An Esteemed Biographer Puts Her Own Life in the Spotlight

New York Times

09-02-2025

'All biography is autobiography,' Ralph Waldo Emerson said, but most biographers are marginal by definition: parasites or scavengers, 'the shadow in the garden,' to quote a godfather of the genre, James Atlas, in turn quoting his thorniest subject, Saul Bellow. When they step out of the margins it's often because something has gone wrong.
In 2017 the highly esteemed biographer Megan Marshall, who won big prizes for her books about long-dead Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters, tried interlacing strings of her own life story with that of her former poetry teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, and was thanked with mixed reviews.
Now Marshall is making another halting run at memoir, with a modest collection of essays on topics including her paternal grandfather, who worked for the Red Cross in France after the First World War and photographed the burial of young American soldiers; a run of left-handedness on her mother's side of the family; and a trip the author took to Kyoto during typhoon season. This is not a typhoon-like book that will knock you over with its coherence, but irregular winds blowing this way and that, some hotter than others.
The most compelling essay, 'Free for a While,' is about Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old killed in a shootout that made front-page headlines in 1970. He had taken courtroom hostages in an attempt to force the release of his older brother George Jackson, the author of the best-selling Black Power manifesto 'Soledad Brother,' from prison. Jonathan happened to be Marshall's classmate at Blair High School in Pasadena, Calif., which canceled her planned salutatorian's speech devoted to him (she managed to barge up and speak anyway).
To read her account of the boy she knew as 'Jon' getting laughs playing Pyramus from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in their A.P. English class — 'Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die' — two weeks before his death, and to discover the devastating origin of the essay's title, is to yearn for an entire new suite of intellectual property — book, play, movie — devoted to this family.
Another standout piece is 'These Useless Things,' wherein Marshall puzzles over why she has kept a wood-handled ice pick, salvaged from her late father's studio apartment and placed on her kitchen windowsill. It recalls her to the vanilla ice cream her parents made for summer celebrations, accompanied by her father's physics lessons, and the fading of the community ice trade as described in John Updike's Rabbit novels.
But there's something else, too: 'Perhaps the implement's concealed danger, the spike blunted with a wine cork, spoke to me of my father as well.'
After a promising start at college, he came to be troubled by mental illness, and drinking would sometimes cost him jobs. Marshall and her two siblings had a life of latchkeys and clipped coupons; she writes evocatively of her mother's aborted art career, and how she sometimes traded in pan drippings collected in a coffee can at the back of the stove for a penny a pound at the butcher.
Small wonder, the right-handed daughter grasps later in the left-handed essay, that 'when I began to write, I found myself attracted to almosts, to might-have-beens, to compromise — so often woman's story.'
Marshall is moved to consider the 'material turn' in the history profession away from documents like diaries and letters, like the many she sifted through when writing about the Transcendentalists, and toward objects. This, the theory goes, helps to resurrect the narratives of people who were illiterate or not considered important enough for archives. (It's what archaeologists have long done.)
Approached by a reader, she pays $300 — a bargain, factoring in inflation — for an early-19th-century Honduran mahogany 'writing box' with a secret drawer, almost certainly shared by Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, and marvels at the dimensionality it gives to the words she has already set down about the sisters. (Will future scholars likely fetishize our own glowing 'writing boxes,' these laptop computers with their busted 'S' keys and crumbs in the crevices? Hard to say.)
Like decorating a house, Marshall suggests with this book, the act of crafting a biography is never really finished, and certain odds and ends can be hard to clean up. There's an old-fashioned jump scare when she peers into the coffin of Una Hawthorne, the oldest child of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who inspired the character of Pearl in 'The Scarlet Letter.' Her hair was supposed to be white from heartbreak, but, Marshall reports, instead is 'deep rusty red.' She spends some time retracing steps in her attempt to find out why.
'That was the lesson of looking inside the coffin,' she writes. 'There are a few things we can know for sure: a patch of cloth, a fragment of bone, a red braid. And then there are the questions we can't answer.'