Interview by Andrea Caswell
THE FINDING OUT: Megan Marshall on her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (HarperCollins)

In her memoir After Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall trains a biographer’s lens on her own life. Through exquisitely crafted narrative essays, Marshall seeks answers to the deepest questions of the human heart, probing the contours of memory, family and friendship in a quest to discover her personal and cultural “history of the self.” 

Andrea Caswell: In the book’s introductory essay, you cite the biographer Paul Murray Kendall’s assertion that “…any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.” I love his use of the word uneasily. During your career researching other people’s lives, did you sense (or maybe resist) the possibility that someday you’d need to write a book containing more of your own history?

Megan Marshall: In the beginning I welcomed the relative anonymity of the biographer’s position in relation to the subject. I’m an amateur pianist who loves playing chamber music, and I thought of myself as the accompanist to the subject’s soloist. While writing my first biography, The Peabody Sisters, I sometimes felt I could hear the sisters’ words as a melody just beyond my ability to comprehend. I was catching their songs and writing them down.  

But of course I was drawn to their songs—or stories—because I was interested, personally, in the issues they confronted: the dilemmas many women face as they attempt to realize their ambitions in a culture that’s hostile to a woman’s independent agency. Women, more than men, have to work to reconcile their individuality with interdependence in family and society. These are themes in all my subjects’ lives.

Almost anyone who grows up wanting to be a writer comes from a background of complications, psychic injuries, that they hope to resolve in writing, in one form or another. One of the essays in After Lives, “Free for a While,” about my high school classmate Jonathan Jackson, the Black power martyr who gave his life in a (misguided) attempt to free his older brother George from prison, tells a story I’d been trying to get at ever since Jonathan died at age seventeen in 1970, the summer before our senior year. The story was about Jonathan, but also about all of us who knew him growing up. He didn’t make it; we did. How were we to understand his example, make some sense of this shocking loss? I’m glad I finally found a way to tell his story—essentially a biographical project, a form of remembrance, or resurrection—within the frame of a personal essay.

Andrea: In these candid, moving essays, readers feel the excitement of a mystery unraveling. You share your pursuit of clues into the untimely death of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Una, and learn details of your grandparents’ life in France during the First World War. As you research and write, does it feel like detective work to you? How would you describe the process?

Megan: Oh yes, the finding out! There’s nothing like it. And one unexpected or confirming fact leads to another. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to discover that Una Hawthorne’s eerie, almost spectral portrait, which I’d passed many times hanging in a stairwell at the Concord Free Public Library, was painted by British pre-Raphaelites—members of the movement that celebrated ashen red-haired beauties like Una—and that Una’s mother, Sophia Hawthorne, had warned her away from socializing with the very woman who painted the portrait! I knew none of that when I set out to solve the mystery of Una’s early death.  

I felt the same way while I was researching my own parents and grandparents in letters I inherited and saved. I’d known that my mother was a talented landscape painter out of college;  her paintings hung on our walls. But I didn’t know the full story of her early accomplishment, or how ambitious she’d been, until I began reading her letters and putting two-and-two together.  She exhibited with Richard Diebenkorn, had the same mentors in college at UC Berkeley. And then she had kids. In the 1950s. The obstacles she faced are laid out right there in her weekly letters to her mother, my grandmother.

The process? You follow your nose, ask lots of questions, and never give up! I’m still researching Una Hawthorne. I just found out about a batch of letters she wrote to a childhood friend, archived at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and will be reading them next month. That’s one message of After Lives: our biographical subjects live on in our imaginations. They never stop calling (or maybe singing) to us.  

Andrea: You note that following the publication of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast in 2017, you entered a period you thought of as ‘After Lives,’ when “documents of my own history, piled up in closets over the years, called out for exploration.” How or where did you begin your exploration? Sometimes in memoir, it’s not obvious just where “the beginning” is. 

Megan: It began with those documents that had been boxed up in my closet, my Marshall grandparents’ letters and diaries written during their several years in Paris during World War I. I knew that November 11, 2018, was the centennial of the armistice that ended the Great War, as it was called then, and I had only a vague sense of what I might find in those papers. The time had come to read them. I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but I will say that my grandfather had suffered from depression in later life.  I thought I might find evidence of shell shock. Instead I found a love story!

