Francine du Plessix Gray on the compassion and severity required to write memoir and biography
The French-American writer spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2006
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Francine du Plessix Gray was a novelist, biographer and literary critic.
She's known for her book Them, which tells the story of her eclectic parents' journey from the artistic Russian émigré community of 1930s Paris to the top of New York's high society. It won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and shed light on their unique characters and what it was like to grown up in their shadows.
Her other works include Lovers and Tyrants, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for biography, Madame de Staël and Soviet Women. Her writing was also often featured in the New Yorker.
The French-American writer died in 2019 at 88.
She spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2006 about the compelling stories she shares about her parents in Them.
Transforming information into illumination
"The important thing is, whether you're writing a biography or memoir, you have to transform information into illumination.
"Through all kinds of aesthetic tricks, you have to breathe life into these facts and make persons who are palpably and essentially heard and seen on the stage of your pages. One has to use all of one's five senses all the time and one has to be very discreet about not piling up too much information at once.
"I find that part of that compassion and severity that I think is essential to any biography or memoir has to do with the fact that biography and memoir is not only an act of commemoration, it's also an act of correction.
"You want to see the world, to see these people as they really were.
You want to see the world, to see these people as they really were.- Francine du Plessix Gray
"You don't want either hagiography or pathography. Pathography was a term coined by Joyce Carol Oates, I believe, about the kind of biography that only sort of shows the evil and the unattractive side and person's character and you have to tread dead down the middle between pathography and hagiography."
Writing about her parents' lives
"I think it's been more illuminating than disturbing. It's a very human impulse, really.
"As deep as our need to eat and drink and sleep and make love is the need to find a pattern in our lives and the lives of those we love, to see a kind of clarity, and kind of causality working out.
"This figuring out of the pattern of a life, of intermingled lives is a deeply satisfying thing. That's where the personal illumination comes from, is to fit them into a canvas which can bring it to life and give you their deeper meaning, the deeper meaning of their existence, as intermixed constantly with the forces of history, let's say, because I'm always fascinated by how the forces of history shape individuals."
Unwavering compassion
"I'm more compassionate than I thought I would be in the sense that I never lost patience with my parents. I continued to love them even though I was able to confront their worst mistakes and their worst flaws. I still have not at all diminished my love for them.
"As for insight to them, I think it brought out the fact that their behaviour had an enormously wide spectrum. I just don't think I've met two people who had a more eerily wide spectrum of behaviour. My stepfather in particular could be the extreme of gentleness, generosity, warmth and charm and goodness, and could also be brutal, cold, ruthless, hypocritical.
I still have not at all diminished my love for them.- Francine du Plessix Gray
"My mother also, who was in essence kind and charitable and compassionate and loving, could be mean and devious and fairly brutal in dealing with people.
"It's the spectrum of the latitude of human behaviour within two people who shaped my life that was perhaps most illuminating and most disturbing."
Francine du Plessix Gray's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
