The frustration of everyone involved in a biography — from the author, the reader, and the subject (if he or she is still living) — is the inability of the form to capture the essence of the subject, the "real" person who lurks inside a dense cocoon of facts, statistics, family connections, resumes, observations, interviews, letters, and photographs. Ronald Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris, was so baffled by his famously opaque subject that he resorted to writing a novel instead (Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, 1999).
Alexander Masters was similarly baffled by his subject, a British man named Stuart Shorter, though not because his subject was famous, controversial, undocumented, or remote in time. Stuart was very much alive during the writing of his biography, very forthcoming with the details of his life, and had a large hand in shaping the book into its final form. The problem was that Stuart was a member of what Masters terms "the chaotic homeless," with the emphasis on chaotic.
Stuart's homelessness stretched from his teens into his thirties, broken by stints in juvenile homes, prisons, hostels, and government housing. The only consistent theme in his life was chaos: a sociopathic father, an abandoned education, petty crimes, then more serious crimes, mental illness, and substance abuse.
Masters met Stuart while working at a day-center in Cambridge, UK. He formed the idea that by telling one man's story, he might somehow come to understand the causes of chronic homelessness. Masters' first attempts, full of footnotes and theorizing, put Stuart right off: "It's bollocks boring." He wants something more like a Tom Clancy thriller, so he suggests, "Do it the other way ‘round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards."
So was born Stuart: A Life Backwards.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!