Biography As Detection

"In letters [Eudora] Welty wrote, especially toward the end of her life, she said she often dreamed in galley proofs, and the struggle of the dream consisted of trying to make corrections on the type. She wrote at a desk with her back to the window, the quiet cruise and trespass of tourists insufficiently obscured outside. If her life had fallen into a trap or two, well, the world is full of traps of all sorts and one can find some writer or other in each and every one of them. Literary biography is like detective fiction for those who don't need suspense."

- The delightful Lorrie Moore reviews a biography of one of her heroines.