By Sara Fitzgerald

For any senior thinking of moving into a smaller apartment or retirement community, the prospect of downsizing can be daunting. But when that senior is also a biographer, the process can be excruciating.

Over the past two years, I prepared to move to a new “continuing care retirement community”— a place where I hoped to live out the rest of my years. My new apartment would be half the size of my old one, my “storage area” reduced to a cage the size of two telephone booths.

As a biographer, my work depended on the things that others had left behind: letters, diaries, photographs, and more. During the pandemic, I told my book talk audiences to be careful as they cleaned out their living spaces. All of their old family documents might help tell an important story.

Now it was my turn, and that admonition weighed heavily on me.

In the end, I applied a framework similar to the one I used for disposing of furniture, fine china, art objects—and an oversupply of books. I kept the things I still valued. I gave my sons things they could choose to pitch. And I tried to find homes for items that others might use and appreciate. I paid to convert old home movies, videotapes, slides, and key photographs to files that could be stored “in the cloud.” But converting paper files to electronic form still seemed like an overwhelming and expensive task. I still liked to hold the paper in my hands.

Our family members weren’t famous, but several had published scholarly books and had ties to significant institutions. My late husband had worked in the Carter White House, his grandfather had been vice mayor of San Diego. Over the years, the two of us had become the archivists for our respective families, the “keepers”—or some might say “hoarders”—when older relatives died and their apartments had to be cleared out. Before our previous move, my husband had culled through boxes of records his parents had saved and produced a 70-page family history. The problem was, I now discovered, that once that project was finished, nothing had been thrown out.

I tried to be systematic, working through the boxes, making piles for particular archives and for various family members, including the niece who had agreed to be the new archivist for my side of the family. But as my moving day drew closer, panic began to set in. Out came the black garbage bags; in went duplicate family snapshots and photos of older people I could not identify. As early as I had started, it was not early enough. In the last weeks, I was still hearing from over-worked archivists, who had finally responded to my queries, when I had no time to follow up.

Despite the time pressures, I still tried hard to check every folder, open every envelope. (Robert Caro’s mantra “Turn Every Page” came to mind.) Occasionally, I was rewarded with “a find.”  In one case, it was the letter my husband had received from his father, describing the Mexican abortion he had arranged for my mother-in-law in the 1930s before they were married. My husband had told me the story, but never shared the letter. My father-in-law instructed him to destroy it and keep the story private, words my husband had clearly ignored. In the current political climate, I felt the letter was definitely worth keeping. I sent copies to our sons and stored the original where I hoped I could find it again.

As I sought new homes for some of my things, I learned that archives also face space limitations. My uncle was a longtime faculty member at the University of Illinois, and he and his wife were supporters of its library. In her later years, my aunt had self-published an interesting family memoir, a short memoir about the University of Illinois Entomology Department, and a memoir of the early years of their retirement community, which was filled with former University of Illinois faculty members. Surely the library might want copies of her memoirs? No, the answer came back, the archive was only interested in the work of faculty members, not their spouses. However, except for two scientific tomes, my uncle had left the writing to his wife. Still, I persisted, and after sending some samples of my aunt’s lively writing, word came back that the archive would accept the books.

My father-in-law had been a Pomona College classmate of Richard Armour, a prolific poet and satirist who also served as dean of Scripps College. Would the Claremont Colleges Library be interested in inscribed copies of Armour’s books? It reviewed its holdings and accepted those it did not already have in its collection. It already had a 1927 Pomona yearbook. I’ll now try e-yearbook.com.

And then what to do with all of my files? When I had moved to a condo at the age of 53, I had thinned out scrapbooks and sent old friends the letters they had once written to me. But there was still more to be done. The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library had previously advised me that it was interested in my papers because I was the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of The Michigan Daily. Some of my downsizing author friends have donated their papers to their alma maters, but I wasn’t ready to share all of my youthful secrets.

And what about the paper files that backed up my most recent books? I had wanted to be ready in case some reader wanted to know more. And I had learned how valuable a biographer’s papers could turn out to be. When researching my latest book, a biography of Emily Hale—the longtime secret love of the poet T. S. Eliot—I had discovered an unexpected gold mine at Princeton University Library: the papers of T. S. Matthews, who wrote the first biography of Eliot in 1973. His papers included research about Hale that had never made it into his final book. Because two of my earlier books were based heavily on materials found in the Bentley Historical Library, I culled through my files to pass on pertinent materials that were not currently in the library’s collections.

In the end, I sent boxes to relatives and to friends on the opposite side of the country who shared my love of history. “Look through the stuff and keep what you want.” If they decide to throw it out, I will never know—and I will feel no pain.

In the final days, I stumbled onto the most poignant discovery. At the back of my storage room, underneath luggage, boxes of tax records, and Christmas decorations, I found a sealed box that had been stashed there when we moved in 20 years before. It was my husband’s boxed-up memories from his career, items that would have delighted him when Parkinson’s disease began limiting the size of his world.

