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A review by octavia_cade
The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
5.0
This was outstanding! It's been very hard to put it down over the past few days, and my own writing has been suffering in consequence. I don't care. I've been a fan of Angela Carter for years - many of her books are on my shelves - and so when I came across this in the local library I knew I had to read it. It's very dense, very well-considered, and deliberately attempts to skirt the mythologisation of Carter, who died relatively young, from cancer, and who became more lauded after her death than she was before it. As Gordon points out early on in the biography, the people around her recalled her in ways that were not always accurate, constructing memories from their own experiences that were influenced more by what they thought Carter was like than they were how she actually was.
That happens to everyone, of course. Memory is a mutable thing, and it does seem as if the closer the person interviewed was to Carter, the less this occurred - unsurprising, given that the more time you spend with a person, the better sense you generally have of their character. It's only through amalgamating all the disparate experiences that people had with Carter, as well as her own interviews, journals, and records, that Gordon is able to produce a complete picture... or at least a picture that approaches on complete. Some people, such as Carter's first husband, refused to be interviewed - as is of course their right - and so those perspectives, valuable as they might be, have been lost.
This was still fascinating to read. Gordon's prose is lucid and compelling, his sympathies engaged, and his research exhaustive but not pedantic. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read, and I want my own copy now.
That happens to everyone, of course. Memory is a mutable thing, and it does seem as if the closer the person interviewed was to Carter, the less this occurred - unsurprising, given that the more time you spend with a person, the better sense you generally have of their character. It's only through amalgamating all the disparate experiences that people had with Carter, as well as her own interviews, journals, and records, that Gordon is able to produce a complete picture... or at least a picture that approaches on complete. Some people, such as Carter's first husband, refused to be interviewed - as is of course their right - and so those perspectives, valuable as they might be, have been lost.
This was still fascinating to read. Gordon's prose is lucid and compelling, his sympathies engaged, and his research exhaustive but not pedantic. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read, and I want my own copy now.