StoryTable Team Readings & Reviews

Portraits in Motion: Why Biography Still Matters

Reading Parul Sehgal’s “Can You Ever Really Know a Person? Biographers Keep Trying”
By StoryTable Journal

By the time you’ve read a hundred pages into a good biography, you begin to feel the pull:
that uncanny sensation that someone else’s life has become your own. You look up from the book and the streetlights, your coffee mug, even the shape of your day feels somehow shaped by the choices of a long-gone stranger.

Parul Sehgal, in her elegant June 13 New York Times essay, dives deep into this phenomenon—not just how we read biographies, but why they endure. In an age of shrinking attention spans and minimalism across media—shorter books, smaller casts, quicker endings—biography remains proudly maximalist. “Fat, splendid and wholly implacable,” she writes. It resists the trend.

But more than its thickness, it’s biography’s insistence on the contradictions of character that makes it feel urgent. It asks: how do people become who they are? How does motive unfurl from memory? How much of the self is performance? Sehgal traces how recent biographers have turned away from “definitive portraits” in favor of fragmented, pluralist selves. This is not biography as monument-building, but biography as excavation.

She gives the example of James Baldwin—whose newly opened archives have produced not one, but two major biographies this year, each approaching him from different angles. One focuses on Baldwin’s erotic and domestic life, another emphasizes his shifting public personas. Both refuse neatness. Neither pretends to settle him. This, Sehgal suggests, is the strength of modern life-writing: the ability to hold contradiction without flattening it into a slogan.

And while the genre has often focused on the public sphere—the “eminent lives” of politicians, generals, artists—modern biography increasingly attends to the personal and even the ordinary. Paradoxically, it does this by embracing its limits. As she quotes biographer Michael Holroyd:

“The need to do this, to keep death in its place, lies deep in human nature.”

At StoryTable, we believe the same. Our journal began with the idea that everyone—famous or not—carries a story worth hearing. Not just for history’s sake, but because understanding lives, in their full complexity, helps us understand our own.

Biography as Empathy

This is where Sehgal’s essay turns from literary reflection to something more intimate. She draws attention to the most powerful shift in biography today: its willingness to remain unfinished. In her survey of books on Sylvia Plath, Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Fanon, Candy Darling and others, what emerges is not a unified message but a kaleidoscope of contradictions. These are not books that pretend to know their subjects completely. Instead, they model how to stay with the questions.

It’s tempting to think of biography as an old-fashioned genre, interested in dusty letters and exact dates. But what makes it vibrant—what makes it necessary—is its devotion to character. The kind of character that cannot be coded into algorithms or inferred from behavior alone. Sehgal writes that AI can scrape the surface of motive (“I hate, I want”) but not its depth—its body, its shame, its backroom whispers. “A.I. knows only to enter through the front door,” she writes. Biography, by contrast, “observes the true story happening elsewhere.”

Understanding Those Closest to Us

What Sehgal’s essay reminds us—perhaps most painfully—is how difficult it can be to truly know even the people we live with. Parents, siblings, partners. We share meals, homes, even lifetimes, yet so often we miss the chance to understand them as they wish to be understood. Not just in what they did, but why they did it. What they hoped for. What hurt them. What they were trying to carry or repair.

Sometimes they don’t explain—out of habit, pride, or fear. Sometimes we don’t ask—assuming there’s time, or thinking we already know. But the truth is, many people leave this world never having had the space to tell their story, even if just as an excuse, an apology, or a hope.

That is why preserving life stories matters. It’s not just for posterity. It’s for connection—for offering those we love the dignity of being heard, and for ourselves, the grace of understanding.

The Quiet Urgency

Toward the end of her piece, Sehgal offers an unforgettable image: Baldwin as a child, daydreaming while watching his mother receive a scrap of black velvet from a neighbor. “That is a good idea,” his mother says, and for years Baldwin believes an “idea” is something dark, soft, and starry. It’s a moment too small for history books, too private for footnotes—but it is the core of biography. Not just what happened, but how it was felt.

