Editor's Note: M.E. Thomas is the author of Confessions of a Sociopath, a psychological study of diagnosed sociopaths by none other than one who is diagnosed herself. Thomas turns conventional wisdom of sociopathy on its head, revealing how one in twenty-five people are sociopaths (that's four percent!), and -- before you quake with paranoia -- how harmless the majority of them actually are. We've asked Thomas to share with us some of the most common misconceptions of sociopathy -- the violence, the inhumanity, the gender constructs -- and have given her the opportunity to swiftly debunk each and every one of them. While psychologists quibble ad naseum on the psychological classification of sociopathy, here's a chance to take a crash course on the human psyche from someone who's been forced to reflect on her own every day. 

I’m a diagnosed sociopath, but that doesn’t mean I’m an evil serial killer. You would like me if you met me. I’m fun, exciting, the perfect office escort—your boss’s wife has never met anyone quite so charming.  I have never stalked prison halls; I prefer mine to be covered in ivy. I’m accomplished and easy to talk to, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about me is my ability to blend in seamlessly in my surroundings. Everyone has met a sociopath, probably without realizing it. Sociopaths are notoriously difficult to spot, particularly since most people don’t know what to look for. Here are some of the biggest myths about sociopaths:

1. Myth: Sociopaths are psychotic. Nomenclature for “sociopathy” is not standard. Some psychologists call it psychopathy, others refer to it by the DSM-5’s title “antisocial personality disorder”. What is clear, however, is that although people sometimes refer to sociopaths as “psychos,” sociopaths do not suffer from psychosis, a condition characterized by derangement and detachment from reality that might take the form of delusions and hallucinations. We’re not crazy. And the truth is that we are sometimes quite successful. It is just that we live, think, and make decisions in a way that some people find loathsome and most find disturbingly amoral.

2. Myth: Sociopaths are all violent, sadistic, killers. “Most psychopaths are not violent, and most violent people are not psychopaths,” according to psychologist and researcher Scott Lilienfield. Sociopaths have a constant need for stimulation, and that can sometimes manifest itself in malicious or violent acts, particularly if those are the opportunities that regularly present themselves to the sociopath. I’m not necessarily a sadist. I intentionally hurt people sometimes, but don’t we all? For the most part, I find my stimulation through more legitimate routes: thrill-seeking sports, risky stock trading, and the occasional consensual choking of a significant other.

3. Myth: Sociopaths are all in prison. Only 20 percent of male and female prison inmates are sociopaths, although we are probably responsible for about half of serious crimes committed. Although sociopaths are more likely to be in prison than the average person, “psychopathy can and does occur in the absence of official criminal convictions, and many psychopathic individuals have no histories of violence," according to psychologist and researcher Jennifer Skeem.

4. Myth: Sociopaths are all men. Sociopathy is diagnosed much more frequently in men. One possible explanation is that very little research data exists regarding sociopathy in women. However, what research has been done reveals that female sociopaths exhibit only two or three main features that are similar to those found in men—usually, a lack of empathy and a pleasure in the manipulation and exploitation of others—but do not often exhibit violently impulsive behavior. This may be one reason that while I’m a diagnosed sociopath, I am not a prototypical sociopath.

5. Myth: Sociopaths are inhuman. When I first started writing about sociopathy, I hoped to help people realize that sociopaths are natural human variants. I thought at the time that the big challenge would be to try to showcase some of our strengths in a more positive light, to demonstrate that we are not as bad as people might think. Recently I have been thinking that the real problem is not in getting “normal” people to believe that we’re better than they think, but in getting them to see that the “normal” ones are actually worse than they believe themselves to be. It is convenient to define normal as whatever you happen to be. No need to confront the possibility that maybe you aren’t as empathetic as you seem. Maybe your conscience doesn’t have quite the sway that you thought it did. Maybe you are both capable and incapable of much more than you had hoped. Maybe you have a lot more in common with sociopaths than you’d like to think. Maybe it is just one big long spectrum with only a few people at the extremes and the rest huddled closer to the middle.

The more complex the mind, the harder it is to wrestle into submission and understand its inner workings. Perhaps that is the reasoning behind Ray Monk's decision to recast Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, in his new biography Oppenheimer, only a few years after Kai Bird and Martin Sherman received Pulitzer Prizes for their work on the same scientist in American Prometheus.

Monk's bibliographic track record, however, suggests he's well equipped for a double-take. His other works include comprehensive profiles of eminent philosophers like the genius Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the brilliant British philosopher Bertrand Russell. In fact, if we all forge our own personal brands of philosophy over time -- if only to make sense of this cluttered world -- then no one is better positioned than Monk to dissect Oppenheimer's life code and worldview. As Monk himself mentions in this installment of Behind the Books, "my aim was to show his philosophy and his ethical and spiritual concerns to be twin parts of the same soul," a soul -- both famous and infamous -- broken asunder by his own invention.

Biographile: What’s your writing routine? Where, when, and how does it happen?

Ray Monk: I usually write in the evening, starting sometime after 9 and going on until about 3 in the morning or often later.

BIOG: To what extent does your writing reflect your own life story?

RM: Well, I am writing the lives of others, so I guess not much. Of course, to a greater or lesser extent, I am myself present in everything I write, so it would be possible to learn much about me from my writing – but probably not my life story.

BIOG: Until recently, your work has been primarily focused on great philosophers. What inspired the switch to science in covering the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer?

RM: I was asked to review a collection of his letters & found them absolutely fascinating -- in a way that has some parallels with my fascination for Wittgenstein. Just as, with Wittgenstein, my aim was to show his philosophy and his ethical and spiritual concerns to be twin parts of the same soul, so my aim in writing Oppenheimer’s life was to find as much unity as I could in the ‘bright, shining splinters’ (to use his friend Rabi’s phrase) of which he was composed.

BIOG: What writers have influenced you most?

RM: Andrew Hodges, the author of a superb life of Alan Turing, has been a big inspiration, as have Richard Ellmann, Richard Holmes and, in a very different way, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

BIOG: What five writers - dead or alive - would you invite to an imaginary dinner party?

RM: Samuel Johnson, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Jonathan Swift.

BIOG: To the aspiring writer, what advice would you give? What advice helped you become the writer you are today?

RM: The best advice I was given was by a philosophy professor who told me that before publishing a book you should lock it away in a drawer for a year and only publish it if, when you return to it, you are still sure that it deserves to be published. That is what I would say to an inspiring writer.

