Shrink-wrap: Sunday 6.6.21
Prep-edition for "Biden, the Beatles... and Deep-Biography"
Happy Sunday and welcome to the first installment of Shrink-wrap.
This is the prep-edition for a feature where we look at the life-story of one selected public figure from the news at a time through deep-biography. That’s a step-by-step process adding the psychological—those “inside-out”— dimensions to the factual-journalism and chronological-history versions.
“We all—in the end—die (and live) in media res: In the middle of a story, of many stories,” the novelist Mona Simpson said in A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs.
If you particularly value—and/or have strong ideas and opinions about—reading, watching or attending biography, memoir, biopic films or biographical theater I would like to hear them.
Thought/discussion thread: What are your favorite or least-favorite biographical or autobiographical books, movies, TV or theater and what do you think makes them good, or bad?
our case-example
For a Shrink-wrap President Joe Biden seems the obvious public figure to start with and use as a detailed demo for how the deep-biography process works. For later editions I’ll call for your “Shrink-wrap THIS?!?” ideas on public figures you’d like examined using this lens — keeping in mind that this is not a search for “heroes,” or even necessarily people we like, but for psychologically mature, “initiated,” grownups.
Once the criteria and process are familiar it’s not necessary always to do a full-biography to gain useful insights. (Nor is it desirable. Some public figures you just don’t want to hang-out with so intimately over days and weeks.)
Deep-biography can be especially useful as part of comparing different candidates, of both similar and very different ages, during election campaigns. The “timeline and initiations” part of the process, actually developed out of my therapy practice, can also be helpful for working-out stuff in our own lives and relationships.
With the Biden story I’m essentially giving away the plot outcomes at the beginning, identifying him up-front as a public figure I have found to be a profoundly and many-times initiated adult from whom much can be learned. Then I’ll show the steps that led me to that conclusion and will want to hear your ideas about it, too.
In the deep-biography process I’m realizing the first steps are things I would like for you to be on the lookout for, reading, watching or pondering if they capture your attention, at the same time I am over the next several weeks. Please email me or share down in Comments:
If you spot favorite (or quirky) quotes or material from articles, profiles, speeches, biography and memoir that you want to be sure I have about Biden.
If you have read or seen details about the treatments and training the President underwent as a child and teen to deal with his stutter. I have some but would value more information here.
If you’d like to try drafting one, the process involves creating a simple, linear-chronological timeline of the subject’s key life-events plus the cultural milestones that many/most people have. (This timeline—which by the end will not look linear or simple at all!—is not the same thing as a résumé of achievements etc., and I’ll explain why when we get to that.)
Given this prep research-gathering phase, along with my tighter than usual domestic schedule for a few weeks, I will wait to send the next Sunday Shrink-wrap installment sometime in July. (That’s when I’ll also explain the working title, “Biden, the Beatles… and Deep Biography.”)
The Friday News Notebook newsletter will continue each week.
And, that is all I have! Talk to you Friday.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”