A brief excerpt from one of her recent FT columns on the troublesome issue of bios…

The other day I was invited to a dinner for non-executive directors to talk about women on boards. Even though I would much rather watch MasterChef on the television than go out and discuss this most worn-out of subjects, I said yes because I liked the person arranging it.

Before the event I had to send in a “brief bio”, so I dashed off something like: “Lucy Kellaway is a journalist at the FT, on the board of Admiral and has written various books.” It was short, to the point and based on a model favoured by Ronald Reagan. A friend told me he had seen his delightfully succinct bio at a grand do in the 1980s: “Ronald Reagan is President of the United States”.

In due course I received a list of the other guests’ bios and saw how outlandish my single sentence looked among the short essays they had submitted. I now see that there is a problem with the Reagan model: it doesn’t work quite as well if you aren’t president of the US. Indeed, the less important you are, the more words it seems you need. But looking at these bios – containing facts like “x played intercollegiate basketball three decades ago” or “y serves on the boards of 17 charities” – made me wonder about this trickiest of literary genres. How long should they be? What should they contain? It seems that the bio is trying to do two things: to say who you are and to show you are different from (and more interesting than) other people. Most overdo the first by being too long, and underdo the second.

Keats was more than a Romantic poet. He was the apotheosis of popular notions of what constitutes the “writer’s life.” From the giving-up of a profitable career in order to write poetry, to the dying young, broken-hearted and far from home, Keats marked out territory generations of writers and wannabes have struggled to claim. In our minds, tragedy authenticates talent. We roll an envious eye at Hemingway’s suicide, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s tear-and-alcohol stained romance, and Flannery O’Connor’s terminal illness. Perhaps it is because we secretly long to be not only the tellers of stories, but also the heroes. Maybe the impulse to lionise flawed lives is a defence against overwhelming expectations (“I, too, would be a literary giant if I could escape the suburbs and spend my time drinking run in Old Havana.”) Whatever the case, the unthinking acceptance of cliches about the “writer’s life” is absurd and dangerous.

Dangerous, because it creates and antificial distinction between writing and life, and diminishes the achievements of writers of every caste. Ian Sansom notes that his literary hero Flann O’Brien, “had a proper job and took his family responsibilities seriously” then adds lugubriously that, “in the end he was destroyed by them… [and] descended into journalism.” What arrogant nonsense. O’Brien wrote surreally brilliant books that prompt other novelists to call him their literary hero. Why is it a cause for complaint that he also had a family and a profession?

Many great writers reconcile their art with other vocations. Edith Wharton was a designer before she was a novelist (her first book was about architecture) and she spent World War I in France doing relief work. George Orwell didn’t just write about the Spanish Civil War, he went to Catalonia and carried a gun. The truth is, few writers are exclusive. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf both wrote brilliant modernist literature. He did so by spending twelve hours a day at his desk; she also ran a printing press, gave lectures, and wrote spirited anti-war essays. That doesn’t make her less of a writer; it makes her more of a person.

Therein lies the nonsense of romanticising the short, solipsistic, stymied writer’s life. “Suffering doesn’t ennoble,” Martha Gellhorn wrote, “Why should it?” And if it doesn’t ennoble, why should it inspire? Conflating talent and tragedy asserts the unprovable theory that bad lives make good books. If Scott Fitzgerald were happy he wouldn’t have written Tender Is The Night but he might have written something better.

Mytholigising the “writer’s life” is alluring because we can use it to justify recklessness, self-hatred, chemical excess, and emotional cruelty. All of which have a certain bent appeal. The problem with looking for artistic validation in unhappiness, though, is that only the unhappiness is guaranteed; the art is still up to us.

You can find your identity in the damage that’s been done to you. Very, very dangerous. You find your identity in your wounds, in your scars, in the places where you’ve been beat up and you turn them into a medal. We all wear the things we’ve survived with some honour, but the real honour is in also transcending them.
— Bruce Springsteen

Henry Miller Library, Big Sur

COMMANDMENTS

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Brilliant, no? Especially “Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly”, which echoes Isak Dinesen’s advice to “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”

What commandments would you add?

These ravings, observations, etc come from one who, beyond vows, is without mother, gender, or country who attempts to bleed from the word a system, a space base.

Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem I am baffled by the hostility Didion rouses in many commentators. She is berated for writing about silk curtains and sundresses from Madeira, accused in so many words of being brittle and elitest. Reading Slouching I am sure there is no potential criticism, just or otherwise, Didion failed to consider. Her outstanding characteristic is gleaming honesty, and her ruthlessness begins at home.

Hunter S Thompson – The Great Shark Hunt HST is so much more than Fear & Loathing and I love this collection of his early writings. The dispatches he filed during his year in South America have all his acid humour and righteous outrage, along with a keen moral sensibility that was later blurred by drugs and frustration.