BIOG: Do you always have to finish reading a book you start?

RM: No! I have hundreds of books that I have started & never finished & the advent of the Kindle, in making books much easier to obtain, has made the situation even worse.

BIOG: eBook or paper book?

RM: Well, of course, paper books are nicer, but I have thousands of them & they are a serious nuisance, so in some ways I look forward to the day when I can replace my many shelves of paper books with a single electronic device.

BIOG: Book first or movie first?

RM: Ideally, the book every time, but it is not always possible. I made a valiant effort to read Parade’s End in advance of the TV series, but I got nowhere near finishing it in time. I am reading Cloud Atlas at the moment, but it is a forlorn hope that I will finish it before seeing the movie.

BIOG: What book are you currently recommending?

RM: Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. It’s every bit as geeky as it sounds, but absolutely fascinating and extremely well-written.

Sectarian strife. Kidnappings. Torture. Paramilitary fronts. These aren't the typical words you associate with religious groups. But when spiritual factions are stoked by jingoism, and when emotions run high on both sides of the battleground, you have the collapse of order, known to Northern Ireland as The Troubles. Colin Broderick, author of the new memoir That's That, is a first-hand witness of the infighting his home country hosted for thirty-plus years, a time when bullets flew from the '60s to the '90s, calming only by 1998. Growing up through that madness, Colin comes to terms with his past by collecting the fragments of his disrupted childhood, and piecing them all together to reexamine his identity, his family, and the tumultuous turf he called home.

Broderick is also the author of Orangutan, a memoir of binging, boozing and wrestling with the Irish-immigrant experience in America. He has written pieces for The New York Times and Poets & Writers. Gladly sitting down to chat with us about his story in this segment of Behind the Books, Colin tells us of his literary leanings: the two-to-twelve hour writing range, his book-strewn bedside table, and the admonition that if writing "lives in you like a virus," you must "write with everything you have. If you don’t, it will destroy you."

Biographile: What’s your writing routine? Where, when, and how does it happen?

Colin Broderick: I can write just about anywhere. When the need is there it doesn't really matter where I am or what sort of chair I’m sitting in. I write in bed, on the couch, in other people's homes (when I can’t afford to stay in my own). I wrote a chunk of my last memoir Orangutan in jail. I write inside, outside, with the radio on, with the radio off. When I get really involved in a project it really doesn't matter where I am, it’s just me and the screen, or the page. Of course it’s always preferable not to have other people around but that’s not always possible, yet.

As for the when; I like to get started early and let my enthusiasm for the work dictate how many hours I’ll spend at the computer. It might be two hours or it might be twelve.

BIOG: What writers have influenced you most?

CB: When I was a young boy growing up in the countryside in Northern Ireland I had to walk three miles to the nearest village on Saturday mornings to catch the mobil library. The selection of literature was fairly limited and I didn't really have anybody to guide me but I did discover both Roald Dahl and Hugh Lofting. They were my first real literary inspirations. Then when I was eighteen and squatting in North London I read post office by Charles Bukowski and I thought “Hey, I can do this. I can be a writer.” After that I got into Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Philip Roth. Colum McCann’s first novel Songdogs was also very influential. And then I got into poetry and I studied with Billy Collins for a few years and he was a wonderful mentor. I found that what is important to me is clarity. I want a good story and I want it told by a great storyteller. Einstein said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

BIOG: Read any great biographies or memoirs recently?

CB: I stayed away from reading memoirs as best I could over the past five years. I found that I would measure my own storytelling technique with whoever I was reading. That being said I did just finish Norris Church Mailer’s A Ticket to the Circus, which was a wonderful little window into what it was like to live with that madman. Of course when you’re reading writers like Hemingway and Roth, it’s fairly biographical material anyway, it’s memoir masquerading as fiction. When I’m done writing for the day I like to watch movies instead. I love great movie-making.

BIOG: Your new book – That’s That – recalls your childhood growing up in Northern Ireland during a period fraught with violence. Are there other accounts of the Northern Ireland experience – in book, movie or some other form – that you've been impressed by?

CB: What I discovered through the process of writing this book was that there is very little in the way of readable literature on what really happened in Northern Ireland during those years. Certainly from a Catholic stand point. And that makes sense. In a country where Catholics were living under constant repression it would make sense that the English would try to repress any voice that was critical of the way they were running the show. There weren't a whole lot of Catholics getting jobs in big publishing houses in the Northern Ireland that I grew up in, and that had a direct effect on what was, and still is to some degree, being published there. When you control the propaganda  it’s much easier to run the show in your favor. The real story of what happened in Northern Ireland is only now beginning to emerge. I hope That’s That helps to balance the scales a little on that front, and at least open it up to a more balanced democratic conversation. As for movies, watch Daniel Day Lewis in "In The Name of The Father". That’s an awesome movie and it gives you a real sense of the injustice that was taking place in Northern Ireland at that time.

BIOG: It’s said that people either read to escape or read to remember. Do you fall into one of these groups?

CB: I do both. I spent most of my adult life escaping; drugs, alcohol abuse, one failed relationship after another, and during that time I read a lot of books that fit that mindset. Then five years ago I quit running and I started remembering. I started reading and writing in order to remember, to construct a narrative for myself. My last memoir Orangutan dealt with the twenty years I spent drinking suicidally and working construction in New York while trying to formulate my life as a writer. In That’s That, I've gone back to the beginning to see if I could get at the "why."

BIOG: What five writers - dead or alive - would you invite to an imaginary dinner party?

CB: Easy: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Bukowski and Woody Allen. (How would I stay sober at that table though? I wouldn't, would I? Maybe I would.)

BIOG: To the aspiring writer, what advice would you give? What advice helped you become the writer you are today?

CB: If you must write, if it lives in you like a virus, then write, write with everything you have. If you don’t, it will destroy you.

BIOG: Faulkner said a writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination. Do you use all three equally, or rely on one over another?

CB: Faulkner had it right. I would add just one thing to his list, you must be able to tell a good story. Only the good stories survive. Tell me a boring story you heard when you were ten. See?

BIOG: What’s next on your reading list?

CB: I will give you the list of books that are currently sitting on my bedside table. I am reading them all simultaneously.

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
Room by Emma Donoghue
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Pastoralia by George Saunders
How to Make Love to a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson (I’m trying to be honest here)
Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I know, it’s a ridiculous sight to behold, but when you’re single you can get away with a bedside table that looks like that.

