Center for Biographical Research

The Center for Biographical Research is pleased to announce the latest issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, available on Project Muse!
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57050

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
volume 47, number 3

Editor’s Note

Best Minds Forum Articles

The Very Best Attention: A Roundtable on Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds

Rebecca Wanzo

Fiction in Flight: Rereading Joy Comes in the Morning after The Best Minds

Joshua Lambert

This article offers a comparative reading of Jonathan Rosen’s 2023 biography, The Best Minds, and his 2004 novel Joy Comes in the Morning. Because both books tell substantially similar stories, including their attention to a young man suffering from schizophrenia, the comparison offers an unusual opportunity to explore the affordances and limitations of fiction and nonfiction for telling stories about mental illness and its effects. In the novel, the character’s schizophrenia is presented in terms of its effects on the novel’s other characters. Drawing on close readings and an interview with the author, this article suggests reading The Best Minds as a corrective attempt to tell the previously fictionalized story again, in a way that gives more respect to a person suffering from mental illness and to the victims of his violent acts.

The Epistemological Quagmire of the Intellectual Dead End

Therí Alyce Pickens

This creative nonfiction essay explores how Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds makes claims about brilliance and good intentions. Pickens takes the perspective of a skeptical reader, one who sorts through her own relationship to high theory, race, gender, and brilliance while contemplating Rosen’s work.

Best Minds, Entangled: Cultures of Psychiatry, Biographical Dialectics, and Narrative Ethics

Ronja Bodola

The Best Minds is a hybrid text that intertwines cultural biography, autobiography, and the history of psychiatry in the United States. This article argues that Rosen’s narrative is structured through a logic of “entanglement,” capturing the intertwined lives of Jon­athan Rosen and Michael Laudor alongside broader sociocultural, political, and psychiatric discourses. The “biographical dialectics” of Jonathan’s and Michael’s lives captures the ongoing, unresolved negotiation of identity in chronic illness. Michael’s life is marked by continuous disruption without narrative closure, contrasting with Jonathan’s retrospective capacity to impose coherence. This asymmetry underscores the narrative power imbalance between subject and narrator, and ultimately raises questions about ethical engagement with, and narrative accountability for stories of mental illness.

A Deadly Convergence: Intergenerational Trauma and Psychosis

Anne L. Glowinski

Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds is an autobiographical narrative tracing Rosen’s decades-long perspective on his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a brilliant young man endowed with a “best mind,” who develops severe schizophrenia. His deterioration is portrayed as a tragedy: a gradual, relentless decline culminating in a terrible act of violence. This essay explores how Holocaust trauma persists through ubiquitous safety concerns and hypervigilance among the Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States from Europe after World War II, as well as among their descendants. It argues that intellectual achievement serves as a stress-reducing safeguard through gained respectability and engrossing purpose, and as a mask concealing existential anxieties. The essay further examines how, within this context of intergenerational trauma and intellectual elitism, the schizophrenia disrupting Michael’s promise of a bright future contributed to a dangerous convergence of severe illness, anxiety, and denial—that led to tragedy.

Open-Forum Articles

The Ordinary Middle: Everyday Black Women and the Depths of the Unspectacular

Rhaisa Kameela Williams

Centering the ordinary lives of poor and working-class Black women in Cleveland, Ohio—a midwestern, deindustrializing city in the midst of rapid decline since the 1940s—I draw on performance studies, Black feminism, and life writing to foreground “resilient weariness” as a crucial affect that frames how they engage each other, local and national policies, and ecological phenomena through the unspectacular and uneventful matter of their lives. In this essay, the ordinary also describes the types of matter that are passed down through mundane rituals. Here, those types of matter are snippets of conversations, memories, and the visual vernacular of a 1976 photograph of my mother, grandmother, and great-aunt at a party. My focus on what I have inherited through conversations and memories are the afterlives of the photograph, occurring in moments that I registered as inconsequential because they were strewn throughout my everyday life. In doing so, I use these experiences to conceptualize the middle as a temporality and positionality that allows me to read archives I have lived amongst, to wade through and tarry in my ordinary worlds that were either unconscious to me or discredited in the academy.

Others in Attendance: Q***r Autothanatographical Address in Eric Michaels’s Unbecoming

Sarah A. McDaniel

This essay proposes posthumous address as an essential and understudied parameter of LGBTQ+ life writing. I take up Unbecoming (1987–1988), the diary begun by anthropologist Eric Michaels eleven months before his death due to AIDS-related opportunistic infections, as an exemplar of what I term q***r autothanatographical address. Bringing together diverse theoretical approaches to autothanatography (the writing of the death of the author), q***r theoretical interrogations of time and temporality, and LGBTQ+ criticism and artwork responsive to the HIV/AIDS crisis, I argue that Michaels models a practice of posthumous address with insurgent political and ethical stakes. This practice, I show, transforms his lifewriting project from a personal diary to an acerbic and interpellative letter.

After You Have the Words: The Burden and Hope of Trans Youth Witnessing

Megan Paslawski

The limitations of testimony are difficult for trans youth to negotiate as they contend with the “hidden adult” of children’s literature. This article seeks a more expansive future for trans youth witnessing by recognizing how the moments of resistance in the memoirs it discusses originate from a BIPOC/feminist/q***r tradition of pedagogical autobiography. As these texts by Katie Rain Hill, Skylar Kergil, and Jazz Jennings demonstrate, the trans youth memoir is least limited when it envisions its work as peer-to-peer witnessing, not testifying to an adult audience with the power of necropolitical judgment.

“Berlin Is All in Ruins, and I Don’t Have a Single Scratch on Me. Fate!”: Luck and Fate in the Memoir of a Former Teenage Ostarbeiter

Anastasia Kostetskaya

The article presents a narrative analysis of the motifs of luck and fate as they appear in an autobiographical narrative of forced labor written by a former adolescent Ostarbeiter from Stalingrad.

Reviews

Life-Writing in the History of Archaeology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Clare Lewis and Gabriel Moshenska

Reviewed by Patrick V. Kirch

The Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women, by Leigh Gilmore

Reviewed by Christina Nakyong Lee

Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images, edited by Arnaud Schmitt

Reviewed by Olga Michael

The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism, by Trent Masiki

Reviewed by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

The Mountain and The Politics of Representation, edited by Martin Hall and Jenny Hall

Reviewed by Anna Saroldi

The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing, edited by Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker

Reviewed by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle