he cites Blume\u2019s email 100 times.<\/p>\n Their relationship cooled after that. The two have barely been in touch since.<\/p>\n Oppenheimer declined to share Blume\u2019s memo, describing it as \u201cthorough.\u201d He acknowledged the potential discomfort of reading one\u2019s own biography, especially for a subject who is a writer herself.<\/p>\n \u201cI think on some level when you\u2019re writing a bio of a living person, you have in mind the hope that they will decide that you know them best,\u201d Oppenheimer said. \u201cBut of course, that\u2019s a silly hope. They\u2019re always going to know themselves best.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer appeared uncomfortable with Blume\u2019s rebuke, but also aware that he had to suspend his discomfort to stay true to his project. His goal was to tell a complete story, warts and all.<\/p>\n \u201cA journalist is not a prosecutor, a journalist is a truth teller,\u201d Oppenheimer said. The same could be said of a biographer…<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is frustrating, for the biographer, is the nagging sense that I am missing a lot,\u201d he writes toward the end of the book, citing \u201cinternal family dynamics\u201d as one area that remained opaque after interviews with Blume and her relatives.<\/p>\n \u201cI pressed her a lot, but I could have pressed more,\u201d Oppenheimer writes. He continues, \u201cIf there\u2019s more to the truth, which I didn\u2019t get at, perhaps the fault is mine.\u201d<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t expect to hear from Blume.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you decide to write a biography, you don\u2019t work for the subject. You work for the reader,\u201d Oppenheimer said. \u201cJudy was an amazing interview subject who was incredibly generous with her time and at a certain point it had to become my book.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re at that point now. She\u2019s not a collaborator on the ongoing project of \u2018Judy Blume: A Life<\/a>.\u2019\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which other writers are as open as Oppenheimer about the gap between aim and execution? <\/p>\n Janet Malcolm<\/a> is the obvious starting point, and the irony is that the article invokes her through the burglar metaphor. Malcolm spent her career making the epistemological problems of journalism and biography her explicit subject. The Journalist and the Murderer<\/a> argues that the journalist-subject relationship is structurally exploitative regardless of the individual journalist’s intentions, and she applies that argument to her own practice as much as to anyone else’s. In the Freud Archives<\/a> and The Silent Woman<\/a> both foreground the biographer’s inability to reach the subject as part of the text rather than as a confession buried in the notes. She is more systematic about this than Oppenheimer because the gap between aim and execution is not an admission for her but the thesis.<\/p>\n Geoff Dyer<\/a> does something related in a different register. Out of Sheer Rage<\/a>, nominally about D.H. Lawrence<\/a>, is mostly about his inability to write the book about Lawrence he intended to write. The failure becomes the subject. That is a more extreme move than Oppenheimer’s, almost a parody of the mode, but it belongs to the same tradition of writers who refuse to pretend the gap does not exist.<\/p>\n Adam Gopnik<\/a> acknowledges limitation more quietly but consistently, usually through the admission that his essays are portraits of his own obsessions as much as portraits of their ostensible subjects. He rarely claims to have arrived at a subject from a position of neutrality.<\/p>\n Robert Caro<\/a> is the interesting countercase. He is obsessively candid about his methods and his uncertainty in the Working memoir<\/a>, but the volumes of the Johnson biography project<\/a> confidence rather than acknowledged limitation. The candor about process is segregated from the finished work, which is the opposite of what Oppenheimer does by embedding Blume’s corrections in the notes.<\/p>\n The writer most structurally similar to what Oppenheimer is doing is probably Hermione Lee<\/a>, whose biography of Penelope Fitzgerald<\/a> and whose theoretical writing about biography both treat the form’s limitations as part of what biography should honestly represent rather than conceal. She argues that the biographer’s subjectivity and the gaps in the record are not embarrassments to be minimized but features of the subject that a serious biography must account for.<\/p>\n When I read Mark Oppenheimer, I keep feeling that there is so much more he wants to do but can’t do due to the requirements of his liberal elite coalition.<\/p>\n The most striking moment in this Times article is his admission near the end of the book that he is “missing a lot” and that “internal family dynamics” remained opaque, followed by the acknowledgment that he could have pressed harder and that if the truth eluded him, the fault might be his. A biographer writing that sentence, in the book itself rather than in a defensive interview after bad reviews, is doing something most practitioners of the genre refuse to do. The genre’s conventional posture is confidence: I have spent years with this person and their archive and I now know them well enough to tell you who they are. Oppenheimer is publishing his uncertainty alongside his conclusions.<\/p>\n His remark about the “silly hope” is in the same register. He names the fantasy that drives biography, that the biographer will come to know the subject better than the subject knows herself, and then immediately identifies it as a fantasy. Most biographers operate from exactly that fantasy without ever acknowledging it. He acknowledges it and proceeds anyway, which is the more honest position: I know this hope is silly and I worked from it regardless because there was no other way to do the work.<\/p>\n The 100 citations of Blume’s own corrective email in his notes section is the formal equivalent of this. He is building her disagreement with his account into the apparatus of the book rather than smoothing it away in revision. Readers who follow the notes will find, repeatedly, the subject saying he got something wrong or incomplete. That is an unusual choice. It converts the book’s scholarly apparatus into a record of the gap between his account and hers.<\/p>\n His candor about limitation did not produce a more limited book. He still wrote the medical history, the sexual experimentation, the postmortem on the marriages. The candor about what he missed coexists with the willingness to publish what he found. That combination, aggressive reporting paired with honest acknowledgment of what the reporting did not reach, is rarer in biography than either quality alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I find a humility and openness in Mark Oppenheimer’s work that makes him incredibly likable. Elisabeth Egan writes in the New York Times: Janet Malcolm, whose papers are also at the Beinecke Library, famously compared a biographer to a burglar, … Continue reading