get out of the way

I really loved Tiphaine Samoyault's biography of Roland Barthes. It was perfect - the weaving together of his life, his intellectual development, the development of his theory, his connection with other key figures and historic developments. A masterpiece. 

So, I thought, I really like this genre - the biography of an influential scholar that treats their life and their work, and I bought another one. I was really looking forward to it, but I was disappointed, probably because I was expecting something like Samoyault. 

The main problem, from my point of view, was that the writer wanted to insert themselves into the book. They talked about their friendship with this scholar and why they wanted to write their biography, and they just had their own things to say, and everything was over-dramatized. Like she talked about one academic who had promoted and protected the work of the subject of the biography, 'to his very last breath'. She shared all this insider information about the relations and interactions between famous figures....and I'm like - who cares?! I'm interested in the life and work of the person that the biography is about. That's why I'm reading the book. I have zero interest in the person who wrote the book, to be honest. 

It made me think that, to write a good biography, takes a kind of humility. It's interesting that a biographer of Barthes should embody the death of the author so nicely.