Curiosity, love, loss: A biographer puts herself in the frame

Can learning about other people’s lives inform how we live our own? This question arose as I read, or rather inhaled, Megan Marshall’s memoir “After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.”

Marshall is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who specializes in trailblazing American women, including 19th-century journalist Margaret Fuller and midcentury poet Elizabeth Bishop. 

In “After Lives,” Marshall turns the lens on her own life. In one poignant essay, for example, Marshall recalls spending three months in Japan on a fellowship in 2017, during which she spent much time taking solitary walks. 

She is drawn to the work of “the Thoreau of Japan,” a 12th-century poet turned Buddhist hermit. Kamo no Chōmei’s classic book “Hōjō-ki” (“The Ten Foot Square Hut”) includes the words, “And so the question / where should we live? / and how?” The hermit’s writings convey not only the peace he found in nature, but also the suffering he witnessed before retreating to his mountain hut. Chōmei’s verses later take on greater resonance in Marshall’s life, when her beloved partner, Scott, dies in 2019 and the pandemic takes hold.  

She draws sustenance from the women in her biographies, all of whose lives were bordered with calamity and loss. And she reflects on what it means to remain open and curious and hopeful about the future. She writes, “My season of introspection was receding, and once again I was eager to learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live. ... It was time to start in again.”