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On Sale February 11, 2025
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AFTER LIVES:
On Biography and
the Mysteries of the
Human Heart
By Megan Marshall
A moving and penetrating memoir of a life in biography from the Pulitzer Prize winner and “gifted storyteller”
(Judith Thurman, The New Yorker).
Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of After Lives, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it.
In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author’s AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Here too is the author’s passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal.
Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, “[at] the front rank of American biographers” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), makes palpable her driving impulse to “learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.”
PRAISE
“Six essays that offer intimate reflections on [the author’s] life and work…candid, sensitive recollections.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Megan Marshall has written a powerful and haunting book about memory, family, friendship, and history. In these intricately braided essays, Marshall approaches her own life through the lives of others as she revisits her grandfather’s experience in World War I, a school friend’s tragic death, a stay in Kyoto, and a 19th-century biographical mystery. After Lives is an intimate and illuminating chronicle of the self from one of America’s best biographers.”—Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
“In her elegant reflections on the biographer's craft, Megan Marshall has in fact given us a memoir--one that enables us to look afresh at books and lives and the way they shape one another.”—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury.
“Megan Marshall has done it again. This time, her gentle, probing eye, her compassion and generosity, are turned inward. In moving and subtle prose, she explores her own canyons of grief, the origins of her interest in the lives of others, and vastly, beautifully, in the making of art itself.”—Ayana Mathis, author of The Unsettled and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
“Megan Marshall’s rich and moving essays, both fresh fieldwork and second takes from an illustrious career in biography, ask searching questions of this most fascinating genre. With its tantalizing glimpses of the author at work, After Lives reveals the alchemy of life writing.”—Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars
“Grave and profound, clear-eyed and informative, these essays invite us into the biographer’s workshop and into the mind of one of the genre’s most accomplished practitioners.”—Anthony Walton, author of The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation |
