Biography as literature

If you were born in the winter in Belfry, Montana and moved to southern California and became a mildly successful architect with a well-heeled clientele, that might make a good story. But would it be better had you stayed in Belfry and become a rancher like your father, or, a preacher at the Lutheran Church?

The actress Lauren Bacall has written two autobiographies, Lauren Bacall By Myself (1984) and Now (1994), updating the first volume with the addition of an extra chaper, By Myself and Then Some.

"I don't think anybody who has a brain can really be happy. What is there to really be happy about? You tell me. If you're a thinking human being, there's no way to distance yourself from the world," Ms. Bacall said in an interview in Vanity Fair magazine, March, 2011.

She has a website---www.laurenbacall.com--in which she says she does not like to be called a legend because a legend involves the past.