The Biography Genre

I read a few biographies every now and then and recently I've been getting more and more into them. I like reading about other people's lives. Perhaps it's the voyeur in me.

Perhaps it's something else entirely though.

This is what I thought last night: when reading fiction, you almost always make yourself the main character, right? You can see yourself going through the adventure, be it on a quest for a magical sword/ring, helping the humpback whales, on a trans dimensional journey with an ancient gunslinger, whatever the case may be. You're right there and you're experiencing it.

But somewhere in the back of your head you know it's fake. This is fiction after all.

But biographies, those are real, this stuff really happened to someone and while you're reading it, are you sure you aren't imagining it happening to you?

And then BAM, that's when it hit me that I was imagining myself to be Charles Schulz, the guy who made the Peanuts strip. It didn't exactly hurt when I identified with a ton of his growing up and feelings toward the world and whatnot (at least up to now, a lot of things we would have agreed on but the things we wouldn't have agreed on we REALLY wouldn't have agreed on). I remember when I first started reading it, I got to the first chunk of pictures in the book and said to myself that he looks nothing like I was seeing in my head and what was in my head was not known to be me but now I think it was.

"This guy doesn't look like me at ALL!"

Now that the realization has hit, I love biographies even more. I'm not turned off at ALL to know that this life is someone else's and these experiences were theirs, not mine because when I'm reading it, they might as well be mine.

This sounds horribly creepy, but I swear it's not. I'm merely saying that while we have a tough time pushing ourselves further into fiction for it's obvious falsehood we can truly let ourselves go in biographies knowing that the events really took place in this world, in this dimension to a real person so since it's based in reality, let yourself go and fully embrace it.

I'm not saying you need to pretend you're the person when you aren't reading the book, but right now, I'm having more fun reading than I have for a long time. I love to read and fiction is my favorite genre, but I never ever experienced the whole diving into a book and really getting a ton out of it. Little snippets here and there really connected with me, but nothing, NOTHING, like what I'm experiencing reading biographies. I can be a strung out blues man (SRV or Clapton), a founding father (Ben Franklin) or even a cartoonist (Charles Schulz).

I get the feeling I'll be reading a LOT more biographies in the future and I have a sneaking suspicion that readers of biographies may be doing the exact same thing, even if it's never occurred to them that they are. I hope if you are and you read this it hits home because I'm sure you'll have a ton more fun reading the stories.