The NYT carried a great article by Stacy Schiff on the dual lives of biographers.
The opening paragraph perfectly captures the feeling:
The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The first is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Netflix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served.
The third paragraph encapsulates the challenge:
Reality does not easily give up meaning; it’s the biographer’s job to clobber it into submission. You’re meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.
Later in the essay Schiff asks, “Whence the urge to be subsumed by someone else’s existence?”; and then provides a beautiful answer:
The double life is a kind of hedge, too, against inadequacy. There must be more to it all than this, you think as you unload the dishwasher again. And there is; while you are ostensibly feeding the kids you are really back in l8th-century Paris, except with Internet service. Maybe you just have a different kind of nervous system, a mutant form of vanity.
And then after eavesdropping for years on another century while to all appearances you seem to be folding the socks in this one, a curious thing happens. As much as you’ve opted for self-deflection over self-reflection, as much as you’ve assumed an alternate identity, you begin to suspect that you’ve left bits of yourself all over the page. Just as autobiography has been said to be a perfect vehicle for telling the truth about other people, so biography contains some small sketch of its author. Its outlines are lost only to one person. Sunk deep in someone else’s psyche, you’re either pathologically unwilling or just plain unable to recognize your own shadow.
The idea that one’s work is a hedge against inadequacy as well as obsolescence is a compelling one. It applies to all creative endeavors, particularly ones not undertaken as a means of earning a living. It is the creative person’s answer to “is this all there is?”, to days spent in necessary but pedestrian pursuits. In the case of a biography project, two lives are redeemed – those of the biographer and the biography subject. Lives led with energy, passion, and a defiant idealism are salvaged from the dustbin of history.
In the final paragraph Schiff says: “biography remains a small sketch of its author.” So true.