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.
Story Table 