I’ve been getting into reading more biographies, and for the most part, it’s been great, but there’s always a lingering thought in my head asking: how much of this is real? I remember large phases of my life, and I get that a biographer would interview people around them/take countless hours trying to remember the past, but how can you remember so many things in such great detail?
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Years upon years of deep research.
Research, research, research!
Yep. It’s why, in a really thoroughly-researched biography, the footnotes/references section at the back is often as long as the book itself!
Sounds like thesis and dissertation both, lol.
This made me laugh because it’s so true! My thesis for my bachelor’s in history was heavy.
My bibliography for my history PhD was over 200 pages
A lot of primary sources that involves asking around and performing interviews.
There’s a lot of research involved in a good biography.
Interviews with the subject or with other people, cross-checking with historical records, sometimes access to things like diaries or letters…
I had the same thought reading Simone de Beauvoir’s La Cérémonie des Adieux, which basically goes over the last years of Jean-Paul Sartre in sometimes excruciating details. Like “Monday, March 27th, 1995, he had a meeting with this guy and spent two hours writing this article. We had an argument with this person regarding this very profound philosophical subject.” or “Summer of 96 we went to this place on holidays, stayed at this lovely hotel, and had this lunch at this restaurant where we were reading this magazine” level of detail, and I was in awe.
Typically at the end of a biography, you’ll see a note section that will indicate where the author got their info for each detail. You’d be amazed, if a person spent years, how much information they could dig up to tell the story of you. It’s not just what you remember, but your friends, family, coworkers, your social media posts, if you’ve kept a diary at all, etc. Also, if a person is a major figure (president, royalty, whatever), there’s a lot of information being collected and reported on during their lives. People will talk about their interactions with prominent figures in their own diaries, newspapers will report on the comings and goings extensively, all of that. It takes years to write a biography because authors will gather all this information and then take extensive time writing it into a cohesive story.
I’ve been shocked at how many times people were writing letters and either kept a drafted copy or a carbon copy of the letter they sent too. I love reading about the sources authors use and when I see that, I imagine how thrilled the author must have been. I’ve also read a lot of books that follow census records and like you said, newspapers and other public records.
I think a lot of people have a sense of history in their correspondence. Even if someone is related to a prominent figure, and they’re writing them purely for enjoyment or normal correspondence, they might keep a copy of a letter they sent for posterity.
It also might be that they kept drafts for practical purposes. My mom keeps a draft of the yearly Christmas letter she sends to her cousins, so she can look back and see if she’s repeated herself at all over the years.
I think how awful it must be for historians when they know that diaries or correspondence were destroyed after a person’s death. So many spouses have burned diaries or letters after a death because of the pain or anger they feel. Such valuable historical records, lost because of a surge of emotion.
A lot of biographers pore over their subjects’ correspondence, and lots of people, at least until recently, saved every letter they ever got (this made business sense, since letters could be used as legal documents). So you could often get a good day-to-day record of their lives that way.
Now multiply that by all the people who corresponded with them, and the amount of data goes up rapidly.
A lot of things recorded in biographies are what are deemed as significant events and not usually the type of thing you would forget.
For example, when you were born, your family members, your upbringing, the birth of your children etc. are all things you are likely to easily remember.
Biographies often also include core memories. So while these events may not be significant to everyone these events were significant moments in this person’s life for whatever reason.
Personal struggles, something biographies also cover usually, are also often not forgotten. If you’ve ever struggled with addiction or lived in poverty, those are just not the types of things you or the people around you would forget.
I do think some minor details may be wrong just because people are likely to misremember minor details, but biographers usually account for that by doing a lot of research and stating when they cannot verify something or there are conflicting accounts.
Interviews, reading stories in newspapers and magazines, if you are a politician, there are your ‘official papers,’ which are usually ‘gifted’ to a university or if you’re a president, your library/presidential center.
Journals and diaries and moving into the future peoples social media accounts, youtube, personal websites, photo sharing websites.
Research can take many forms. If the people that they knew are still living then interviews can be a big part of the research. If they aren’t then they look for diaries, letters (to, from , or about), journals, articles written about them at the time, ledgers or any other documentation of their lives.
A good example would be Prairie Fires which is a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder who wrote Little House on the Prairie. Fortunately she became well known as an author while she was still living so her journals, journals of family and friends, as well as letters written to and from her were preserved. They research also found documentation in the form of land deeds, census and articles so there was a lot of information that allowed the biographer to give a very detailed look into her life.
I think it would be difficult to recount your whole life chronologically right off the bat. But I think that the writers and the subjects of the books engage in long and many conversations over a period of time - memories and context are bound to add up as you converse and dig deeper. Also, I’d presume that interviews are done with other people who were either involved in specific events, time periods, or knew the subject of the biography well, further adding context and richness with details and perspectives. But these are all guesses, I don’t really know
Plus, it’s probably expected for biographers to be VERY good interviewers and know the best questions to ask, and know when to direct the conversation in the right direction
If it’s a living person, then it’s relatively easy to research. There’s more than likely a lot of different sorts of documentation out there, not to mention the wealth of living people that you can interview, including but not limited to the subject of the biography. It’s less a matter of remembering and more a matter of asking the right questions, and then working the answers together in a satisfactory way.
If it’s a dead person, especially a long dead person, it’s somewhat more difficult, and you have to rely on more written sources. It’s more like historical writing, in that case.
Diaries, letters, articles. In the old days before technology people wrote more I guess. It was expensive to call someone all the time, but you could send them a letter for the cost of a stamp.
Check the acknowledgments in any decently researched biography and you will see a litany of thanks to various librarians and archivists for their assistance in helping the author find resources about the subject of the biography.
Libraries and archives are vital for any serious biographical research (or serious research, period.)