If pressed to list the most important aspects of our lives, our relationships may be the most meaningful. There are those we share with our friends and family, of course, and perhaps those we share with a given god. Often left unspoken, however, are the relationships we share with ourselves. After all, fulfillment starts from within. And while an attack on our family or friends elicits immediate defense, when our own identities are on the line, our responses becomes less decisive. Many of us buckle under the pressure of conformity, driving our frustrations inward and letting them fester. But the lucky few among us remain strong -- Jennifer Finney Boylan among them -- and shine like a beacon of hope for the rest of us.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, born inside the itchy fabric of 'James Boylan,' has dedicated the past ten years of her life to retracing her story from the cumbersome 'James' to the liberating 'Jenny.' Her breakthrough memoir, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, still serves as a poignant call-to-arms for transgender individuals to raise the level of conversation and awareness concerning transgender issues. But like the greatest of writers, by relaying her uncommon experiences, Boylan reminds us of the common bonds we all share, through compassion and laughter, through resilience and a sense of self.

Active in the glaad community, regularly appearing on national television, currently teaching English at Colby College, and now out with her most recent memoir, Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, Jennifer was kind enough to take time out of her schedule to give us a glimpse of her literary interests. In this installment of Behind the Books, Jennifer waxes reflective on her bookish habits: rendering a story from the clutter of life, moving "from a life of invention to a life of truth," and writing "until you shake most of your ghosts loose."

BIOGRAPHILE: What’s your writing routine? Where, when, and how does it happen?

JENNIFER F BOYLAN: I get up very early in the morning — in Maine, the school bus comes at 7 AM, so since our boys were small, I've gotten up and made a big breakfast for the family. I've kept to this routine, even though my sons are grown now. I tend to write between 8 AM and 10 AM, every day if I can, except Christmas. It’s funny—I used to have to write under very rarefied conditions — I had to be in the mood, everything had to be perfect, I had to have my special pen … But one thing having children does, is it teaches you how to deal with interruption. When my babies were napping, I knew I could grab 15 minutes, maybe, if I had it. And so I have become a lot less precious as a writer. If I have the time — especially in the morning, I grab it.

BIOG: What writers have influenced you most?

JFB: When I was young, the writer I most wanted to grow up to be was James Thurber. Now I think it’s such a funny choice — that blind, judgmental Midwesterner. And yet, I think I detected in Thurber’s prose, the not-particularly well disguised aroma of melancholy. For Thurber, it was his impending blindness; for me, it was the weight of all the gender issues I carried around. It gave me a kind of comic tension, I think, but it also gave me a worried heart. No one reads Thurber any more — it’s strange. I still love his work, although what I love most are his more serious stories like The Cane in the Corridor and One is a Wanderer, rather than the comic set pieces like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

BIOG: What genre do you read the most? Does it change often?

JFB: Although I have largely moved from writing fiction and novels (in my 20s and 30s) to writing nonfiction (in my 40s and 50s), I still read mostly fiction, and contemporary fiction at that. It is very odd — I always thought that I would write one memoir and then get back to novels. And yet, aside from my young adult work, my writing as a man was fiction, and my writing as a woman has been nonfiction. A person could write a whole thesis on how profound that is. It might be because in moving to a woman’s life from a man's, I have moved from a life of invention to a life of truth. I would like to think that’s true.

BIOG: Read any great biographies or memoirs recently?

JFB: I could bore you with my love of the Caro LBJ — but then everyone read that last year, and adored it. What would happen if I told you I loved Phil Lesh’s memoir, Searching for the Sound, about his life in, of all things, The Grateful Dead. I like that Lesh is so unsparing of himself and his band-mates; I also think he manages to write about music in a way that is deeply moving. George A. Fischer’s Beethoven biography is pretty great too.

BIOG: It’s said that people either read to escape or read to remember. Do you fall into one of these groups?

JFB: I write to remember; I read to escape.

BIOG: Faulkner said a writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination. Do you use all three equally, or rely on one over another?

JFB: Well, experience and imagination are connected, aren't they? Our lives happen to us, but in order to make sense of them, we order and reorder and reinterpret events so that they all fit together in our imaginations. I think this is one of the things memoirists do when they’re on their game — they make sense of the random clutter of life by rendering it into story. My friend Rick Russo has a funny quote about this: “Boylan, just because it never happened doesn't mean you can’t remember it.”

I can tell you that, of all the things I went through to “become a woman,” nothing was more profound than writing about it. More than surgery, more than seeing the changes in the way people treated me, more than going from a father to a mother — the thing that most “made” me a woman was writing.

As for observation, the third part of Faulkner’s trio, I have to say I fear sometimes I’m not as observant as I’d like to be. I spend so many of my days in a cloud. Things only seem clear to me in retrospect, after they've become part of a story.

BIOG: To the aspiring writer, what advice would you give? What advice helped you become the writer you are today?

JFB: Well, I believe that every writer probably has a thousand pages of bad fiction — or nonfiction — in him or her. So the first thing you have to do, is just write your bad 1,000 pages. Just writing that much will shake most of your ghosts loose, and teach you how to work your way in and out of many of the blind alleys writers routinely find themselves in. Then, when you get to page 1,001, you can say, Today I begin.

BIOG: Do you always have to finish reading a book you start?

JFB: I am a loyal person, and I tend to finish everything I start, even when it’s terrible. I know how hard writers work, and I hate to dismiss anything someone has invented. I keep hoping the light will burst through the clouds. Sometimes it does, in the same way that you can know someone — a friend of your children, say — for years, and never give them much credit, and suddenly they look at you and you know that there’s a fire there, something you never saw before, and never would have, if you’d lost faith too soon.

BIOG: What’s next on your reading list?

JFB: When my mother died, I inherited her leather bound collection of The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. It’s a hilarious collection, actually, full of stuff like The Three Musketeers and The Arabian Nights. I am chagrined by so many of these books I've never actually read, or haven’t read since childhood. So next on my list is reading all of those. Right now I’m in the middle of Little Dorrit, and The Brothers Karamazov, which I’m reading simultaneously. I can tell you this is giving me very weird dreams.

Glenn Frankel's fascinating exploration of the source material behind John Ford's epic film "The Searchers" packs a kind of multidimensional storytelling that all authors would be wise to follow. The true story he reveals goes something like this: In 1836, on the lawless lands of the American frontier, a Comanche tribe raided and murdered a group of pioneer families in a tumbleweed Texas town. Nine-year-old Cynthia Anne Parker survived and was absorbed into the Comanche clan. Despite losing her father in the raid, she married the Chief and comfortably settled into her new Native American family.

