I read mostly fiction. Out of nonfiction, I read biographies. The rest I shun, as I don’t like books on one idea that gets blown up to fill three-hundred pages. And it’s not about these ideas per se -- many of them I find really interesting. I just think you can summarize them in a few pages and still convey the message in a strong, effective way. That’s why whenever some nonfiction book attracts a lot of attention and coverage and recommendations, and I’m intrigued by the subject (it’s all in the title -- I don’t have to ask anyone what books like Atomic Habits or Deep Work or The Subtle Art of not Giving etc. are about), I go look for a summary somewhere, or a review. I’m not going to lose much, I don’t read these things for the beauty of their prose. In fact, most nonfiction is utterly boring. But these books have great covers. And sometimes I regret that some objectively awesome-looking covers don’t find their way to my bookshelf. Then I get over it.
And so I read fiction because I like to live parallel lives when I read, and I can’t do that with The 4-Hour Workweek. Again, I’m not criticizing the authors, nor the ideas they write about (although I have to say some of them are like discovering hot water1). I’m criticizing their delivery -- it just seems a little too much. A little unnecessary, overkill.
The other day I was listening to Walter Isaacson on Lex Friedman. He writes the best biographies. I’ve read Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs by him, and I’m about to start Elon Musk. He also wrote on Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winner inventor of CRISPR, the DNA editing tool. I’m planning to read these too, eventually. His books are extraordinary.
As he went through some stories and anecdotes on the characters of his books, as well as the process of spending time with them, gathering and processing information, and eventually distilling everything to write on them, I thought about the tremendous amount of time and energy and work behind a biography. And I also thought that, while writing a self-help/how to/life hack book is essentially a matter of stretching one central idea to the brink of exasperation, writing a biography is exactly the opposite -- condensing a massive amount of facts and ideas and thoughts and stories into a sensible, readable text of acceptable length.
Biographies are inspiring and instructive; they’re books of history centered around one individual’s life, deeds, and achievements. We biographers have this dirty secret that we know we distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual; but sometimes it [really] is driven by an individual, says Isaacson. Sometimes, he continues, there are “flows of forces” and “groups of people” that contribute to history-making, but it’s hard to figure out whether these flows of forces and groups of people would have achieved the same without Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Whether it would have been a matter of if, or merely a matter of when.
When we think about Einstein’s four 1905 papers that changed science forever, and how it took four years before people truly got what he wrote. When we think about moving the world into the era of the iPhone, where people can’t live without an always-connected minicomputer in their pockets, and how all-star engineering teams from Motorola and Panasonic didn’t get that, but Jobs did. When we think about the electric vehicles era, and how all the great people at GM and Ford who, based on early prototypes, decided to stop working on them. Then comes Musk who gets us to more than a million electric vehicles per year, all based not on a superior technical ability, but on a superior vision and certainly a superior drive and perseverance. If five years from now someone buys a car that’s gasoline-powered, Isaacson says, we’ll think “that’s odd”. And we’ll owe that way of thinking to Elon Musk. So when we think about all that, it’s hard to deny that some of the bigger leaps in history have been caused by individuals.
And it’s interesting how these individuals have common traits, broadly speaking. They all had troubled childhoods, they all had to face adversities, they all have complex psychological profiles, they all have demons from their past they had to come to terms with. And they all transformed these aggravations into powerful driving forces that made them do what they did. It’s funny, sometimes I think that, in order to achieve anything remarkable in life, we’d have to go through suffering and pain and distress early on, and almost reach the point of throwing the towel and ending it there. That those of us who were lucky to have a normal upbringing -- like Yours Truly -- will never amount to anything extraordinary. As an avid reader of biographies, that’s something I think about often. It’s a cliché, I know. But there’s truth in clichés too, I say to myself.
Why do Isaacson and all the other biographers write only about individuals who did something exceptional? But it’s obvious, you’d respond. Because these individuals did things everybody benefited from, things that you and I can live a better life today off of. Of course, that’s obvious. Also, true. But aren’t they all stories, after all? Why would a biography of an ordinary individual be less interesting to read?
We read biographies to learn from, and be inspired by, the lives of people who created something special. But we also read biographies because we’re curious about these individuals, we want to have a peek into their private circumstances, discover things about them we wouldn’t get from a magazine piece or a newspaper article. At least, that’s why I read them. But I’m also very attracted to the stories of ordinary people. And I believe this is one of the reasons I’m attracted to fiction.
Fiction, by definition, is not real. It’s made-up stories. But these made-up stories are always the reflection of real stuff. They employ an emotional apparatus that’s been shaped by real-life occurrences. Some of them are covertly autobiographical. Others are inspired by, and constructed on, the lives of someone the author knows, someone they have observed, or someone they shared experiences with. While listening to the Isaacson interview, I thought that a piece of fiction is a biography in disguise. A biography of unknown, ordinary people. Something that’s probably not allowed to be called a biography, because it doesn’t recount the life of an individual that somehow affected the course of history. But a biography nonetheless -- a chronological series of events and stories and situations consummated by a non-real protagonist we can identify with, learn from, or be inspired by.
I think it’d be nice to see biographies of ordinary people in bookstores. I’d buy them. Maybe they’d not be about someone who sent rockets to Mars, but I’m sure they’d be full of intriguing stories. Something similar to what Brandon Stanton did with Humans of New York, but longer and more articulated. How would you react if you entered a Barnes & Noble and saw their shelves full of volumes titled Jerry Rosewood, or Audrey Wolfer, or Umberto Giada? I’d be captivated.
Wouldn’t you?
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This is the literal translation of a line we say a lot in Italian, which is “Scoprire l’acqua calda”. I’m not sure that it conveys the right message in English, but it’s used when something straightforward, obvious, known by everybody, is explained as if it were the discovery of the century.
I can't wait to read your autobiography
Your (always wonderful) piece reminded me of a book which I can sum up into “The life of a common man, written in an uncommon and perfect way”. It’s “Stoner” by John Williams. You can’t ask yourself what’s so interesting about this uninteresting man. That’s the power of writing.