All posts tagged: Biography

7 Interesting Things I Learned from the New Judy Blume Biography

7 Interesting Things I Learned from the New Judy Blume Biography

Published by Jenni Sidey

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Judy Blume is a literary legend. Her career has taken her across age ranges, from books for very young readers to adult readers, as well as, of course, young adult readers. This year, two biographies of Blume hit shelves, and they’ve been eye-opening into the life of one of the groundbreakers in youth literature. I’ve spent the last several weeks listening to Judy Blume by Mark Oppenheimer, performed on audio by Molly Ringwald. But right before I got deep into the audiobook, two different articles came out that have altered how I think about the book as I listen. First was this piece in The New York Times, published two days before the book’s release, that discussed the relationship between Oppenheimer and Blume. It explores the dynamics between writer and subject in biography, and it raises a host of interesting questions, including what kind of relationship is expected. Oppenheimer had access to pieces of an unpublished memoir by …

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing | Biography books

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing | Biography books

Published by Sam Flores

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.” Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called …

Alcohol, cocaine, and Broadway: A new revealing Stephen Sondheim biography

Alcohol, cocaine, and Broadway: A new revealing Stephen Sondheim biography

Published by Sam Flores

Book Review Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy By Daniel Okrent Yale University Press: 320 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021, at 91, was a gut punch to musical theater fans. Showered with honors and tributes, he had begun to seem eternal, a cultural constant. Even his gnarliest shows enjoyed successful revivals — more acclaimed, and more profitable, than their original productions. His influence and mentorship shaped a new generation of theatrical composers that included Adam Guettel (“The Light in the Piazza”), Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), Jonathan Larson (“Rent”) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”). The most secular of Jews, Sondheim is now the subject of a biography in Yale University Press’ excellent Jewish Lives series. Its author, Daniel Okrent, was the New York Times’ first public editor and has written acclaimed books on topics such as immigration and Prohibition. Okrent never met Sondheim, he tells us, but he had some near …

A Yoko Ono biography that avoids John Lennon… Really?

A Yoko Ono biography that avoids John Lennon… Really?

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter What is Yoko Ono? Is she the artist whose “Music of the Mind” concept was honoured with a major exhibition by the Tate in 2024? Or the author of Wrapping Piece in 1965, in which she swaddled an orchestra’s members in gauze? Or the maker of the experimental film Bottoms, in 1967? Or the woman who said “I was a rebel even in the avant-garde”, and whose paintings came with numbered instructions? The Ono of three husbands, each of whom added to her myth? The widow of fame and fortune? (With John Lennon, she ended up in tabloid hell.) A further worry: is she even knowable? How seriously does she want to be taken? To approach her life and work is to enter a forcefield that will send the critic or biographer’s navigation spinning, with warning lights from every instrument panel: …

Hannibal Lecter origins: A review of Brian Raftery’s Thomas Harris biography

Hannibal Lecter origins: A review of Brian Raftery’s Thomas Harris biography

Published by Sam Flores

Book Review Hannibal Lecter: A Life By Brian RafterySimon & Schuster: 336 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Of all President Trump’s rather peculiar hyper-fixations — rigged elections, left-wing fake news and Rosie O’Donnell — there is one that particularly stands out, and his name is Hannibal Lecter. At times the president either compliments the serial killer or compares Lecter’s time in an asylum to that of immigrants seeking asylum — though the constant references to Hannibal the Cannibal might fall into comparison given the president’s own rather carnivorous-leaning diet. Brian Raftery cleverly opens his new biography, “Hannibal Lecter: A Life,” with this heightened focus on how the once side character became such a household name. In introducing Lecter to this culturally embalmed state only offered to a select golden group of characters, the Los Angeles-based author sets the stage to unravel the mysterious character’s origins through his elusive creator, Thomas Harris, and the real-life crimes and surprising …

Lukas Prize Finalists Spotlight Baldwin Biography and a Searing Look at Ukraine’s War

Lukas Prize Finalists Spotlight Baldwin Biography and a Searing Look at Ukraine’s War

Published by Sam Flores

NEW YORK (AP) — A biography of James Baldwin, a deep and personal probe into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a revelatory history of the American West inspired by a 19th century photograph are among this year’s finalists for prizes established in honor of the late investigative journalist J. Anthony Lukas. The finalists in three categories were announced Thursday by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, which oversee the Lukas Prize Project. Danielle Leavitt’s “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine” is a nominee for the $10,000 Lukas Book Prize, given for works that exemplify “literary grace, commitment to serious research and original reporting.” Others cited are Bench Ansfield’s “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” Rich Benjamin’s “Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History,” Mariah Blake’s “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals” and Jeff Hobbs’ “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, …

David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God by Peter Ormerod review – the making of a modern saint | Biography books

David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God by Peter Ormerod review – the making of a modern saint | Biography books

Published by Sam Flores

It has become a tired cliche among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie died in 2016. It also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of a liberal order that has crumbled around our ears, Bowie prophesied the mayhem that has replaced it. In his later years, he thought that we had entered a zone of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the internet – not its promise, but its menace. There is no plan and no order. There is just disaster and social collapse. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity through to the background violence of The Next Day and Blackstar, was always drowned or destroyed or incinerated: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide” as he exclaims at the beginning of Diamond Dogs. Bowie prefigured Trumpworld in countless ways. Just listen to Under the God on the much-maligned Tin Machine in 1989: “Washington heads in …

The Bed Trick by Izabella Scott review – a bizarre story of sexual duplicity | Biography books

The Bed Trick by Izabella Scott review – a bizarre story of sexual duplicity | Biography books

Published by Sam Flores

In September 2015, Gayle Newland stood trial accused of sex by deception. It was alleged that she created an online identity as a man and used this character, Kye Fortune, to lure another woman into a sexual relationship, which was consummated repeatedly with the assistance of a blindfold and a prosthetic penis. The woman believed she was having sex with Kye until one day her ring caught on his hat and she felt long hair. Tearing off her blindfold, she realised her male lover was actually her female friend. As these lurid, almost fairytale details seeped out, the case went viral. “Sex attacker who posed as man found guilty” was one of the milder headlines. The trial caught Izabella Scott’s attention because it was a real-life example of a plot device she recognised from literature. The bed trick can be found in folk stories and operas, in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Often told for comic effect, it concerns sex by trickery and deception, under cover of darkness. “The plot suggests,” Scott writes, “that, in bed, anyone …

The Books Briefing: A Biography Without ‘The Boring Bits’

The Books Briefing: A Biography Without ‘The Boring Bits’

Published by José Betancourt

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In a recent Atlantic article about Adam Morgan’s new book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: “what to do with the boring bits.” This feels like an apt dilemma to invoke while critiquing a book about an editor. Morgan’s subject, Margaret Anderson, was the first person to publish portions of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States—and was convicted on obscenity charges as a result. But as Stewart writes, Anderson, who founded The Little Review in 1914, was an editor for less than 10 years, and afterward she lived “the way most people do, somewhat aimlessly.” Because of this, Stewart believes, the biography falls short of its promise; Morgan fails to prove his argument that Anderson’s “greatest work” was “the life she had forged” after leaving her career. Perhaps, she suggests, he should have focused on the editing—and edited out the …