An obituarist’s search for the soul

‘“Deep breath”, says the doctor. I take one and hold it.’ Thus begins the fourth chapter of Ann Wroe’s Lifescapes. It is apt because, although the book is part memoir, part essay on the art of biography, it is really about the breath of life itself. Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, at times almost ecstatic. Reader, dive in.

Wroe has written weekly obituaries for the Economist for 20 years, seeking out seemingly ephemeral moments that unlock people’s lives. ‘Time and again,’ she says, ‘some incident in childhood is the key to a career.’ The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was delighted by the sound his toy hammer made on pipes and buckets at his family’s farm. Thich Nhat Hanh, the father of ‘mindfulness’, was startled into a sense of nowness by ‘a draught of water from a natural well’.

In Lifescapes it is fragments of other lives that dominate, particularly at first. Just as the photographer Richard Avedon’s autobiography comprised 300 of his own images, so Wroe cites innumerable life stories, including more than 40 of her obituaries. Biography writing seems for her to be a process of identification, perhaps even of projection. Holding a letter signed by Perkin Warbeck, one of her subjects, gives her ‘a thrill, like a caught breath… [from] the thought that his hand and wrist… had moved across the paper where… I moved mine’.

The book is a mosaic of such moments, of epiphanies and snatches of conversation, of caught breaths. Indeed it is divided into two sections, ‘Outbreath’ and ‘Inbreath’, the former considering how we express our intimate self, the latter more concerned with what that self comprises. But really it is the organising metaphor that matters, not the organisation itself.

Where is Wroe in this? Some might say nowhere; she, I think, would say everywhere.