After Lives

“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 on 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 “An esteemed biographer put her own life in the spotlight.” — Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times “Can learning about other people’s lives inform how we live our own? This question arose as I read, or rather inhaled, Megan Marshall’s memoir After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart." — April Austin, Christian Science Monitor “What a marvel this book is!” — Larry Wilson, Pasadena Star News "In this slim volume of essays, Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, turns inward.” — The New Yorker "Fluent and involving essays…Marshall nimbly extrapolates significant implications from small moments, humble objects, and quiet discoveries as she astutely and gracefully records a “season of introspection,” ending with a stirring and promising account of how she found herself "practicing biography again." — Booklist "Much-lauded biographer Megan Marshall…opens up her own life to readers…Interweaving stories from her own life, Marshall looks back on her work and her endlessly fascinating subjects." — Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe “Six essays that offer intimate reflections on [the author’s] life and work…candid, sensitive recollections.” — Kirkus Reviews