She stayed with them for over twenty-four years until, in a tragically ironic twist of fate, her Comanche family was raided by American soldiers, and Cynthia was captured, once again, against her will. Never readjusting to white society, she starved herself to death ten years later. This story, stranger than fiction, was ripe for a dramatic retelling. Writer Alan Le May was the first to retell the tale, or variations of it, and John Ford then took to work to adapt it into a masterpiece of American cinema in 1956 with "The Searchers." Frankel's story is part film history, part biography of Cynthia Parker, and part peeling truth from myth.

Frankel is also the author of Beyond the Promised Land, a tale of Jewish and Arab relations, and Rivonia's Children, the story of Jewish activists battling apartheid in South Africa. In 1989, Frankel won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his "sensitive and balanced reporting from Israel and the Middle East." In this installment of Behind the Books, Glenn pauses from his projects to sit down with us and talk all things bookish: his sprawling, sunny workspace, the "sly" and "supple" writing of Bob Dylan's Chronicle: Volume One, the closed border between fact and fiction, and imploring aspiring writers to "start small," and to "write for money. Even if it's peanuts."

BIOGRAPHILE: What’s your writing routine? Where, when, and how does it happen?

GLENN FRANKEL: I have a serious day job, directing the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. So I write on weekends, or on Fridays. I’d like to be productive in the morning, but things often don’t click until the day grinds on. Or after dark. When desperation sets in, words begin to flow. I’m one of those writers who needs to get something down on paper. Then I can polish, rewrite, make it begin to feel vaguely presentable.

As for physical space, I like to have the biggest desk possible. In Austin this means the dining room table with two leaves pulled out to the max. All summer, while my wife had fled the Texas heat for our home in Northern Virginia, I spread out in this large sunny room with four big windows and easy access to the kitchen. That’s where I wrote. But I also had an editing room -- my front porch. After writing for an extended time, I’d plug my laptop and move outside to read it over and begin the long hard process of demolition and rebuilding.

BIOG: To what extent does your writing reflect your own life story?

GF: I’m a nonfiction writer and journalist by trade, not a memoirist or novelist, so I don’t invent my stories or my characters and I don’t write directly from my own life. Nonetheless, my work reflects my experiences as a journalist -- the things I care about, the way I approach research, the way I try to portray people. As a journalist, I have seen people face shattering crises and suffer greatly, cope with death and destruction and the loss of loved ones. I have also seen people do terrible things and seek to justify their actions. These are the things I focus on in my work.

BIOG: Read any great biographies or memoirs?

GF: My favorite in recent years is Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One. I hear the man’s voice on every page and what an amazing voice it is: sly, powerful, supple, amusing. Dylan is America’s most compelling modern poet and Chronicles is his best and most creative writing since Blood on the Tracks.

But my all-time favorite memoir is novelist Meyer Levin’s The Obsession (1973), his tortured recounting of his doomed efforts to bring Anne Frank’s diary to the Broadway stage. It’s a tale of history and betrayal and a 20-year struggle over not who controls Anne Frank’s story but its meaning. Levin insists he was the victim of a left-wing conspiracy led by Lillian Helman to scrub Anne of her Jewish identity and present her as a universal figure. But he also concedes that he himself became so angry and obsessed that he lost his grip on reality. Levin is an unreliable narrator telling a gripping tale.

BIOG: What classics would you read if you had all the time in the world?

GF: Back to Melville, the father of modern American literature. Then work my way forward. I’d take a side trip to re-read the major works of W.E.B. DuBois, a great thinker but an even greater writer.

BIOG: It’s said that people either read to escape or read to remember. Do you fall into one of these groups?

Both, of course, and for every other purpose under heaven. I read to live. Which is to say I read all the time, in almost any circumstance, on any device I can get my hands on. I read for every possible purpose: memory, escape, information, entertainment, to explain the world to myself and to explain myself to the world.

BIOG: What five writers -- dead or alive -- would you invite to an imaginary dinner party?

GF: It’s my fantasy so Thomas Pynchon would have to show up if I invited him, right?  Add Bob Dylan, John Lennon and, for my own selfish reasons, Brian Epstein (he’s a writer, purportedly, of A Cellarful of Noise), and my friend Katherine Boo to help me cope with all those egos.

BIOG: To the aspiring writer, what advice would you give? What advice helped you become the writer you are today?

GF: Write for money, even if it’s peanuts. Start small, learn your craft by knocking out direct, accessible prose on some kind of deadline. Work for somebody. Find an editor. Get paid. Keep writing.

BIOG: Your new book The Searchers, about the classic John Wayne film and the fascinating real-life kidnapping on which it was based, is also an interesting study on adaptation. Do facts sometimes need to be sacrificed to tell a good story?

GF: In my world facts are sacred. To sacrifice them is to misunderstand their role and value and yours as a writer. To sacrifice facts -- which I assume means to make stuff up or leave out those facts that are inconvenient to narrative arc or flow -- is to write something called fiction. A perfectly legitimate past-time so long as it’s labeled as such. Then the assumptions, rules and demands are totally different. There’s no border crossing or safe ground between the two -- it’s either fact or fiction. In Cold Blood is a marvelous book, but it’s fiction.

BIOG: While on that subject, book first or movie first?

GF: No set rule. But generally I’ve gone backwards from film to book. Brokeback Mountain was a great film, yet even greater short story. "The Searchers," by contrast, was an artistic triumph as a film and an excellent, but not quite triumphant, novel. True Grit works beautifully in both, especially in the Coen brothers’ version of the movie.

BIOG: What’s next on your reading list?

GF: The fabulous Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. If I could spin a sentence half as precise and supple as that woman…I’m also awaiting Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light in May, the last volume in his amazing World War Two trilogy. Sentence for sentence, scene for scene, there is no better or more ambitious nonfiction writer in America.

Richard Lischer's courageous new memoir -- Stations of the Heart -- is a touching and sensitive search for meaning in the wake of a child's death. Fate dealt Richard a crippling blow when his son Adam called in 2005 to explain the ugly return of  the melanoma his body had harbored, news that began to unravel the bright future his son seemed destined to have. The heartbreak that ensued barely gave Richard room to come to terms with it all before, in three month's time, Adam passed away.

