Writers on writers: why literary friends make the best biographers

Who has the best view of a writer’s life? I take a Goldilocks position on this: some scholars seem to keep themselves at an overly respectful distance from the figure of the author, but family members, especially ex-partners or children, often risk dressing up gossip and complaints as biography.

Perhaps friendship is the right vantage point for a literary memoir. Recent portraits of writers by friends, assistants and younger authors — including Cory Leadbeater’s just-published The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion and AJ Verdelle’s Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison (2022) — stake their claim. But I wonder if such accounts, many penned by assistants and aides who became writers themselves, are really more insightful than the traditional biography, or if this literary genre is just a sophisticated form of selfie-with-a-famous-author.

The Uptown Local, in which Leadbeater reflects on the nine years he spent as personal assistant to Joan Didion — the author celebrated for memoirs such as The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and her collected journalism — makes a persuasive case for the argument that writers should write about writers. Leadbeater dreamt of a literary career but his family history was harsh — his father spent time in prison for mortgage fraud, his mother was ill with cancer — and he writes with moving candour about his battles with suicidal ideation and addiction.

Leadbeater’s New Jersey upbringing was a universe apart from the Manhattan apartment where Didion lived until her death at the age of 87 in 2021. But while studying at Columbia, he was introduced by the poet and journalist James Fenton to a New York he knew about only from books — opera at the Lincoln Center, a regular table at Le Monde — and then to Didion, who was seeking a personal assistant. “In one generation we [my family] had gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan,” he notes. 

The Uptown Local is a twin portrait of a writer as a struggling young man and of a great author in the last years of her life. Didion, in Leadbeater’s telling, is far from the marble statue version that hardens around legendary writers. She laughed more than you’d expect and gave great advice: “When I told Joan that a character named Billy Silvers had taken over one of my books, she said, unimpressed, ‘Well take it back.’”

At times, hybrid memoirs — even when they are brilliantly written, such as Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), an account of Shapland’s self-discovery as a queer writer via the letters of the late American novelist — can leave me feeling that neither writer has enough space. I tend to prefer literary memoirs where the friendship feels more equal.

The writer AJ Verdelle, born in Washington and now a New Yorker, made her name with her first novel, The Good Negress (1995), which follows a young Black girl’s coming of age as she moves from rural Virginia to Detroit. In Miss Chloe, her Toni Morrison memoir, Verdelle pays tribute to the late Nobel Literature laureate, but she’s particularly brilliant at describing the nature of the friendship between the two writers: “My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional. Our relationship had its flares and embers, its low heat and occasional blaze.”

A little fire goes a long way, as anyone who’s read the novelist Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan (2011), her classic remembrance of a friendship — or a frenemyship — with Susan Sontag will know. Sontag was a writer and towering public intellectual, and she mentored Nunez, who was dating Sontag’s son David Rieff. The three of them moved in together in the late 1970s, shortly after Nunez and Rieff had begun dating: “the duke and duchess and duckling” of New York’s Riverside Drive, as Sontag put it to Nunez.

“I knew that wasn’t good,” Nunez writes drily, and yet, in her unsparing representation of Sontag — brilliant, needy, sometimes monstrous — she also creates an unforgettable, timeless study of two fiercely intelligent women, friends one moment and fencers the next.

When a writer befriends a younger writer, the talent flows first one way, then the other. In My Man in Antibes, his 2023 memoir of his long friendship with the much older novelist Graham Greene, Michael Mewshaw writes about Greene’s fury after the younger man publishes a profile that his friend considers unflattering, or not sufficiently tactful. Mewshaw also includes his response to Greene: “It seems not to have occurred to you that when we talked there were two novelists in the room.” Most writers forget that, in a literary friendship, while one talks, acquires and discards lovers, charms or behaves terribly — the other is taking notes.

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen