James Joyces’s Baby Impressions and Other “Awkward Pleasures” of Literary Biography

The Paris Review is sharing an archived interview with literary biographer Hermione Lee. Originally published in twenty thirteen, the piece explores Lee's reflections on biography as a craft — a field, she suggests, filled with odd pleasures, like discovering James Joyce's baby impressions or Tolstoy on his horse yogurt diet. Yet biography is never neutral, Lee observes; it requires constant choices about structure, interpretation, and inevitably, whom to blame. The conversation offers insight into how her biographies of figures like Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald navigate these fundamental tensions.

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