At StoryTable, we’re building a space to capture these very moments—the velvet scraps, the quiet exchanges, the stories told too late. We believe that a person is not a set of events, but a process of becoming. We believe in the power of remembering someone as they truly were: complex, contradictory, unfinished.

Sehgal’s essay ends with Ellmann’s reflection on what drives biography:

“to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves.”

That is a challenge. And it is a gift.

Our goal, through writing, reflection, and dialogue, is to meet that challenge—one life at a time.

J. Kim personal essay

Why Writing Down a Life Story Really Matters

To Me, and Maybe to All of Us

I didn’t grow up thinking life stories needed to be written down.
They lived in fragments — in things people remembered at family dinners, in objects kept in drawers, in the way someone’s voice echoes even after they’re gone.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking that.

It’s not just about nostalgia.
It’s about loneliness.
And about what gets left unsaid.

When Writing Becomes Remembering

Years ago, while working on my cultural anthropology thesis, I spent time with Korean white-collar retirees — men who had risen through banks and government offices in the decades following war and upheaval. They weren’t celebrities. They didn’t lead revolutions. But their lives were full of movement — from villages to cities, from typewriters to meetings, from youth to responsibility.

What I remember most was how quiet they were.
How often they paused when asked simple questions like,
“What did you want, back then?”

Sometimes they couldn’t answer.
Other times they tried — slowly, carefully.
And occasionally, writing helped them get there.

Getting Older Is Getting Used to Silence

As people age, something shifts.
Not just physically, but socially.

The family grows busy with its own life.
The workplace disappears.
Friend groups shrink.

We become more alone — even before we’re truly alone.
And in that quiet, memories gather like dust.
Unshared, unasked, unread.

It’s not about being forgotten.
It’s about being misunderstood.

Your child doesn’t know why you made that decision in your 30s.
Your spouse might not fully understand what you lost in your 40s.
Even you might need help remembering what mattered most.

Writing a life story can feel like an excuse — not in the apologetic sense, but in the explanatory one.
A way of saying: This is why I chose what I did. This is what it meant to me.

My Father, and the Others Like Him

My own father was born in the early 1950s in the Korean countryside. He moved to Seoul for a job, started as a bank teller, worked quietly, and eventually retired as a branch manager.

At work, his coworkers respected him — he was flexible, reliable, generous.
At home, he was stricter, more distant. I now wonder if he felt lonely there.
Maybe it was hard to explain his inner world to us.
Or maybe he didn’t know how.

He was the eldest of eight siblings, raised with responsibility etched into his habits.
Duty, not expression.
Provision, not explanation.

So much of him — like the men I interviewed — remained unsaid.
But I now see: it wasn’t because there was nothing to say.
It was because no one asked.
And maybe, he didn’t know how to start.

Science Has a Name for This

Psychologists call it narrative identity — the idea that we make sense of ourselves through story.
Writing, especially in later life, helps reduce stress, increase emotional clarity, and even alleviate feelings of isolation.

Sociologists frame it as a bridge across generations.
Anthropologists like myself see it as cultural memory — a form of preservation that can outlive the speaker.

When someone writes their life story, they’re not just sharing facts.
They’re building a path for others to walk through their mind and time.

Family Is the Closest, Yet Sometimes the Least Understood

We think we know our parents.
Or our grandparents.
But we know them mostly through roles — not reflections.

Writing a life story gives the family something rare:
A chance to understand.
Even when the person is no longer around.
Even when distance, death, or silence have stepped in.

It’s not about legacy in the traditional sense.
It’s about repairing the unseen misunderstandings that time has layered into relationships.

When someone writes down what they felt — not just what they did — we begin to know them as people.
And that knowledge softens things.
Even the difficult parts.

A Gentle Invitation

You don’t have to be a writer.
You don’t need perfect grammar.
But you have a life no one else has lived.
And someone — maybe even your future self — needs to hear it.

