Mark Harris

asked in a biographer's head about the subject they're writing about is often a really useful question because you spend years trying to

chase what you can't definitively have, which is, what was someone thinking at a given moment?

You can try to reconstruct that from diaries or from letters or from conversations with someone who you interviewed, but you're ultimately guessing.

And I don't believe in writing the kind of biography where there are sentences like,

so-and-so paced the room nervously alone.

If they were alone in the room and they never told you whether they paced the room nervously or not, then you shouldn't put it in.

But I do think that anyone who's writing a biography has to take on a certain level of arrogance at some point.

You have to

start to believe that you get them, you kind of know how they were thinking and what they were thinking, or all you're going to end up with is a kind of dry recitation of fact.

And so I think to counterbalance that arrogance,

It's good to feel the person over your shoulder sometimes second guessing you, correcting you, telling you not to be so sure of yourself.

It's a good jolt of humility, which I think you need when you're a biographer as often as you need arrogance.

Well, that's a very different thing because that's an actual, practical, tangible thing about living people.

I would not have written the biography if I had not had their consent in advance.

And consent, rather than cooperation, was what I asked for.

I specifically asked Diane if she was okay with this and if I could...

state publicly that she was okay with it as a way of getting other people who were willing to talk to me to cooperate.

And she gave me that.

I did not say, and I need you to do an interview, and she never said, I want to read it along the way, or you can't talk about this and this and this.

And so I felt very fortunate.