Reflections on the writing of lives

and first...

Biographies are full of verifiable facts, but they are also full of things that aren't there: absences, gaps, missing evidence, knowledge or information that has been passed from person to person losing credibility or shifting shape on the way.  Biographies, like lives, are up of contested objects--relics, testimonies, versions, correspondences, the unverifiable ...[Consider this from Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot:]

You can define a net in two ways, depending on your point of view.  Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish.  But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.
You can do the same with biography.  The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells.  Yet consider what he doesn't catch: there is always far more of that.  The biography stands, fat and worthy burgher-ish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling lie will give you all the facts, a ten pound one all the hypotheses as well.  But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographer.

--Body Parts: Essays on Life-writing by Hermione Lee (London: Chatto & Windus)