Cathy Curtis

The other day, I received a book I ordered, And That's Not All, a memoir by the English actress Joan Plowright, who was married to Laurence Olivier. I had wanted to read it simply because I admired her and was curious about her life with the celebrated actor and director. But it turned out that she was a good friend of Edna O'Brien's. The great Irish novelist is the subject of my forthcoming biography, Fearless, which is now in proof, nearly ready to be printed.

 

The two women met for dinner in 1977, when Edna published her novel Johnny I Hardly Knew You. Plowright recalled that she "was always sensitive to mood and atmosphere and ready to discuss anything with the utmost candour." Edna's candour was on display when she remarked that the Plowright–Olivier family (all three children were also actors) needed to become more open to conversations about their feelings, rather than only about aspects of the theatre.

 

Plowright called Edna a valued confidante—she privately counseled Olivier in the early 1980s, when he had threatened divorce because he was furious that his wife had agreed to play Martha in Edwin Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the National Theatre. Although he was no longer director of the theatre and too ill to continue working, he insisted that Plowright could appear onstage only in a play he directed. After speaking with Edna, he wrote a deeply apologetic letter to his wife.

 

If only I had been aware of this conversation when I was writing my book! I had known of no other event that so perfectly illuminated Edna's qualities of empathy and persuasive argument.

 

While my biography does portray her love of entertaining, it was a treat to read about the St. Patrick's Day dinner party she gave in 1986 to celebrate Plowright–Olivier's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Among the guests were the playwright Harold Pinter; his wife, Antonia Fraser, author of historical novels; the novelist Philip Roth and his then-wife, the actress Claire Bloom; and the actors Ian McKellen, Jeremy Irons, and Sinead Cusack (married to Irons)—all of whom also appear in my biography.

 

Another new-to-me source swam into view recently: an interview Edna gave on October 27, 2015, to mark the publication of her novel The Little Red Chairs. She spoke to Sinéad Gleeson in the Library Voices program. Much of this material was familiar to me from Edna's writing and the many other interviews I had watched, listened to, and read. But there were a few quotes I wish I had known earlier, among them:

 

    * Edna noted that "separation"—in her case, from County Clare (to Dublin), from Ireland (to England), and from her devout mother (who loved her with clinging intensity but was deeply suspicious of writing)—was "a great whetstone for some kind of creativity." It "quickens what is lost and the world you hurtle into."

 

    * Edna never stopped being haunted by her mother's condemnation of her writing and her lifestyle, even after the woman's death. She also had married and divorced a bitter, controlling fellow writer. Her many later love affairs, mostly with married men in the public eye, never resulted in lasting happiness. What I wish I had been able to quote is Edna's pitiless summation in this interview: "I have a longing for nearness and a terror of domination."

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

My new biography, FEARLESS, which will be published later this year, is a comprehensive life of the great Irish novelist Edna O'Brien. Researching this book involved a rather daunting number of roadblocks.

 

In early 2020, after requesting a draft of my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna declined, in an email exchange via her London agent, to make herself available for an interview. She did not give a reason, but I imagine that her decision was due at least in part to concerns about my approach. It was clear from remarks made during her last years that she sought validation for the seriousness of her body of work and had grown impatient with rehashes of her eventful personal life. She had recently received a brutally negative profile in The New Yorker, and she saw that my Hardwick biography delves into that author's fraught private life with her husband, the poet Robert Lowell. 

 

According to Edna's agent, there was to be an official biography; Edna would choose the author from among several candidates. I was also informed that I was not to contact anyone who knew Edna (when I tried to do that anyway, most potential interviewees either failed to respond or declined to speak to me), and that my book could not be published until after Edna's death. As I pursued my research, I learned that I was also forbidden to consult her archive at University College Dublin.

 

Fortunately, there is a voluminous archive of Edna's papers at Emory University, and it is open to all researchers. A few items within this massive resource—including Edna's journals and correspondence with certain individuals—are closed to researchers until August 1, 2034. But she had spent some sixty years speaking to members of the press; appearing on talk shows and in documentaries (often available online); corresponding with family, friends, and people in publishing and the theatre; and writing published and unpublished essays on a variety of topics. Of course, I also read her many novels, nonfiction books, and short stories, as well as her film scripts, playscripts, and poetry.

 

As luck would have it, I benefited by not being allowed to publish while Edna was living. Additional information I obtained from various sources helped me better explain aspects of Irish history and politics, and I was able to conclude the biography with a description of Edna's funeral. I also read many books by the excellent young contemporary Irish women novelists who owe their writerly freedom to Edna's example, which I briefly discuss in my final chapter.

 

Meanwhile, Sinéad O'Shea, a Dublin-based documentary filmmaker who had interviewed Edna in 2016 for a Publishers Weekly article, decided to put Edna's life on film. After her attempts to interest Edna's agent failed, serendipity came to the rescue. At a party, O'Shea chatted with an American film producer, Barbara Broccoli, who turned out to be a good friend of Edna's. Broccoli coaxed Edna, who was initially hostile to the idea, to agree to the documentary.

 

O'Shea interviewed Edna at her home in the spring of 2023—an exchange that had to be cut short after forty minutes when she was too ill to continue. (Edna was being treated for pancreatic cancer.) In succeeding months, she recorded voice messages about her life from her hospital bed and suggested that O'Shea read her journals. (There was one final videotaped session in the hospital three months before Edna's death in July 2024.) Apparently, the fact of Edna's agreement to the documentary superseded the archive's embargo of her journals.

 

The documentary, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (not yet in release in the US; I was able to stream it last autumn) is very well done, providing an entertaining and sympathetic narrative of Edna's life. Both her sons are interviewed as well as a number of other people for whom she was a friend and inspiration. Passages from the journals, read by the actress Jessie Buckley, form the backbone of the film.

 

I must say that I wish I had known someone who could have interceded for me with Edna, so that I could have spoken to her and her sons, read the journals, and assured other people in her life that she was happy to have them tell me what it was like to know her. But it seems that the authorized biography will not appear after all, whether because Edna had trouble choosing the right author, or for some other reason. So I am pleased that my biography will not have a rival and that it will provide a much fuller account of Edna's writing life than is possible on film.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

Looking for a particular book on my crowded shelves, I came across a catalogue of the work of the artist Jay de Feo. It sparked a recollection of the day when the head of the Jay de Feo Trust told me that she would not allow access to the artist's archives for my planned biography. This person, who had known my writing during my years as an art critic in the San Francisco Bay Area, initially agreed to meet with me in Berkeley, where the archive is located. I purchased an air ticket and looked forward to starting my new project. Then, about forty-eight hours before the flight, I received an ominous email requesting a phone call—during which she informed me that I was not sufficiently "scholarly" to write the de Feo biography.

 

At the time, I was in shock and just muttered something to get off the phone. Now—with the hindsight of having written four more biographies and having weathered many other biography-related disappointments—I see what the problem really was. What this person wanted was a critical endorsement of de Feo's body of work, presented as a series of aesthetic triumphs and written in the detailed, measured style of an academic monograph. After she read my Grace Hartigan biography, a narrative that traces the ups and downs of the artist's personal life and finds fault with the late work, it was clear that I was not going to deliver the book the Trust wanted.

 

I am hardly alone in this dilemma. Gatekeepers of various kinds are always trying to keep biographers from presenting a fallible human being whose work, however significant, was sometimes lacking, and whose personal life must also be documented as fully as possible. When the subject is an artist, the gatekeepers' underlying motivations include not only maintaining a reputation but also boosting future auction sales and encouraging museum acquisitions.

 

The monetary value of a unique artwork at any particular time is based in part on the fashion of the day, the artist's previous sales, her fame or notoriety, and the size, medium, and subject matter of the work. But as a biographer, I am indifferent to the commodity value of art beyond its ability to keep the artist afloat during her lifetime. What matters to me is the journey—the artist's attempts and failures and occasional successes, the responses of critics, the tussles with dealers, the effects of soured romances and financial troubles.

 

Also, although I have an academic background in art history, I write for people who may never have taken a single course in the subject. My goal is always to bring readers back to the work, and I would hate to have academic language become a barrier to understanding. Of course I hope that people in the art world don't have too many quibbles with my biographies, but my allegiance is only to the facts I uncover, my own sense of appropriateness, and the goal of telling these stories in an involving way.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

My next book (due later this year) is Fearless: A Biography of Edna O'Brien. This great Irish writer shockingly never even made the shortlist for the Booker Prize, Great Britain's major annual literary honor. Despite more than sixty years of publishing novels and short stories that explored, in gorgeous prose, broad and deep realms of women's experience, Edna was constantly overlooked.

 

She was appointed to the Booker committee that awarded the 1973 prize to J. G. Farrell for The Siege of Krishnapor, a sign that her literary judgment must have been deemed sound. But this acknowledgement did not carry over to her own work, which some leading critics rejected on the grounds of passages of supposedly florid writing or heroines too much in thrall to their lovers. But other factors may have been at work as well.