So, keep it—but don’t forget about it.

Sara Fitzgerald is the author most recently of The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

I’m currently researching a biography of the British novelist Mo Hayder. Hayder led about nine lives, all of them fascinating. She was born Clare Damaris Bastin, the daughter of a noted astrophysicist. She ran away from home at the age of 15 and spent some years working as a model and actress under the name “Candy Davis.” She moved to Japan to work as a hostess and then to the U.S., where she made animated films before reinventing herself in Britain with her stunning debut novel Birdman. She then became one of the most popular authors of the detective/horror genre.

She was relaunching herself again as the speculative fiction writer “Theo Clare” before her tragic death of motor neuron disease. There are some parallels between Hayder and James Ellroy. They both went through some extremely difficult times, but overcame them to achieve extraordinary things. I’m in the early stages, but working every day and resolved to see it through, no matter how long it takes.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

It’s difficult to choose a favorite as there are so many exceptional biographers all with their own distinctive voice and qualities. But I confess to a particular admiration for Claire Tomalin. Nicknamed “the Tomahawk” when she was literary editor at the Sunday Times, Tomalin’s biographies of Nelly Ternan and Dorothea Jordan gave a voice to the forgotten women of history.

My favorite book of Tomalin’s would probably be her autobiography, A Life of My Own, in which she writes “[W]orking on a biography means you are obsessed with one person and one period for several years. Another life is bound up with yours and will remain so for the rest of your own life—that at least is my experience. You have gone in too deep to cast them aside.” I read this shortly after finishing work on James Ellroy’s biography and was moved to tears. Her words led me to relive all my own experiences.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

When I was writing Ellroy’s biography, I was able to discover the identity of his mother’s first husband. This was significant as Ellroy had tried and failed to discover his identity and knew him only as “the Spaulding Man,” but I learned (and was able to inform Ellroy) that it was Easton Ewing Spaulding, the heir to a real estate fortune. The most touching moment I had as a biographer came when I was able to find and interview a woman who had been Ellroy’s girlfriend when they were both homeless and living in L.A.’s parks together in the early 1970s.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Discovering the identity of a woman James Ellroy only referred to as “Comrade Joan,” and then, for legal reasons, I couldn’t publish it. Ellroy, a keen student of Beethoven, essentially set up Comrade Joan to be his “Immortal Beloved”—a mystery woman whose identity he thought would remain secret forever. Less frustrating, but certainly terrifying, was the time when one of Ellroy’s ex-partners wrote a kiss-and-tell memoir about her relationship with Ellroy, and I had the thankless task of informing him about everything that was in the book.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I’ve always had a fascination with the law: the theatricality of the courtroom contrasting with the paper-crunching drudgery of a lawyer’s work, followed by the occasional “eureka” moment that comes with endless research. I don’t think I was cut out to be a lawyer, but the nature of my work as a biographer means I’ve spent a lot of time with them.

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

Historical fiction. I would include James Ellroy’s The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. series as among my favorite novels, as I’ve pored over them so many times. I also have a particular affection for George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels.

Steven Powell is the author of the Edgar Award-winning Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. Learn more about him here.

By Elizabeth Schott

This month’s “Hidden Archives” column takes us to The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and to its associate librarian and curator of manuscripts, Heather Wolfe.

How do you access the collection?

• Heather Wolfe had many great suggestions for finding inspiration at the library, including a unique recommendation for “seeding the imagination” that can be found in the Collation blog posts: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/.
• For basic information on how to search the Folger’s collections, Wolfe provided these useful links: folger.edu; findingaids.folger.edu; digitalcollections.folger.edu.

What’s the best way to contact you?

The best way to reach me is at hwolfe@folger.edu.

Which is your favorite overlooked archive (or archives)?

No archive is entirely overlooked, but the Delia Salter Bacon papers are pretty great, as is the William Winter collection, which interconnects with many other archives in the collection such as [the papers of] Edwin Booth and Augustin Daly.

What are your newest, shiniest archives?

The collections of actors Lynn Redgrave and Earle Hyman, though they’re not yet fully cataloged. To learn more, read this blog post on Earle Hyman: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/earle-hyman-collection/.

Which institution should we contact next?

Wolfe suggested we reach out to Shannon Supple at Yale’s Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut, but Supple has asked that we get back to her, writing, “Many thanks for getting in touch with me and for the work that you do to share evidence of the lives and labors of people throughout history. This is such a lovely series that you’ve cultivated . . . I can suggest my wonderful colleague Krystal Appiah at the University of Virginia. I expect she’ll have some truly transformative and under-researched collections that she can share.”

We look forward to bringing Appiah’s and Supple’s insights to future issues of TBC.

Liz Schott is working on a biography of mid-century modern weaver and textile designer Dorothy Liebes.