Biography shows us the world through others' eyes, memoirist tells OCLW

McWilliam overcame writer's block following a period of near-blindness brought on by the rare illness blepharospasm to write the Hawthornden Prize-winning memoir What to Look for in Winter. Wolfson College President and OCLW Director Hermione Lee, in her introduction to the lecture, described her voice as "subtle, original and sharp", and her memoir as remarkable for its candour and lack of sef-pity, "told with eloquence, truthfulness and comic brio".

Such traits were in full evidence in McWilliam's lecture, in which she described the power of the "small, tendril-like detail" in the best biography to bring the subject to life and take the reader out of oneself - a "sober intoxication" .

She evocatively described the challenges of the biographer's art as: "the attempt to convey this thing that would sooner flee than stay: life in time", and argued that, despite the subject's tendency to "topiarize or burnish their reputation; to give their biographer the slip", the biographer often comes to know more about a subject than they themselves know about their own life.

McWilliam enlivened her lecture throughout with a dry humour and penetrating insight, whether dispelling the artificial conflict between fiction and biography or illuminating her argument with reference to Henry James and Philip Larkin's famous horror of the biographer's attempt at an "intimacy closer than life".

Before responding to a series of questions from the audience and a book signing, McWilliam concluded with the trenchant observation that biography should aim to illuminate the spirit or consciousness of the subject, drawing on the metaphor of, if not a seance, a communion between biographer and subject, in an elegant echo of her earlier description of the complicity between reader and writer in the combined work necessary to recreate lived lives. It is this joint project through which the edifying potential of biography can be realised, helping us to see off prejudice by observing the world through the eyes of others.

The concluding lecture in the series will be delivered by the Booker Prize shortlisted novelist and Libyan exile Hisham Matar on 21st February.

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