Merry Wanderer of the Night:
biography

Confession time: I watched Father of the Bride

and Father of the Bride 2

on an alternating daily fashion for at least one year of my life. I woke up and watched as much of that day's movie before I went to school, then came home and finished it after school, and did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next for one year. 365 days. Which means I've seen each movie a minimum of 183 times. I'm honestly not kidding about this. I was around eight when the obsession consumed me. I just loved those movies, and I adored Steve Martin. Mostly because he reminded me of my dad. I'm not a huge fan of stand-up comedy, but I was interested in Steve Martin's autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

simply because he had such a huge impact on my childhood, and in turn my life. I read his novella Shopgirl a year ago, so I knew that Steve Martin was a fantastic writer. Within the first ten pages of this book I knew I was in for something great.

Actually on the first page he shines, "My most persistent memory of standup is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future; the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next"(1). I've never been a stand-up comic, but that description instills the fear and heightened awareness he must have experienced every single night. He ends the chapter in a similarly fantastic fashion, describing why this book is a biography and not an autobiography: "In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dram. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years" (3).

The rest of the biography relays the events of Steve Martin's life, and it must be said that the first half of his life covered is rather boring. This isn't really a great biography to read if you want to hear a really interesting, fabulous story about a celebrity. Martin worked at Disneyland, he didn't get along with his father, he liked doing magic tricks. He's different, but not astounding. All of that said, I felt like I knew Martin pretty well by the end of this biography simply through his writing. He can be repetitive, and there were times I wondered why he included the information he did-- but overall I loved this book.

I give this biography an A.

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I read Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee

as a companion to To Kill a Mockingbird for the 50th Anniversary. Harper Lee doesn't give interviews anymore so this biography was done entirely from interviews Charles J. Shields did with people who knew Harper Lee and from information he could find from the time period involving her. It was also, basically, done without Harper Lee's permission although the fact that the book is out shows me that she doesn't have a huge problem with it. The biography is made up of ten chapters that begin with Harper Lee's childhood to the point where she quit giving interviews and some more present day stories of her. When I first started the biography I was surprised by how novel-like Shields managed to make it. He did a great job setting up the scene of Harper Lee as a child living in a small town called Monroeville, Alabama. While most of the images were probably created by Shields himself I think there was still some truth in them.

What really amazed me about this book was how much of To Kill a Mockingbird is based on Harper Lee's own life. Her father was a lawyer and the character of Atticus is loosely based on him. Scout is really based on Harper Lee herself, who was a tomboy and had a quick mouth as a child. Dill is based on Harper Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote who was also handed around to relatives like a bowl of mashed potatoes and was a bit eccentric as a child. What I gathered from the book is that the case in the book is based off a couple of cases and experiences Harper Lee had as a child. It was really interesting for me to finish To Kill a Mockingbird and then move on to this book because I saw where so many of the ideas came from. Shields also pulls out quotes from the book and since I'd just finished it I could remember exactly where the quotations came from which gave them a little more context in the biography.

Harper Lee attended University of Alabama where she was a writer and editor on a school publication called the Rammer Jammer. While this section was interesting because I got to see some early writing of Harper Lee's I think it dragged on a bit too long. There is also a section about Harper Lee's involvement in the research of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which at first is fascinating but turns into a big yawn rather quickly. It's 45 pages! The book is only 280-some pages! I felt like I was reading about Truman Capote and not about Harper Lee for 1/5 of the book. I think that chapter was necessary but really needed to be weeded down. The portrait I came away with was not very different from the portrait I had going into the book, but it was nice to read the story of how To Kill a Mockingbird came to be. There is one point in the biography where Shields makes the suggestion that Harper Lee might be a bit of a one-trick pony. She was asked to submit a short story to a magazine and wrote what sounded like a short story version of To Kill a Mockingbird. He uses this as a possible suggestion for why she has never published a book since To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought this was an interesting idea although I think a lot of authors write similar stories in multiple books.

I give this biography a C.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.