But in that concentrated period, through the furious, processing-haze, Richard learned a series of valuable spiritual lessons, as well as a renewed understanding of man's place on earth. A teacher for over three decades, Richard stepped down from the lectern in Adam's time of need and returned dutifully to the pupil's chair, discovering new facets of despair and hope by watching his son exhibit strength, resolve, and acceptance in his final days. The result, though shadowed by loss, is a powerful and moving portrait of the unbreakable bonds between father and son, and the lessons gleaned from every station of life.

With time, writing and reliving the past can prove to be its own form of catharsis. In that vein, we asked Richard about the habits he's formed around writing and reading. Richard is also the author of Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through a Country Church and The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence, and has served as a Professor of homiletics and ministry at Duke Divinity School since 1979. In this installment of Behind the Books, we learn of the "delaying tactics" that writers can't help but employ, his passion for Augustine's The Confessions, the formative impact of books, and how writing and reading is "but an exercise in being human."

BIOGRAPHILE: What’s your writing routine? Where, when, and how does it happen?

RICHARD LISCHER: I wish I had a routine!  When I am free of teaching obligations, I will write a couple pages every day.  The day begins with a good breakfast and a few “delaying tactics” (we all have them) followed by the confrontation with the computer screen.  I write into the afternoon and then do other things.  In mid-evening I edit and revise what I have written that day.  That session often goes late into the night.  It is followed by the reward of snacks, mindless TV and finally, bed.

Despite the usual advice, I have noticed that writing x number of pages per day does not make a book.  I have done that but, lacking a core purpose and being emotionally unprepared for my task,  I wound up scrapping much of what I’d written in Stations of the Heart and starting over — several times.

BIOG: What writers have influenced you most?

RL: Although I write essays and memoir, I think novelists have had the most influence on my writing.  I love Graham Greene above all; his style is inimitable.  Once I read pages and pages of A Burnt Out Case and couldn't find a single adjective.  I also love everything by Ian McEwan, Kafka, Conrad, Chaim Potok, everything by John Updike, Kingsley Amis, John Knowles, Walker Percy,  Flannery O’Connor, Alice McDermott and the spare precision of Marilynne Robinson.  Also many non-fiction writers, but especially, Joan Didion.  I also like the Victorians, e.g., Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf.

BIOG: What genre do you read the most? Does it change often?

RL: Modern fiction, British.

BIOG: Read any great biographies or memoirs recently?

RL: Jon Krakauer can really tell a story.  I recently read and enjoyed, Love’s Work by Gillian Rose.  Also Breathing Space by Heidi Neumark;  Plan B by Anne Lamott.  I am looking forward to reading David McGlynn’s A Door in the Ocean. 

BIOG: Apart from the Bible, is there one book you return to again and again, whether because it has a resounding spiritual message or is simply a pleasure to read?

RL: Augustine, The Confessions — both for its message and the pleasure of it.  I continue to read it and to teach it.  Augustine writes with the consciousness of a modern.  He allows the reader to enter his mind as he works.  I put Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s  Letters and Papers from Prison in the same category, though for different reasons.  Also, The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day.

BIOG: What classics would you read if you had all the time in the world?

RL: I would go back to works I was introduced to in my college days.  I would sit in a comfortable place and read Plato, the Greek tragedians, especially Sophocles, and I would re-read the great novels of Dostoyevsky. They probe the great human themes, and what is writing or reading but an exercise in being human?

BIOG: It’s said that people either read to escape or read to remember. Do you fall into one of these groups?

RL: For me, neither.  I read for pleasure, but most of all, I read to be formed by others:  formed in my thinking by encountering the insights of others, and formed in my writing by means of imitation and admiration.

BIOG: To the aspiring writer, what advice would you give? What advice helped you become the writer you are today?

RL: My advice is to keep working at it and, as you do, take time to study the writing of others. Disciplined imitation is very important.  I learned a lot about writing from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life—not so much about its technical aspects, but her book opened my eyes to a few huge principles of writing that helped me a lot.  Plus, she pumps you up on every page!  Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird was also painlessly instructive.  In the end, it isn’t advice that helps me as much as encouragement.  A little encouragement keeps me running a long time.

BIOG: Faulkner said a writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination. Do you use all three equally, or rely on one over another?

RL: I can’t break it down, but I wouldn't argue with Faulkner! I also think certain personal qualities are necessary. You have to believe in yourself and have a single-minded devotion both to your subject and to your craft.

BIOG: What’s next on your reading list?

RL: Rousseau’s Confessions;  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.  I am presently writing a book on religious autobiography and memoir.

James Lasdun, author of Give Me Everything You Have, is a novelist and poet, and has taught creative writing at Princeton and NYU, among other schools in the Northeast. He has contributed essays and thoughtful critiques for Harper's, Granta and The Guardian, and is also half of the creative mind behind Sunday, a film given the Waldo Salt Best Screenplay award at Sundance. In his first memoir, James Lasdun writes about "Nasreen," one of his former creative writing students who began stalking him online after a brief email correspondence. His is a dark yet refreshingly philosophical tale, interspersed with musings on the Middle East and the literary influences in his life, amounting to an intelligent unpacking of what it means to be stalked.

BIOGRAPHILE: What was your writing routine for Give Me Everything You Have? Where, when, and how did it happen?

JAMES LASDUN: I wrote most of it while we were doing a serious construction job on our house (involving moving it). For several months we had to live in a series of houses borrowed from friends. So most of it was composed on the fly in other peoples’ offices and studios, filled with other people’s books (which are always so much more enticing than one’s own).  I think the unsettled circumstances suited the mood of the book.

BIOG: How different was it for you to write non-fiction, especially about a difficult, personal issue?  Was the process very different from writing fiction or poetry?

JL: Very different. I’d written very little non-fiction before and no autobiography. Direct self-portraiture, which seemed a crucial element, is a very strange, difficult thing to do, if you’re not used to it, but I found it an interesting challenge. My instinct was to set myself in motion. Hence, partly, the two journeys in the book. For obvious reasons this hasn't been a comfortable book to publish but I’m glad I wrote it. Among other things it has made me interested in the possibilities of extended non-fiction, which I’d never given much thought to in the past.

BIOG: You refer to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in your book — did any other memoirs or autobiographies influence you while writing Give Me Everything You Have?