 

As an Irishwoman living in London, Edna was always something of an outsider. Although she had many good friends in the British theatre world and among leading American and Irish writers, she was not a member of the inner circle of mid-twentieth-century British literati. A major reason for her exclusion is that she never attended any institution of higher learning, whereas most of her peers were Oxbridge graduates.

 

Historically, judges of literary awards have tended to look more favorably on writers like themselves: people with the right educational pedigree whose books are about familiar and acceptable subject matters. Writers of color have always known this. (Note that I am not comparing Edna's struggles to theirs, just pointing out one area of overlap.) Yet it is a truism that many past winners of major literary prizes are no longer read while ignored works by some of their contemporaries have become classics.

 

There was another issue that set Edna apart. As a passionate defender of the Irish Republic who hoped that the six counties of Northern Ireland (part of Great Britain ever since the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) would one day join the twenty-six counties of the Republic, she was looked at askance by English people who found such political demonstrations excessive and misplaced.

 

For Edna O'Brien, the failure of her country of residence to acknowledge her writing with a significant award was finally ameliorated when, at age eighty-eight, she received the David Cohen Prize for Literature, honoring her life's work. Of course she was delighted. But a major award would have meant so much to her decades earlier, when she struggled to maintain faith in her vision despite a literary climate that too often trivialized and deplored her efforts.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2025

The other day, while reading a short story collection, I found myself turning to the back cover of the paperback, which has brief descriptions of the themes of three of the stories. For some inexplicable reason I tried to match up these descriptions with the stories I had already read. Only one of the summaries sounded familiar.

 

These stories are not mysterious, and their themes were apparent to me as I read. But some peculiar need for validation led me to find out what they were "supposed" to be about. Or, let's face it, what someone in the publisher's publicity department decided they were about.

 

After reading the last two stories, I felt that at least one of them didn't quite fit with its supposed theme. Paging back through the rest of the book, I tried to see if that theme described a different story. But that didn't seem to be the case.

 

Readers are accustomed to learning from another source (a review or the flap copy) what a book is about before actually turning to page 1. Of course, the flap copy is meant to interest a potential book buyer. But what if we already own the book and are still in thrall to the content of those brief paragraphs?

 

They give us certain expectations—of a particular style, of the particular trajectory the plot will take, and the type of characters we will encounter. If we fail to find these elements as we read, we will feel deceived. Might we feel that the problem is ours—that we don't understand what the author is doing? In the case of experimental work, this may well be the case. Otherwise, the fault is the hype machine of publishing.

 

Imagine a scenario in which someone gives us a new book with an unrevealing title that was published without any descriptive information on its cover—a book whose author is also unfamiliar. What would we do? Read the first paragraph? See if the chapters have titles? Check to see how long it is? Surely we would be strangely at sea with no guidance about what's between the covers. Yet our experience as readers would be akin to that of a nineteenth-century explorer venturing upon an uncharted land. The experience might be upsetting or disappointing or captivating, but we would have no one with whom to compare notes. Entirely on our own, we would have to judge the writing purely for itself.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2025

 

Many of us know the subversive thrill of finding a mistake in the writing of an esteemed author—a fact we know and the author did not. Book reviewers naturally feel obliged to report such findings to the world at large. But there is a substantial difference between correcting a few lapses in the course of discussing larger aspects of the book and harping on occasional errors as "proof" of the author's unworthiness to write about the subject.

 

Anyone who has written a substantial book that draws on multiple sources and incorporates thousands of pieces of information knows that there are very likely errors of one sort or another. These may range from errors of omission (why didn't the author mention X about Y?) and small errors of fact (Z didn't live at that address; Q was born too late to take advantage of W) to confusion about well-documented historical events.

 

Errors can arise as a result of the author's carelessness or honest confusion. Some errors may be the result of the author's lack of expertise in areas tangential to the subject's life—a matter of failing to know what you don't know. Given the pressures inherent in publishing a contracted book, some aspects of a life inevitably will be dealt with summarily. Compounding the problem, there are no fact-checkers at trade publishing houses. A biographer writing for general readers is unlikely to engage more than superficially with scholarly literature published on the subject, which may provide hitherto unknown significant facts along with a big helping of impenetrable theoretical material.

 

There is an elderly biographer who has made it his business to write book reviews couched as irritable screeds about even the smallest errors and omissions. Such obsessive scrutiny would do a prosecuting attorney proud; in a book reviewer, however, it becomes the work of a crank. I couldn't help a twinge of schadenfreude when I learned that his own recent biography—as the subject's widow told me— is studded with misinformation.

