The Paris Review Reissues Hermione Lee Interview on the Strange Art of Biography
The Paris Review has unlocked an archival conversation with biographer Hermione Lee, selected by Daisy Hildyard, as part of its weekly archive release. The interview offers a sharp look at how literary lives are shaped, told, and sometimes blamed on the page.
The Paris Review has made available an archived interview with biographer Hermione Lee, chosen this week by writer Daisy Hildyard. The republication returns to one of the magazine’s recurring concerns: how literature remembers writers, and how biography tries to make sense of a life without flattening its contradictions.
The piece appears in the magazine’s archive series, which the publication says unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for readers each week, with a newsletter sent on Sunday mornings. This week’s selection is Lee’s conversation with Louisa Thomas from The Art of Biography series, originally published in issue no. 205 in Summer 2013. Lee’s interview is being revisited not simply as a profile of a major biographer, but as a meditation on what biography can and cannot do.
At the center of the discussion is a deceptively simple problem: what is a life? Lee approaches that question as one of craft rather than mysticism, arguing that biography depends on finding, or even inventing, a structure that fits the subject. The interview treats the form as something made under pressure, with choices about emphasis, sequence, and evidence shaping the reader’s sense of a person just as much as the facts themselves do. In that sense, the conversation is about technique as much as about temperament.