Do biographies need to start at the beginning?

Alternatives to the predictably linear narratives of most biographies.

I read a lot of biographies. As you might expect, nearly all of them start with the subject’s birth, continue on through their childhood, teenage years, and so on, until they “become someone important,” and eventually die.

The problem I have with this format is that even the most interesting people tend to have rather mundane early lives. Early chapters of most biographies cover the subject’s parents, grandparents, education, and so on, and while this is no doubt a comprehensive approach to a subject’s life, I think it puts the cart before the horse.

Most readers, I think, care about the subject’s childhood in relation to who they became as adults. A childhood anecdote illuminates an event in adulthood. As such, it makes more sense to jump back to the subject’s childhood when events in adulthood show a relation to them – and not cover them beforehand. By the time you make it to the key events in the subject’s (adult) life, the childhood sections are chapters ago, and you’ve most likely forgotten the specific details.

So, maybe the issue isn’t so much that biographies cover the mundane aspects of life, but rather that the biography format itself is often too linear and predictable. Whether the subject is Gandhi or Napoleon, the narrative form is almost always essentially the same: a person was born, grew up, did important things, and died.

If you read a lot of biographies, this linear format becomes tiring after awhile, so much so that it makes you want to stop reading biographies, which is not a good thing!

This is one reason why I enjoyed the format of the film Steve Jobs (2015). Rather than start at the beginning of Steve Jobs’ life and plod through until the end, it instead focuses on three key Apple product launches and then fills in the story via flashbacks.

This all led me to wonder; what innovation has been done in the biography genre? Should there be innovation? What would an innovative biographical form look like?

I’ve come across a few examples of different approaches, but not as many as you’d probably expect for a genre of literature that is thousands of years old. Nonlinear narratives are not uncommon in fiction, but it was difficult to find more than a handful of biographical works that strayed far from the traditional model. Starting in medias res, that is, “in the midst of things”, is an ancient tradition going all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and yet it doesn’t seem to have had much influence on contemporary biographies. In researching this topic, I did find an interesting paper about postmodernism and biography, which explores similar questions.

Two Simple Proposals

I have at least two ideas for making the standard biographical form a little more compelling.

The first is akin to the Steve Jobs film mentioned above: a focus on key events in the subject’s life that are peppered with relevant flashbacks. Rather than tell the subject’s story from start to end, focus on a few key events and jump back in time to show how the past led to the present.

Let’s use Napoleon as an example, as a new film about his life is set to release next month. The traditional narrative of Napoleon’s life is something like this – and I am dramatically summarizing here:

Napoleon, the son of minor Italian nobles, was born on the island of Corsica. As a teenager, Napoleon was enrolled in a military academy in continental France, and his outsider status as a provincial shaped his personality into an obsessive and ambitious military man. He rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and maneuvered himself into becoming the consul and then emperor of France. His armies conquered much of Europe, fought off numerous coalitions of British, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces, before finally losing and being exiled to Elba, an island off the coast of Italy. Less than a year later, he escaped, marched back to Paris and promptly reclaimed power, only to lose again, this time at Waterloo. Finally, he was exiled to St. Helena, a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America. He died there about five years later at the age of 51.

Comprehensive, but a little boring. How could we make this more interesting and less linear?

Notice that three islands played a key role in Napoleon’s life: Corsica, Elba, and St. Helena. These seem like a good theme to wrap a story around, similar to the three Apple product launches in Steve Jobs.

Napoleon on Saint Helena by Franz Josef Sandmann, c. 1820

So, instead of a traditional linear narrative, an “innovative” biography of Napoleon could center on these three islands as flashpoints in Napoleon’s life:

Napoleon was born on one island, exiled to another island after nearly conquering the world, performed a dramatic escape from that island – only to be exiled to a third island, where he would ruminate on his past glory for five lonely years before dying in middle age.

A Collection of Impressions

A second idea is to make biographies more impressionistic and anecdotal. Rather than a linear narrative that goes from birth to death, such a biography could instead divide the subject’s life into relevant periods and then offer details, anecdotes, and other short episodes that occurred during that time. This would allow for some sense of a linear narrative while also being less predictable.

This approach is also closer to how we actually process our own memories, i.e., as isolated stories that aren’t remembered in any particular order. While you may have various memories of your childhood, teenage years, twenties, and so on, they are not remembered as sequential, but rather as separate, largely independent episodes.