Book Review: Tiny Terror by William Todd Schultz

What you make of the new book Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers will depend a great deal on what you make of the term “psychobiography.” If you bristle a bit, I think your instincts are correct.

A “psychobiography,” the author explains in the introduction, zeroes in on the why. The why in conventional biographies is touched upon but typically undernourished, he argues. In my opinion, the author has exposed some erroneous thinking right there on page xv. Biographers do, I think, concern themselves a great deal with the why (which I take as a shorthand denotation for the unspoken motivations of the subject, the interior life, emotions etc). Biographers simply go about it in a different way than Schultz has. A biographer gets at the why of a life by examining, organizing and revealing the known exterior facts, sometimes explicitly drawing connections, other times not. The way we get to know the subject of a biography mirrors the way we get to know anyone: it is a slow accumulation of objective detail which somehow allows us to conjecture about the interior life. We could probably get to know more about Abraham Lincoln and his “why’s” than we could get to know about our next-door neighbor, simply because we have access to more factual details about his life. It is not really the use of terms like “attachment theory” and “script theory” which reveal other people to us, either in biographies or in life. It is the accumulation of significant detail.