It occurred to Ms. Klein that the audience was afraid of looking stupid. The silence grew awkward. The problem is that the living ones tend to say no. Some even encourage their friends to do the same. Which can make spending three or four years reconstructing a hostile subject's life a lonely, dispiriting way of paying the bills.
Letters go unanswered, calls unreturned.
Sources hang up when the biographer introduces himself over the phone. One potential source let Ms. Klein fly all the way to London before canceling their lunch date. And in a city where virtually every definable group has its corresponding support group, and where biographers are abundant enough to have two, one small subset of biographers working on living subjects hangs loosely together, mostly by phone, to share war stories, lick their wounds and offer moral support. They are all experienced biographers with multiple books to their names. The writers met through the New York University Biography Seminar, a larger group of published biographers, many of them academics writing on figures long dead, who gather monthly at N.Y.U. to do the biographer's equivalent of talking shop.