Biography is a classic, difficult art, and biographers, those torch-bearers of one of literature’s oldest genres, tend to be scrupulous, detail-oriented obsessives. Yet under rigid control there is often a strange and passionate devotion; they might fall in love with a ghost in order to begin their work, but they have to fall out of love in order to finish it.
Aspiring biographers have a thousand reasons not to embark on a biography – these books tend to take a decade or more of work and rarely can anyone survive on an advance for that long. But alongside the more or less conventional authors are those biographers who, for whatever reason, meet their task by changing the rules. These slanted, badly behaved books tend to captivate me, which is why I chose to write a novel in the shape of such a biography. Here are 10 of my favourite such books.
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