What's in a life?

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Biographers love their work. Really, it is more like play. We are scholarsleuths, we lead a double life - our own, and someone else's. We find out, follow clues, join the dots, make connections.

We read private letters, gently question informants, scour endless books, take notes, pile up files. It is called research.

We are also lovers, totally absorbed in our subject's activities and character. I am working on a biography of Leonard Woolf. My husband, royally, says there are three people in this marriage.

Then we get to write the story. The true story. Except it is not, because biography is the least naturalistic of literary genres. Poetry and fiction, in comparison, are pure documentary. Think about it: the experience of living a life is nothing at all like writing or reading a Life.

In real life, memory is patchy, with some scenes and events standing out in neon and large blanks of time about which you can not remember a thing. There does not seem to be any pattern to it. We live in the evershifting present, and the future is uncontrollable. The whole thing is chronically unstable.

The only certainty is that we shall die - after long decades, or within weeks, or in the next nano-second, who knows? It is when someone is dead that their friends and relations decide what their life was, and a story evolves, to be passed down to the next generation and, finally, forgotten. We have no control over our own story.

So, one attraction of biography is that it seems to frame and make sense of some interesting person's life in a way that might help us make sense of our own. It is comforting. Biography takes you out of your own skin and time and brings you as near as possible to being someone else. It gratifies inquisitiveness and fantasy and provides an historical frisson. At its best, it provides insight not only into someone else's psyche, but also into our own.

There is, however, a lower lure. Biographers nowadays would be positively failing in their duty if they concealed what they knew. Biography satisfies our base curiosity about other people's habits, motives and private behaviour. Its success over the past 40 years or so is largely due to modern freedoms about what can be revealed in print. Until 1966, for example, male homosexuals were criminals in the eyes of the law, and could be sent to prison.

Around this time, Michael Holroyd published his biography of Lytton Strachey, and revealed not only his subject's same-sex passions and infatuations, but the intricate and multiple sexual connections of the whole Bloomsbury Group. After that came the deluge. No holds were barred for the biographers and their happy publishers.

It is not quite like that any more. Readers' eyes no longer stand out on stalks over the goat-like sexual antics of a respected author or dead public figure. (Live ones are different. The current have an inflated currency.) People are no longer so avid to know the clinical details of who did what to whom. We are not amazed. We can take it or leave it.

People relish Claire Tomalin's biography of Pepys, a lively libertine, chiefly for her intimate evocation of 17th century household routines, medical procedures and familial stinks (washing was not a priority). Heroes still have feet of clay, but the clay is different.

The reading public is more inclined now to overheat about the general moral qualities of a famous figure: Philip Larkin's bigotry, TS Eliot's anti-Semitism, Laurens van der Post's compulsive lying.

And then there is the market. Success induces surfeit. Virtually every notable figure from the past has now been written about. There will always - every 10 years, anyway - be takers for a new biography of the really major historical figures. But publishers, ruled by their marketing men, find it harder to justify biographies of the less well-known. This is bad news, in that they then become the unknown, and culture narrows down to a handful of iconic figures.

Established biographers, too, have become iconic figures, each one a "brand" with a faithful following. There are new brands, notably the shapely blonde kind, with an alluring author-photo and attendant publicity as their unique selling point.

There are still poodle-biographers, who write the histories of eminent people and their enterprises under instruction, and for a fee. There are also biographers whose aim is to slag off their subject.

Maybe we are getting desperate. Biography, like everything else, has to move on. Dissatisfied by the impersonal presentation of another's life, some authors appear in person in their books, with their quest as the central pivot on which the narrative hangs. An old definition of a biographer was "a novelist under oath" (so said Desmond MacCarthy, literary critic and member of the Bloomsbury Group). The oath was to tell a good story well without making anything up. But the boundary between biography and fiction, in creative hands, is getting blurred.

Holding the ring for dogged chronicles with massive scholarly documentation are well-funded American academic biographers. It has not struck them that it is necessary for a biographer to be able to write well, and to be selective. They just put everything in, giving the trivial and the important equal weight - and weight is the operative word. These tomes are heavy in both senses. British academics, however, have more commercial and artistic savvy; and only in Britain do mainstream biographers make a living like any other professional scribbler, without sustaining salaries and grants.

At the other end of the continuum are celebrity biographies. Nowadays, the superstars of football, music, fashion and film have their storiessofar retailed to the fans. As do those in public life who have risen very high or fallen very low.

These provisional biographies and autobiographies are extended journalism, whether they are ghost-written or patched together from newspaper cuttings and the gossip of hairdressers, life-style gurus, dog walkers, best friends and worst enemies. Journalism is great, but it is by its nature ephemeral.

It is open season on biography. The genre, no longer distinct and unified, is up for grabs. That is why it is worth thinking and talking about - and why I took time off to write a novel.

•Victoria Glendinning, whose biographies include Vita Sackville-West and Rebecca West, is giving a masterclass on Sunday at the London Book Fair at Olympia (020 8910 7914; www.lbf-virtual.com). Her latest novel, Flight, is published in paperback this week by Scribner.

 

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