Andrea: You achieve a beautiful blend of memoir and biography by merging your personal history with stories of your research subjects, such as the Peabody sisters. In your quest to piece together a chronicle of the self, you acknowledge that a biographer knows “better than anyone, there are memories that can’t be verified, questions that can’t be answered.” How did you make peace—if you did—with those moments from the past that remain unclear? What advice would you offer writers of memoir as they navigate inevitable gaps in their knowledge or histories?

Megan: Every writer comes to terms with the problem of fuzzy memory in her own way. I have a background in journalism as well as in biography, so along with exploring archives and reading books and articles for context, I often consulted friends or family members. I learned a lot more than my own memory could supply, and that was thrilling, just what I hoped for. But I’m also honest about what can’t be known and how memory can be fluky or partial. Several of the essays circle around this problem and reach resolutions that aren’t definitive answers—which is something an essay can do even better than a work of narrative nonfiction.  

Andrea: Unusual and intimate details of people’s lives are revealed in their letters, and you share choice examples from what I imagine must be thousands of letters studied during your career as a biographer. Are you a letter-writer yourself, or has email taken over? 

Megan: This is a great question. I have two friends with whom I carry on handwritten correspondences. Well, one friend types on a portable Smith-Corona electric; he’s in his nineties and never transitioned to a word processor. I write back to him by hand, because it just doesn’t feel right to compose a letter on the computer and print it out to send. But the purpose of writing letters that are delivered by mail has entirely changed—vanished. The correspondence with my colleague who’s younger than I am doesn’t feel quite natural, and I never answer my older friend as fully as he writes to me.  

Recently I found some letters a friend wrote to me over the summer after our freshman year of college, the year we’d become close. They were wonderful letters, full of ideas and self-questioning, along with the details of what she was doing while we were apart and her plans for the fall semester. Back then, in the early 1970s, it was too expensive to make extended long-distance phone calls, and of course there was no email. Everything she wanted to say to me, she said by letter in a style that was both concentrated and free. All the other ways we can stay connected now have eroded the integrity of the written letter. I’m very careful not to refer to emails as letters. They aren’t.

Andrea: In “Free For a While,” the essay you mentioned earlier, you revisit your adolescence in California and an episode from your high school graduation. You wanted to speak of your slain classmate, Jonathan Jackson, and the school district tried to silence you. I admired very much how you went to the microphone anyway that day, to remember “Jon” and assert the importance of thinking and acting authentically. Do you think finding your voice that day contributed to your desire to share stories of the past, or led to becoming a biographer? 

Megan: After I wrote “Free for a While,” another essay that was spurred by an anniversary—my 50th class reunion—I realized just what you’re saying. I was reluctant at first to mention my speech in the essay. I’m not the protagonist, and there were others in our class of almost five hundred students who knew Jon much better than I did. I didn’t want to be perceived as grandstanding. But this book is also about how I became a writer, and more particularly a biographer. In the introduction I write about the “proximate distance” the biographer feels: close to, but also observing, her subject. That’s a good phrase for the way I felt at Blair High School in Pasadena in 1970 and 1971. I was on the edge of history, and although I couldn’t have articulated it then, I’d become aware that we all live in history as it is being made. We may not be able to change things, but the writer can bear witness. And maybe speaking up anyway after school authorities censored my speech prepared me to face the obstacles to publication that writers confront at every stage of their careers, especially early on. I didn’t give up.

Andrea: During a fellowship at Kyoto University, you read Hōjō-ki by Buddhist poet Kamo no Chōmei, who is sometimes called “the Thoreau of Japan.” You even made a pilgrimage to a replica of the hut where he lived as a hermit 600 years before Thoreau took to a cabin at Walden Pond. Chōmei’s poems, like your essays, ask profound questions about how best to live our short lives. Could you share more about how Chōmei’s work informed the writing of your memoir? Do you have a favorite translation or version of his book, Hōjō-ki, to recommend? 

Megan: There are several good translations of Hojo-ki, but my favorite is by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins, with illustrations by Michael Hofmann, published by Stone Bridge Press. It’s a beautiful slim volume (unlike Thoreau’s pretty hefty Walden), and it’s easy to find. This translation is done in verse, spare but eloquent, and published under the title Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World. 

