Why We Read Biographies

That’s right, you guessed it: this post is 100% about my novel reading obsession. Except not at all.

Early on in our relationship when the Man and I would go on bookstore dates, he would hang out in the military history and biographies section. Meanwhile, I would bop between fiction, poetry, and kids’ books (you’re never too old for kids’ books), sipping my coffee and wondering how he could be content not reading fiction. Eventually, I realized that this was defeating the purpose of going on a date, and, since I knew there was slim chance of me getting him on board with my reading tastes, I knew I had to find something I could love in the sections he was frequenting.

So, I began to read travel writing. That put us right next to each other in the book store and scratched an itch for me that wasn’t being satisfied. From travel writing, I moved on to writer’s biographies, then food memoirs, then any number of different genres that had me orbiting his general area.

In the process, we began to share books more and more often. Some of this is just the effect of marriage—you rub off on each other—but some was a purposeful maturing of taste. I read Fortitude; he read Harry Potter. I read No Time for Spectators; he read Ender’s Game. (Okay, my taste matured—his relived a lost childhood.) Over time, we realized that we liked reading overlapping books and getting to discuss them (and argue about them).

Now, I thoroughly enjoy reading biographies and memoirs, and I think I’ve figured out why. Much like travel writing, where you get to see a different part of the world without ever leaving the comfort of your own couch, biographies and memoirs enable us to experience another’s point of view, feel another’s feelings, live another’s life. This is the kind of opportunity we don’t really get even with those that we know the most intimately.

A memoir is a rare chance to step into a moment in time and learn a key lesson without having to walk personally through the pain that got the writer there. A biography welcomes you to a bird’s eye perspective of another’s life, and it should make us wonder how someone else would view the grand arc of our lives.

When we read well-written biographies and memoirs, we walk away asking important questions. What is the narrative we are telling with our own lives? What over arching story would someone else tell if they were writing about us? And why does that matter? (You probably know the answer to that last one.)

Good biographies and memoirs should leave us asking almost as many questions of ourselves as they answer about the subject. And that’s not a bad thing. They provide us with the opportunity to see reality through another’s eyes—and that is powerful.

I love reading fiction, because it too helps us to reshape our narrative. We learn to look for the hero in our story, for the theme that might be drawn out, for the moments of rising and falling action. But well written biographies and memoirs do this with the added benefit of knowing that a real person endured and grew and learned—these moments really happened, these struggles truly were survived—so you can too.

So, what are you reading? How is it changing the questions you ask? How is it reshaping the way you see our world?