Isaac Butler

He went to tons of private paper collections.

I mean, he really did the work and it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful story.

And can I name one more?

Is that okay?

You can name one more.

Okay, I'm going to go, let's go James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, his book of film criticism, which is also a memoir, which is also a great political treatise.

You know, when he's writing that, people aren't really writing the kind of film criticism that is doing social critique and autobiography and film criticism at the same time.

Now it feels like we all do it all the time, right?

But he's really the pioneer, and it's great to go back to those kind of pioneering works.

Fire in the Belly, which is C. Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, is essential reading.

I mean, everything C. Carr writes is essential reading.

I love C. Carr's work.

Absolutely incredible.

We would not understand the 80s and 90s in art without her columns for The Village Voice and her books.

So Fire in the Belly is incredible.

But the greatest, I think, artist memoir of all time might be Elia Kazan's A Life, which is, you know, it's like reading Paradise.

It's like the Paradise Lost of showbiz autobiographies.

On the first page, he says, I am the devil and you cannot trust anything I say.

And then for 800 pages, just digs into the most salacious, darkest parts of himself and puts them on the page.

It's funny.