The search for Chõmei’s hut—both the replica on the grounds of a shrine near Kyoto University where I was in residence, and the remote site of the hut on the outskirts of the city—gave shape to my three months’ stay in a country that was strange to me, and so compelling visually. It wasn’t until three years later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I began writing the essay, that I realized how helpful Chōmei’s writing on the natural disasters that sent him into seclusion—fire, flood, wind, a plague—could be for me in my own sudden isolation. And beyond his Buddhist doctrine of impermanence—“The only lasting truth is change,” to quote Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, another source of inspiration in these essays—Chōmei had a powerful historical sense that I share: 

To understand 

the world of today

hold it up

to the world

of long ago. 

Andrea: The jacket art for After Lives comes from a self-portrait painted by your mother as a college student in the early 1940s.  You imagine that she may have been trying to conjure “a different self—perhaps a more confident one,” and recognize that an artist or writer “must step outside the frame to see her subject, to find its shape or imagine a new one.” Why might making art require such bravery and vision from writers and artists? 

Megan: In the case of my mother, I was thinking of some very particular details of her life. She’d been raised by a musically talented mother, whose own mother had been a professional musician.  My mother was pushed toward music; she was a very good harpist and could have followed the maternal line. But she wanted to paint! She switched majors in college, studied with some of the finest artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and stepped outside the frame she was given. She imagined a career path for herself that no one she knew had followed, one that required originality as well as skill. I’ve said I’m an amateur pianist—I straddled two arts too. To have become a performer just never felt as creative to me as writing, but my mother never pushed me in music, you can imagine.

I suppose there are artists who grew up in families of artists and slipping into the family trade may be easier for them, if they aren’t daunted by those who came before. But I don’t think that’s the story for most visual artists. Bravery, vision, stamina, some capacity for self-protection: all these qualities are important. And the ability to be effectively self-critical, to self-edit—which I think is what I was getting at.  

Andrea: Your life’s work has taught you an important lesson: Do not judge a woman, even a woman of ambition and capability, by her accomplishments. This judgmental reflex, though, is often exactly what we do, to ourselves and others, thus this lesson you impart feels revolutionary. What additional insights can you share about how you learned this and why you believe it’s so important?

Megan: The twenty years I spent researching and writing The Peabody Sisters was a journey into the wilderness: of archives, nineteenth-century American literature and culture, and my own heart. I’m not sure I’d have taken on the project if I knew it would take so long. My two daughters grew up alongside my developing book, and I never wanted them to feel resentment toward it, so I kept my commitment, my obsession with getting the story straight and telling it right, out of daily family life as best I could. My support in the work came from librarians and historians I met in the archives and from a group of women biographers I organized in 1985 that is still meeting today. 

The longer it took, the less confidence I felt that I’d ever finish, and inwardly I despaired. I finally put the question to myself, as I realized one of the sisters, Sophia, a talented artist, had too: if I never finish this book (or paint original paintings, in Sophia’s case), am I a worthless person? What about all the other things I do, think, and feel? That’s who I am, not my book, finished or unfinished. I had to adopt that view to keep going, which took some internal pressure off, even as I felt some sadness, some further diminution of self. And then, finally, it was done!

Andrea: In these informative, generous essays, you share childhood memories—of your grandmother at her ironing board, of your father making ice cream, using an ice pick you now keep on your kitchen windowsill. You cite “the special power of things to give substance to memories,” and ask the poignant question, “Were words ever enough?” At this moment in history, recording our own and other people’s stories feels like a matter of survival. Might that be why writing matters so much, regardless of accolades or achievements?

Megan: I spoke earlier of bearing witness. We need writers and artists of all kinds to bear witness, to record in whatever way they can the experience of now. The essay you refer to, “These Useless Things,” ends with a notion that surprised me when it emerged, but I think it gives a better answer than I can come up with in an interview: “the enduring human need to communicate in writing, to give things life in words.” We could substitute “historical events” for “things” and the phrase would be just as true. Without words, we are nowhere, even as the power of words can be abused. Writers have to resist, to call out those who abuse others with their words, and to resist by continuing to make art with words.  

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s Senior Fiction Editor at Cleaver Magazine and is on the faculty of the Cleaver Workshops. She runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering revision feedback on fiction up to 5000 words. Andrea’s work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, The Coachella Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Atticus Review, Columbia Journal, and others. She’s an alum of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more information, please visit www.andreacaswell.com.

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.