The Autobiography of a Biographer

I’ll admit: I approached *The Autobiography of a Biographer* skeptical that an hour-long panel could justify its runtime. But within five minutes, I was hooked—not by grand revelations, but by the way these three writers *argue*. Stacy Schiff’s dry wit cuts through Edmund Morris’s theatrical reminiscing, while James Atlas plays the wry mediator, dropping one-liners like, *“Every biography is a failed novel”*—a line that’ll haunt me next time I pick up a doorstopper bio. The narration (or lack of polished narration) is part of the charm: this is a *conversation*, not a performance, and the Symphony Space recording captures the spontaneity of live debate. You can hear Schiff’s eye-rolls in her tone when Morris spins another tale of Reagan-era access; Atlas’s chuckle when he admits to “inventing” a scene because the subject’s diary was *too boring*. The pacing stumbles once or twice—Morris’s anecdotes occasionally meander, and a tighter edit could’ve trimmed a few tangential riffs on publishing industry woes. But the trade-off is authenticity. When Schiff admits she once cried in an archive, or Atlas confesses to “falling in love” with a subject only to later despise them, it’s the kind of vulnerability you rarely hear from writers who’ve built careers on detachment. The production’s lo-fi aesthetic (audible page-turns, the occasional mic bump) might frustrate audiophiles, but it suits the content: this is biography stripped of its varnish. My only real gripe? At 65 minutes, it leaves you wanting a sequel—preferably with these three, a bottle of whiskey, and no time limits.