 

It seems to me that a balanced, spite-free outlook—a realization that writers, like biographical subjects, are fallible—is the wisest tack to take when weighing the value of a book.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024

I keep thinking about the differences between what the academy deems appropriate in a biography (a genre still considered somewhat questionable) and what the rest of us write. Academics follow a certain protocol. Just as scientists peering through a microscope literally look down on the material on the slide, academics always remain superior to the subject under dissection, determining the value of the subject's work by slotting it into specific categories. That's why academics value only biographies organized thematically; this structure—imposed in response to currently fashionable theories—is seen as more worthy of intellectual effort than the messy factuality of the life. Academics also believe it is their job to state an opinion about every facet of the work and to vigorously question any autobiographical remark of the subject that does not fit with their own sense of likely and unlikely events.

 

As a non-academic biographer, I approach my subjects in a completely different way. I seek to know what it was like to be them—to think their thoughts (as conveyed by their journals, letters, and other written materials), and to understand how their upbringing and subsequent life events shaped their view of the world and influenced their work. To do this, I rely on archival sources dating as close as possible to the event in question, while also presenting some of the inevitable memory slips and embroideries that recreate these events years later. As far as I am concerned, the best way to organize a biography is to emphasize the narrative, which generally involves moving chronologically through the life. Of course that does not mean including dull or inconsequential details; a biographer needs to exercise a shaping hand in determining what facts are important.

 

But I am not writing to prove something about my subjects, or to demonstrate how cleverly I can refute their claims or dismiss some of their efforts. In other words: it's not about me. I do not stand above my subjects; I try to stand (insofar as possible) inside them, or at least alongside them. I express my own opinions only when I feel strongly about them.(I relegate any disagreements with other published sources to the endnotes, where I know only specialists will see them.) It's a question of humility, really. I am writing about this life because it is compelling and because it belongs to someone whose work I admire. My goal is to introduce others to this person and her work. I try to accomplish it as gracefully as I can, but in the end, what matters is readers' ability to connect with my subject—to appreciate her, understand her world, and close the book with a sense of how complicated a creative life can be.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2024

 

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, partly to take a break from the looming election. Something that I've come to realize is that it can take awhile to feel comfortable with a novel's cast of characters and the author's writing style. The most basic problem is sorting out who's who. I think it is a mistake for novelists to introduce a group of characters too quickly; this involves a lot of tedious paging back and forth when I fail to recall whether X is the brother, the uncle, or Z's husband. I prefer to meet these people one or two at a time, the way I would in real life. I want to see what the author does with them, how she describes their interior lives and how she manages to give each of them a different way of speaking.

 

In fiction, I look for freshly minted observations of the way people think and behave and a sense that the author has created a unique world with parallels to the one I inhabit. Whenever I encounter generic descriptions, unbelievable dialogue, or trendy writerly mannerisms, I don't bother reading further. Conversely, after finishing an outstanding novel, my expectations become more demanding. Recently, when I turned from the Irish novelist Sally Rooney's brilliant Intermezzo to two recent and much-praised novels by leading American women writers, they seemed disappointingly humdrum and sentimental. American readers are famous for preferring stories with a therapeutic upbeat resolution and for condemning deeply tragic narratives as "too sad." Yet a tragic sense of life is perhaps the most important characteristic of great writers.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024

In the annals of publishing, certain editors have been rightly praised for their guidance on manuscripts that were too long, poorly organized, lacking credible situations, insufficiently researched, or carelessly written. Some editors are still working in this manner. But readers' attention spans have shrunk, and books have to compete with a plethora of other leisuretime pursuits. Because publishers—so many of them owned by conglomerates—have to make money, they are no longer welcoming books on worthy subjects that are unlikely to appeal to tens of thousands of readers.

 

As a result, it is increasingly difficult to publish a biography about someone who is neither a world leader nor a pop star, someone who may have done her important work decades ago and whose name is unfamiliar to people under fifty. To make such a book more palatable to younger readers, a writer might be urged to emphasize particularly relatable aspects of the life (even if they are tangential to the subject's importance), to employ ahistorical descriptions, or even to invent scenes and dialogue.

 

I recently read a new biography of a celebrated editor at a major publishing house. While aspects of her life and work are of interest, the writing often made me cringe. From the author's lengthy acknowledgements, it seems clear that she lacked confidence in her work and was uncritically grateful for the editorial assistance she received. Her editor's advice likely accounts for the formulaic way many chapters begin, with a brief description of the book's subject going about the banal activities of her life. Not only are these passages are laughably flat and cliched, but they exist only to pander to an audience with no particular interest in publishing or editing who are looking for a breezy read.

