To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.
As a biographer, I try to uncover the adventures and personalities behind each character I research. Once my character and I have reached an understanding, then I begin the detective work reading old books, old letters, old newspapers, and visiting the places where my subject lived. Often I turn up surprises, and of course, I pass them on.
I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.
Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.