JL: I've never been a huge reader of memoirs. There wasn't an obvious model for the book I was trying to write -- a true story involving real people, that was still unfolding as I wrote it, and one that would also attempt to comprise various journeys, memories, texts and reflections. But there were some books I had vaguely in mind aside from the ones you mention. Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein was one. Some of Naipaul’s hybrid works of travel and history were an influence. Janet Hobhouse’s family memoir, The Furies, has an energy and freedom about it that I've always admired and would certainly have liked to emulate.

BIOG: Did you ever worry that releasing this book would intensify Nasreen’s campaign against you?

JL: My feeling was that once somebody has explicitly threatened to kill you and harm your family, things are as bad as they can get. Also, the book is not an attack on Nasreen. I tried very hard to look at the situation from her point of view, and regardless of whether I succeeded, I think she comes out of it as a powerful, if obviously deeply troubled, human being.

BIOG: I read a Jewish Daily Forward article about the situation and it sounds like you haven’t heard from Nasreen since August and that she’s being investigated by the NYPD.  Has there been an update since then?

JL: That’s correct. A detective at the Hate Crimes Unit of the NYPD  has taken on the case, but there have been no developments since August.

BIOG: In this article, it’s mentioned that at a book reading you did, “one of the audience [members] also used to be the object of Nasreen’s attention.”  Do you know if this person also had a similar experience to yours?  Were you able to commiserate?

JL: This was the English academic I mentioned in the book. He and Nasreen had connected through an ad in the LRB and had an email correspondence which Nasreen bizarrely forwarded to me. He contacted me when the book came out and told me that he’d visited her in the States but that she’d rapidly turned against him and ended up sending him emails similar to some of the ones she sent me. It was a much milder, briefer version of what I went through. But after hearing from him I heard from two other men who’d had relationships with her, both of whom she ended up cyberstalking and trying to harm online. They all characterized her as a highly intelligent, charming, attractive person, and they were all stunned by the way things developed. To me this makes the whole story more mysterious and tragic than ever.

BIOG: Now that Give Me Everything You Have has been released, has your writer’s block disappeared?  Have you been able to start a new project?

JL: It was more a case of monomania than block – I just couldn't focus on anything else. But yes, I feel freed from it now, and I've been writing fiction again and preparing another nonfiction project.

Michael Hainey was six years old when his father died suddenly one night. Hainey didn't know the questions to ask then -- his mother refused to discuss it, and the obituary in the paper merely said his father, a copy editor for the Chicago Sun Times, had died “after visiting friends.” It wasn't until he was almost the same age as his father had been when he died that Hainey, an editor at GQ, found the determination to investigate what, exactly, had happened the night his father didn't come home, and why his mother had lived under such a fierce code of silence for so many years. In his memoir, After Visiting Friends, he writes about approaching the story as a journalist, interviewing his father’s former colleagues and friends, and finally uncovering the truth behind the secrets and silence.

Biographile: At what point in the process of investigating your father’s death did you realize you wanted to write about it?

Michael Hainey: The two are impossibly intertwined. This is a tale of obsession -- an obsession that had gripped me from the time I was a boy. I decided that I needed to know this story... and because I needed to know the story, I decided that I wanted to tell/write the story. I was writing the story as I went.

Biog: What were some of your fears about not just finding out the truth of your father’s death, but writing a book about it?

MH: Fears? How much time do you have? I had fears about just about everything... I'm a writer, after all. But I will say that the book allowed me to battle and in some cases conquer (many of) those fears.

Biog: I imagine you were taking notes the entire time, but at what point did you actually start writing? Did you need time to process the experience before starting to turn it into a story?

MH: I worked on this book for ten years. I went through two entire drafts. The book that you are reading is the result of the third effort. To answer your question, I didn't need time to process the experience, I needed time to process the telling of the story. As a writer who is an editor by training, I was pretty ruthless on the paring down; on focusing on what was essential and what was not.

Biog: Were there any moments when you thought you’d never solve the mystery?

MH: Many times. As I write in the book, there were many times I thought the trail had run cold. But then I would meet a stranger -- someone I never knew existed before I began my quest -- and they would rise up to guide me. This is one of the great gifts I received in writing this book: the strangers I met in my quest.

Biog: Without giving away too much about what actually happened, can you talk about your worst-case scenario of how he died? Was the truth better or worse?

MH: There was never a worst-case scenario. I'd already lived through that -- losing my father when I was a boy of six, that's pretty much worse-case scenario.  For me, looking for the story -- the facts -- of how he died, that was important. The truth was not "better or worse" -- it was simply the truth, without judgments. All of us have family, and inside all of our families there are secrets, the answers to which we long to go in search of.

Biog: What has your family’s reaction been to the book?

MH: My mother and my brother are the heroes of this book. My mother and brother are individuals of great strength and integrity and them giving permission for this story to be told is a testament to their dedication to living their lives with truth and honesty as their guides.

Biog: You describe your father’s world, including the men he worked with at the Chicago Sun-Times, as hardboiled, like something from a Dashiell Hammett novel. Did this affect your decision to structure your book as a mystery?

MH: I didn't structure the book as "a mystery," as a genre. And this is an important distinction. To my mind ALL literature -- all great literature --  must possess at its core a mystery. The mysteries inside the story keep us turning pages, keep us on the search with the narrator. Because we see the narrator's search for answers to their mysteries as our search.

Biog: What do you think your father would think about this book and your decision to investigate his past?

MH: If he was the man I came to understand him to be -- a man who respected and loved great reporting and writing and a great story -- I believe he would admire this book. He would know that there was a story there that needed to be gotten.

Biog: What was the hardest part of the book to write?

MH: Perhaps the part I struggled with most was telling my mother what I learned. As I write in the book, I was frozen for more than a year, unable to move forward. For a long time I thought I would not be able to publish the book.

Biog: Is there anything you learned that you wish you didn’t know?

MH: No. All knowledge is good knowledge. We are never sorry when we learn a truth. It may upset us or cause us heartbreak in the moment, but inevitably we know clarity is better than the fog of ignorance or self-deception.

Biog: What advice do you have for someone wanting to investigate a family secret (and write about it)?

MH: Start. Now. Start the conversations. Now.

“I've got a hundred bear stories,” says Alaska-native Leigh Newman, author of the splendid new memoir Still Points North. Getting up close and personal with grizzlies was an everyday part of her adventurous upbringing. Other common off-the-grid activities included flying up into the mountains to drain new fishing holes,  going on solo walkabouts to pick wildflowers, examining the contents of a dead caribou’s stomach, and getting stranded on a rapidly-flooding island. (Well, once anyway.) How ever wild and woolly Newman’s childhood was, though, no amount of time in the outback prepared her for dealing with her parents' bitter divorce. “The Last Frontier” isn't Alaska, it’s the human heart.

During summers and holidays, Newman was raised by a rugged outdoors-man in Anchorage, learning survival skills that would make Jack London proud. The rest of the year was spent in Baltimore, attending a refined girls’ school steeped in the classics, while trying to help her mother who struggled mentally, emotionally, and financially. To cope, Newman compartmentalized, living as two different people, 5,000 miles apart. A fearless independent spirit was forged out of her Alaska-Maryland duality, but the marital dissolution behind it also led to a deep fear of committing to anything ... Even, later in life, to the man she loves.

Newman nails the enchantment of being a kid free to explore the natural world, the pain of not understanding why the human one has to complicate it, and the confusion of becoming an adult and trying to reconcile it all. Being an Alaska native myself, and someone raised within striking distance of the Montana mountains, during the same 1970s era of divorce, in a town with similar DNA to Anchorage, whose own parents eventually split up ... I frequently felt like Still Points North was written just for me. It wasn't, but it’s always a  thrill when great writing hits so close to home.

These days, Newman lives in Brooklyn, with her husband Lawrence and two sons, writing in between parenting and her gig as an Oprah.com editor. Her relatively normal life may not be as crazy as her Alaskan youth, but Newman’s compass, both navigational and moral, is forever pointed north.

Biographile: Let’s begin by talking about Alaska as a physical place, it has such a strong mythology about it. What makes it so unique?

Leigh Newman: In Alaska, you’ll find places that nobody has ever been to, or maybe one person came here years ago in an airplane and left no trace. There’s a great feeling to that, to go places where nobody has gone before. You are an animal, living and breathing nature with no other people around. I've heard it’s the same in the Brazilian rain forests, but I feel like Alaska is one of the few places in the world where you can walk new ground because it’s so inaccessible. The culture definitely teaches a self-reliance at an early age.

Biog: Are there any Alaskan writers you were reading during the three-years it took you to finish Still Points North?

LN: I purposely didn't read Alaska writers. I didn't want to write about anyone else’s Alaska, and I didn't want to be intimidated. Memoirs are fingerprints of a time period, and they need that visual quality, so the book I really looked at was Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. That book turned everything around for me. Her approach to the landscapes of Africa and the craziness of her family is filled with celebration, and energy. I love Alaska, and yes, I know I could’ve died when our plane fell out of the sky, or the grizzly came into our tent, but I loved it. I wanted readers to feel my crazy wild childhood, but not in a mournful way.  It’s half a love letter to growing up, and half a love letter to my husband and how he coped with that legacy.

Biog: In popular culture, like say Into the Wild, Alaska comes across as this completely inhospitable foreboding place. Is it?

LN: I don’t feel that way. It’s tough and it’s possible you can die, but everyone in Alaska frames it as "everything that can go wrong is your fault." I remember reading Into the Wild and when he gets out of the bus without any boots thinking, "Come on, really?" I know he was confused and lost, but you have to shake your head at the hubris.  Alaska is serious and demands being taken seriously, but growing up in nature brings great joy. Seeing bears and floating down rivers ... It was freeing. The 1970s and the wilderness conflated in my head. It may have been too hands-off, but I would spend hours and hours out in the woods, fishing or just playing. As a kid, it fostered my imagination. You have so little power at that age, but knowing I could catch and prepare my own food, start a fire, pitch a tent, it was incredible. Occasionally, scary things would happen, like when our tent flooded, but ninety percent of the time, it was "let’s get out there and do something amazing." I assumed everybody lived like that. It took me a long time to realize Alaskans live differently.

Biog: Speaking of the 1970s -- and maybe this isn't true for everybody -- but in Billings Mont., where I grew up, divorced parents were as common as married ones. It was a different time for parenting, hard to fathom in a lot of ways...

LN: Still Points North is different than a lot of memoirs in one way, I really love my parents and think they raised me the best that they could. In part, I want to celebrate the radical approach they used. Whatever choices they made, they went all the way. It’s a quality I would like to have more of in my own life. But that culture of divorce in the 1970s and 80s, when America was at its highest point, comes out of a time period when young parents were trying to figure out who they were. I think we underestimate the effects of the Vietnam War, whether they were in or not, and the newfound personal freedoms and all the social upheaval that came with it. You can’t be all over your kids when you’re undergoing major personal changes, having marital problems, and thinking about upending your life.

Biog: Your father wasn't hands-off, though, didn't he take you just about everywhere?

LN: My father spent an inordinate amount of time with me growing up. Whatever he was doing, I was doing. If that meant flying into the wilderness to hunt caribou, I was his co-pilot. My dad was a runner, so he had me running 10Ks in fourth-grade. He taught me how to sew little patches and stuff for Brownies, and then bought me my first sewing machine. Alaskans tend to be Renaissance-like in interests. They've left the lower 48 for something different, or they don’t quite fit in, which often coincides with high I.Q.s or different approaches to life. I am not the only one with a "Great Alaskan Dad." I know a dozen girls with fathers who flew helicopters, cooked fresh food, played the cello, and climbed Mt. McKinley without dying.

Biog: Billings and Anchorage are similar, so I’m guessing there was a fair amount of illicit frontier behavior?

LN: When I was growing up, Anchorage was a cowtown. It’s larger and more cosmopolitan today. Back then, my mom tried to bring in a bit of culture by putting on an opera, in a Quonset hut. High school was kind of a train wreck for me. There was a lot of drinking, and we’d hang out at this famous bar Chilkoot Charlie’s, with every kind of creepy guy a 16-year-old should not be running into. People were constantly getting shot. My housekeeper’s husband shot his own son, our babysitter’s boyfriend raped and killed a woman ... There was a lot of lunacy taking place, but by the grace of God, I skated through it.

Biog: To someone raised in an urban environment, coming face-to-face with bears sounds incredibly dangerous, and "how could any parent let their children out of the house?" But flip it around, and folks in the wilderness would have the same feeling on putting a 10-year-old on the subway alone--

LN: (Laughs) My dad has said exactly that! He can’t get over the fact that I live in New York. He’s constantly worried about me being a mother here. All mothers here, actually.

