Even if Annie Ernaux—who, as David McAllister points out, “has made it her life’s work to document all of her life’s defining events”—hadn’t won the Nobel for literature, this still would have been a triple-A-rated year for biography, autobiography, memoir and all the other types of book we gather under the banner of “lives”.
After all, the year brought us Robert Lowell’s Memoirs—which aren’t memoirs in the usual sense, but rather a collection of the American poet’s (largely unpublished) autobiographical writing, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. The centrepiece is a 150-page account of Lowell’s peculiar, upholstered youth in the early decades of the 20th century, but there’s much else to appreciate, including his sketches of other poets—like Ezra Pound and TS Eliot—and his bone-shuddering descriptions of his own depression.
Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight isn’t just the first English-language biography of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth; it is a book that lives up to its subject. Roth’s career and character were complicated—he fled the Nazis in the 1930s, only to renounce his Jewishness in the hotel bars of Paris—yet Pim manages to disentangle it all and, in doing so, adds to our understanding and appreciation of Roth’s work. It’s time to re-read The Radetzky March.
Similarly, Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite has you reaching for the writing of its subject, the 17th-century English poet John Donne—but only after you’ve finished her book. With its short chapters and whip-smart prose, this is a swift and joyous task.
Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer is a denser read, yet somehow more diaphanous at the same time. It concerns the twilight stages of people’s lives, which aren’t necessarily the years before they die but could also be when their great work is coming to an end. The recently retired tennis star Federer is in there, of course, but so too are Beethoven, Nietzsche, Tennyson and more—including, you realise, Dyer himself.
The interests of CLR James, the historian and activist who wrote perhaps the greatest book on cricket, 1963’s Beyond a Boundary, were similarly broad. It is impressive that John L Williams’s A Life Beyond the Boundaries encompasses them all, as part of a meticulous account of James’s life, which began in Trinidad and ended in a flat in Brixton.
Both Amy Bloom’s In Love and Florence Williams’s Heartbreak concern moments of trauma in their authors’ lives: a husband’s assisted suicide and a divorce after “three decades of togetherness”, respectively. What follows from those traumas is grief, sure—but also tremendous insight. Bloom writes about the manner of her husband’s death, one of the 21st century’s ethical battlegrounds, with awesome candour. Williams, by investigating the science behind a broken heart, turns her personal experiences into something universal and, in the end, useful.
In A Divine Language, Alec Wilkinson grapples with a very particular feeling: his dislike of maths at school. Decades later and now in his sixties, he decided to return to “algebra, geometry and calculus” to discover whether he was missing anything. The solution, encoded in this book, is brilliant because of its complexity—“It was meant to be a lark,” Wilkinson writes, “and it has become a reckoning.”
Even the “celebrity” end of the shelf has made some significant contributions this year. Faith, Hope and Carnage, based on a series of conversations between the slicked-back punk Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O’Hagan, is a revelation—particularly in the pulverising sections where Cave discusses the death of his son Arthur.
And Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is both the first memoir from a main cast member of the sitcom Friends (Perry played 10-gags-a-second Chandler) and one of the most affecting accounts of alcoholism and addiction ever to come out of Hollywood. Oh, and—for some reason—he doesn’t seem to like Keanu Reeves.
Read more
Books of the Year 2022: Ideas
Books of the Year 2022: Politics & Reportage
Books of the Year 2022: History
