That blue river

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

A minimal version of this contract requires biographers to seek the truth and readers to take this aspiration in good faith. Of course, the ‘whole truth’ can never be told. As David Marr reminds us in this volume, ‘There can be no such thing as a definitive biography.’ Yet he and some of his co-contributors see an ethos of constrained truth-seeking as fundamental to various forms of life writing, a more inclusive and current term for the varieties of life narratives than ‘biography’. In the case of autobiography and memoir, the minimal contract can be expressed thus: ‘Writers undertake to write as truthfully as possible about themselves and their lives, and readers to read accordingly.’