 

I had a similar experience with my previous trade book editor. Along with an account of Edna O'Brien's hugely eventful personal life, my biography discusses at length the often shockingly prejudiced reactions to her novels, her struggles to get her plays produced, and her remarkable perseverance in the face of daunting rejection. No doubt seeking to make the book more appealing to a broad readership, the editor wanted "more lifestyle," including the insertion of an anecdote about O'Brien's personal life at the start of each of the later chapters, after her career began. This editor also wanted me to dispense with my detailed accounts of the way O'Brien was treated by editors, interviewers, book critics, agents, film producers, theatre directors, and others—which demonstrate the extraordinary difficulties she had in trying to disseminate her work and having it fairly reviewed, and which account for all manner of personal and financial troubles. The editor even failed to show interest in O'Brien's fascinating eye-level account of her travels in Cuba in 1968. It was as if her career was too annoyingly diffuse to fit neatly into a book about a woman best known for her first novel.

 

In response, I wrote that the book my editor had in mind was not the one I intended to write, explaining that the real "throughline" is O'Brien's extraordinary body of work, and what she went through to produce it. It would be an injustice to this great writer if the biography were primarily focused on her troubled love life and other personal details. I believe in standing firm against the meddling of editors who are so bottom-line oriented that they distort the book you have spent years researching and writing. You have to ask yourself: what is more important, that you remain true to your vision of your subject, or that you compromise your writerly integrity just to retain that book contract?

 

After I took back my manuscript, my incredulous agent ("No one does that!") dropped me. I eventually found a wonderful new agent who loved the manuscript. He worked diligently to find a new trade publisher for my book. But, although most editors praised the writing, they declined to sign me, citing contemporary readers' lack of interest in literary biography.

 

Ultimately, I chose to publish with a "hybrid" press, just one wobbly step above self-publishing. (A hybrid press is one that requires the author to pay for design, printing, and distribution.) The good news is that the author has complete control over such things as the cover design and flap copy. The bad news (besides the lack of an advance and the unexpected dent in the author's meager savings) is that there is a stigma attached to this manner of publishing. The cloud hovering over such books is, "Why wasn't this good enough for a trade or university press to snap it up?" (There actually was interest from an editor at Princeton University Press, but the peer reviewers, academics who are required to vet the manuscript, wanted me to drop my chronological approach—the only one I ever use, because it guides the reader properly through the life—in favor of a thematic organization. Still, I benefited greatly from several factual corrections to my accounts of Irish history.)

 

My book, FEARLESS: A BIOGRAPHY OF EDNA O'BRIEN, will be published in 2025 by Atmosphere Press. I think this is the best—the most carefully considered, richly sourced, and wide-ranging—of my five biographies. But the final judgment will rest with you.

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024

Catching up with the March 21 issue of The New York Review of Books, I read (in a review of the Penguin edition of the final volume of In Search of Lost Time) that Marcel Proust disagreed with Sainte-Beuve's biographical approach to literary criticism: "A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices."

 

In the same issue, the reviewer of William Egginton's book The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality has a bone to pick with the author's inclusion of biographical details along with the "drama of ideas" that illuminates this study. The reviewer approvingly quotes David Foster Wallace's negative remarks about a Borges biography that views his work in the light of his "emotional states and tragic love life." According to Wallace, this makes no sense because Borges was a Neoplatonist who believed that the self is an illusion.

 

But here's the thing: writers can hold all manner of arcane and complicated beliefs about the self, yet they cannot control the way their life experiences seep into their fiction. That's because writers are human beings, not intellectual automatons. Egginton suggests that Borges wondered if having accepted an invitation from the Chilean dictator August Pinochet made it impossible for him to receive the Nobel Prize—and that this thought about a road not taken influenced the short story "Garden of Forking Paths." To me this sounds eminently plausible.

 

I can't resist adding that reviewers who wrote that my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick did not accord her the full gravity of her intellectual position as a doyenne of American letters seemed not to realize that she was also a fallible and crisis-ridden human being, a woman who had to deal—for about one-third of her life—with an immensely gifted husband (the poet Robert Lowell) who was constantly falling prey to episodes of bipolar disorder that wreaked havoc with her attempt to lead a normal married life. And although she had remade herself as a model New Yorker, her personality was also formed by her Kentucky youth; most obviously, she never lost her Southern accent. These facts in no way detract from her accomplishments as a literary personage. But they must be taken into account in any truthful account of her life.  

 

(c) Cathy Curtis 2024