EM Forster – Two Cheers for Democracy Reading Forster essays in bulk is like eating ice cream, there is a point where it gets sickly, but its so delicious you press on. What shines through is his refusal to accept “how things are” and his absolute prioritisation of the personal over the ideological. If it is a choice between betraying my friend or my country, he writes, I hope I have the guts to betray my country.

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own Simply one of the finest essays about writing ever written. Beautiful, biting, and superbly argued. The image she evokes of an Oxford dinner is one of my favourite pieces of descriptive writing.

George Orwell – Facing Unpleasant Facts Forster, a contemporary of Orwell, noted that George found many things to be unhappy about with the world, and wanted to share them. Something for which the world should be grateful, because Orwell’s ire was never expressed in less than astonishing prose. Who else could write that the Christian conception of heaven resembles “choir practice in a jewellery shop”?

Truman Capote – Portraits and Observations Truman Capote is a descriptive genius and an unsparing chronicler of human emotion. Reading is like watching Muhammad Ali warm up. The profile of Marlon Brando is particularly audacious and brilliant.

Natalia Ginzburg – The Little Virtues I only “met” Natalia in a writing seminar last year, but she is already an old friend. The essays collected here include Silence, Human Relationships and the title piece, which is probably the best child-rearing advice I’ve ever encountered.

Martha Gellhorn – The Face of War Gellhorn was a heroic war correspondent. She covered every major 20th century conflict from the Spanish Civil War to the Central American conflicts of the 1980s. Fierce, fearless, and apolitical in the best way, she excoriates war without sloppy pacifism or jingoism.

Germaine Greer – The Madwoman’s Underclothes Germaine Greer is so provocative people feel the hard edge but tend to miss the sparkle of her diamond sentences. These short pieces are more personal than the majesterial The Female Eunuch, but equally blunt, polemic and rewarding.

Michel de Montaigne – Complete Essays Last but far from least, the daddy of all essayists, Michel de Montaigne. I picked him up on the recommendation of Virginia Woolf and there was an instant flash of recognition. He writes about love, fear, sex and death with remarkably modern, mordant glee.

Do you have a favourite essay? Describe it in <140 characters and I'll Tweet the best comments.

View from the Sant Joan road

Hotels cling to the cliffs at Portinatx like acrylic nails, a perfect backdrop to sunburnt kids and beery parents. A small brown sign points the way out: Sant Joan. Sharp right, down-shift. The road lifts you above the roofs of the holiday apartments and turns its back on the dive school. Flirt with third, settle for second. No need to rush along the ribbon of asphalt unwinding in a haze of pine boughs. You’re following a track carved out over centuries by peasant feet and donkey carts. Only the surface has changed. Above you, a jewel-bright sky. Pull over and inhale the silence. Beyond a shimmering basin of green, the Mediterranean gift-wraps the view with a band of silver.

Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day - Before you ask, the book is better. Ishiguro’s magnificent writing gradually reveals the depth of the narrator’s self-delusion, creating a complicated character who is deplorable, pitiable and ultimately heart-breaking.

Willa Cather The Professor’s House – Willa Cather was one of Truman Capote’s favourite writers, which is reason enough to read her. This compact tale is a beautiful reflection on aging, family life and responsibility.

Truman Capote Answered Prayers – Hilarious, salacious and brimming with Capote’s characteristic mix of mischief and malice, this unfinished novel infuriated his posh, real-life social circle by gleefully baring their secrets. Society murder, infidelity and lots of drinking is involved.

William Golding The Lord of the Flies – I put off reading this for a long time because I thought I knew what it was about. Mistake. It isn’t what it’s about that makes this brilliant, it’s Golding’s blinding use of perspective. You know what’s coming but the end still makes you gasp.

EM Forster A Room With A View – A compassionate but sharply observed account of the “muddles” people create when they lie to themselves. Essential reading for anyone who is ever tempted to do what they should, rather than what they feel (which is, I’m pretty sure, all of us).

William Faulker As I Lay Dying – Faulkner said he intended to create a masterpiece when he sat down to write As I Lay Dying, and did he ever. Each wretched detail of the Burden’s odyssey to bury their mother springs from the page, by the end you think you’re beyond shock, but you’re not.

Virginia Woolf To The Lighthouse – A clear-eyed, yet subtle look at emotional interplay of family life. The stream of consciousness narrative heightens the effect by demanding attentive reading.

Henry James What Maisie Knew – Any James will do, but this is my favourite. His virtuouso prose reveals what Maisie knew, and a great deal more, without ever being so uncouth as to say it directly.

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence – Wharton is another author you can’t go wrong with. She seems to know everything about human nature and the countless little ways we betray ourselves and each other.

F Scott Fitzgerald The Beautiful and Damned – The writing isn’t quite as spectacular as The Great Gatsby but this earlier novel is well worth a read for its handling of love, greed, vanity, ambition and failure.

Marina Botafoch & the lighthouse

Massively homesick for Ibiza!