I believe this not just as a son, but as a researcher.
Not just as a Korean, but as someone trying to make sense of what connects people across time.

We’re made of more than events.
We’re made of meaning.

Writing your story might be the most generous thing you do — for yourself, for your family, and for the quiet places inside you that are still waiting to speak.

J. Kim personal essay, reflections

The Silence After a Story Ends

I didn’t always notice it when it happened. But over time, I started to recognize the pause that followed when my mother told a story from her past. She would say something about her childhood, or a moment from her early years in Seoul, and then there would be this silence. It wasn’t dramatic or emotional. It just sat there. And I’d sit with it too, not entirely sure if I was supposed to say something or just leave it alone.

One time, she told me about the first winter her family spent in a new apartment. The heater had broken, and there weren’t enough blankets. She and her sisters slept side by side, tightly packed together. The way she told it, it wasn’t a complaint — just a fact. She finished the story without any kind of wrap-up, no final sentence to tie it together. And then she went quiet.

At first, I thought that meant she was done talking. Now I understand it a little differently. That silence isn’t the end of the story. It’s part of it.

My mother was born in the early 1950s, just after the Korean War. She grew up in a time when the country was rebuilding from nothing. Hunger wasn’t a concept — it was a constant. Education was a privilege, not a given. For women especially, life was often dictated by obligation more than choice. Knowing that now, her stories make a different kind of sense. The tone. The sparseness. The way she seems to hand them over with little emotion, as if they aren’t unique but typical of anyone who survived that time.

I didn’t grow up asking my parents many questions about their past. Like a lot of children of immigrants, I picked up the basics through fragments — food, habits, the occasional mention of a relative or event. But the deeper stories, the ones that reveal how someone saw the world, were rarely told. I think there was a quiet agreement between us that the past was too far away, or too complicated to explain. Maybe they assumed I wouldn’t understand. Maybe they were right.

But something shifted for me in my thirties. I started to feel more curious, not in a formal way, but in a quiet way. I found myself wanting to know what my parents had been like before they were parents. Not just what they had done, but what they had hoped for, what they had missed, who they had loved and lost along the way.

So I started listening more closely. I didn’t sit them down with questions or a voice recorder. I just paid attention. Stories would slip out during dinner, or while watching TV, or when they were half-talking to themselves. And once in a while, they would say something that surprised me.

My mother once mentioned her younger sister in passing. I had never heard much about her. She said they had argued the night before her sister was killed in an accident. Something about a scarf. She didn’t go into detail. Just said, “We didn’t talk the next morning.” That was it.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t silence out of discomfort. It was silence out of respect — like the story had taken up space, and there was nothing to do but sit with it.

These moments kept happening. A detail about a childhood illness. A passing remark about a teacher who was kind. A mention of a friend she lost touch with. I started to see my mother not as a fixed figure in my life, but as someone who had lived many versions of herself before I ever arrived. Each story added another thread to that version.

I used to think that stories were always meant to be shared out loud and responded to. That they needed acknowledgment, or validation, or some kind of moral takeaway. But my mother’s stories didn’t work that way. She didn’t need me to react. She just needed to say them once, sometimes without looking up, and then leave them there.

I’ve come to believe that the silence after a story is a kind of punctuation. Not a period, exactly — more like an em-dash, or a soft return. It’s the moment where you decide whether to ask a follow-up question, or whether to let the story breathe on its own. Often, I let it breathe. Some stories don’t need commentary. They’re already carrying enough.

Over the last year, my mother has told me fewer stories. It’s not that she’s forgotten them. I think it’s more that she’s already told me what she needed to say. Or maybe I’ve learned how to listen without her having to speak.

There are days when we sit in the same room and barely talk. I used to think that meant something was wrong. Now I don’t mind it. Some of the most honest moments between us happen without words.

I still think about those silences. The ones that followed her stories. They weren’t empty. They were full of something I can’t quite name. Not regret. Not sadness. Just the weight of something real.

And I’ve learned to stop filling them.