Biog: You find commonalities between New York City and Alaska in the book, because it’s all about heightened experiences, isn't it? Philosophically, don’t they share more things than a place in the middle?

LN: That’s true. When I was started dusting off the bones of what was there and connecting things together, I realized Alaska prepared me for these intense places all over the world. I understood how people lived in radical situations. New York City is a survival culture. For example, New Yorkers are acutely aware of the temperature and the day’s weather, just like in Alaska. In both cases, people spend so much time outside. People are tough, blunt, and honest in New York, just like home. When I first moved here in the early 1990s, I was living on the Lower East Side. It was rough. I was always aware of my surroundings, who was in my space, and what their physical relationship was to me out on the sidewalks. My neighborhood was filled with drug addicts and dealers. I viewed them the same way as bears. Stay away and stay alive.

Biog: Your dad had a classic lone wolf D.I.Y.-saying, "can’t lives on won’t street," which is great advice for field dressing a caribou, but yet he couldn't discuss the most important thing in your life. Did he recognize that he didn't talk you through the divorce?

LN: I know my dad knew that he couldn't talk because I know that his father never talked to him. When my father’s father was dying, they never discussed it. He never told him the things kids need to hear. I was alive when my dad’s sister committed suicide, again, nobody discussed it. So dad was acutely aware and wanted to be better. However, he and I share the same problem, in that we both think we’re talking to people and we haven’t said anything. We’d go fishing or hiking, and he felt like we talked for hours. We didn't  He was not the proverbial dad ignoring his kid from behind a newspaper, but he wasn't a talker. He was in the garage gutting an animal, calling me in to see a dead mouse in the stomach, or taking me out to collecting wildflowers. He thought he was talking through his actions. At the age of ten, it was hard to discern what he was saying. And that’s when I filled in the stories, wondering if the divorce was my fault.

If Biographile is the online hub for lovers of real life stories, the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center is the brick-and-mortar epicenter. We caught up with Gary Giddins, executive director of LLCB, in anticipation of Writing Writers’ Lives, its fifth annual biography conference beginning at 1:00 PM on Monday, March 18 at Elebash Recital Hall (365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street) in Manhattan. See below for the full interview.

The Center for Biography, focused on connecting independent and academic biographers and providing free public programming, also hosts four resident biography fellows per year. D.T. Max, author of the David Foster Wallace biography “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” was among the group in 2011-2012.

Highlights of next week's free one-day conference include a panel on Writing Jewish Lives, co-sponsored by the Jewish Lives series of Yale University Press; Hermione Lee (author of “Virginia Woolf”) in conversation with Giddins; and, Annette Gordon-Reed on her Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello.” Giddins, author of "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams" (volume one of two; the second is forthcoming), has also written eleven other books, including biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.

RSVP for the conference by email [biography@gc.cuny.edu], and if you go, tell us all about it on Facebook and Twitter.

Biographile: How does the conference programming come together?

Gary Giddins: We’re thinking about ideas all the time, but we want to keep it fairly current, so we’re always looking at Publishers Weekly to see what books are coming out. The Jefferson controversy has been in the news all year, and I loved Annette Gordon-Reed’s book, so we put in a call to her, and she said yes. I was delighted to hear that Blake Bailey was writing a biography of Charles Jackson, and he happens to be in New York this coming week for an event related to Philip Roth’s eightieth birthday. There’s a lot of accidental programming. Last year E.L. Doctorow spoke about the way novelists use biographical techniques. The year before that, I believe it was about ethics in biography. In fact, we did a panel on ethics late last year after the business about Petraeus and Paula Broadwell’s book hit the news.

Biog: How do you open up the Center to the general public?

GG: All of our events are free, and we do about one event a month and try to build up a mailing list. We try to make the events of general interest, we have Q&As, and we sell authors’ books when we can. We've built up fairly loyal audience of people who are interested in biography and literature. And now a number of biographers around the country have called to express interest, and we make ourselves open to them in any way that we can. And then we have fellowship program. We give rather generous grants to four emerging biographers throughout the year, and we do workshops and have celebratory events when one of them publishes a book.

For the big Leon Levy lecture in the fall, we bring in a living master, like Bob Masssie, Bob Caro, or Hilary Spurling. That’s an event that gets a lot of attention. David Lewis, who wrote a great two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, is coming next year. Word gets around, and we’ve built up an audience.

The Leon Levy Foundation really made this whole thing possible. About six years ago, the great biographer David Nasaw and a couple other people said, let's create the first biography center in the United States. Nancy Milford was the director for the first year, then Brenda Wineapple, my predecessor, came in. We’re totally in debt to the Foundation; they’ve been incredibly generous and really allowed us to make this thing grow.

Biog: How did you end up as executive director of the Center?

GG: I was teaching courses related to jazz and American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and I had published three biographies.  Brenda decided she had to step down to finish her book, so I stepped in as acting director. I’ve been doing it now for two years, and it relieves me of having to do freelance writing after forty years of doing it. It’s the reward at the end of the road -- you can say no to the people who said no to you for years.

Biog: What’s the value in reading biography?

GG: As I’m constantly pointing out, this is the golden age of biography, in part because of the sophistication of research techniques that didn’t exist before, and so many archives are opening up. It’s a fairly recent art. Putting aside Plutarch, in the English language, it only goes only as far back as Boswell's “Life of Samuel Johnson.” If you were to make a list of, say, the twenty-five greatest fiction writers, poets, or playwrights of all time, you could easily make that list without any living writers, but you couldn’t do that with biography. So many of the greatest biographers, like Caro and Massie, are our contemporaries. Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” is a masterwork, and no one could have written a book like that, say, forty or fifty years ago, with that kind of access and literary savvy.

It’s always amazed me that the academy doesn't take biography as seriously as it should. Biography is an antidote to writing history, in this sense: when you write history you’re dealing with masses of people and large movements, dealing with wars, almost always focusing on the most powerful figures in any period. History is so full of barbarism and racism and all sorts of hatreds and monstrosities that it can be a pretty depressing field. Biography is a way of zooming in on people at all levels of society, whether they’re presidents and generals or heroic infantrymen. Usually when you focus on individuals, rather than on societies in general, there’s a lot more to be optimistic about. You do find heroic figures and admirable people, and it’s a way of understanding the way people work. What makes a great poet or novelist? Certain areas are difficult to penetrate, but by reading an account of their lives, we get to know the way other lives are structured, and we invariably see something of ourselves in reading the lives of other people.