After Lives

<p><strong>A moving and penetrating memoir of a life in biography from the Pulitzer Prize winner and “gifted storyteller” (Judith Thurman, <em>The New Yorker</em>).</strong></p><p>Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including <em>The Peabody Sisters</em> and the Pulitzer Prize–winning <em>Margaret Fuller</em>, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of <em>After Lives</em>, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it.</p><p>In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author’s AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. </p><p>Here too is the author’s passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal. </p><p>Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, “[at] the front rank of American biographers” (Dwight Garner, <em>New York Times</em>), makes palpable her driving impulse to “learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.” </p>