Following Elon Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson’s accusations of unethical behavior on the part of Musk’s authorized biographer, memoirist Kelly McMasters and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle join co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the ethics of biography. Dunkle, the author of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb , talks about using archives to restore the history of Babb, the writer whose notes John Steinbeck used to research The Grapes of Wrath, and how women’s lives are often wrongly or incompletely depicted . McMasters, a memoirist whose recent book The Leaving Season: A Memoir portrays many people close to her, talks about the impossibility of writing honestly about her life without including her children, the two people with whom she spends the most time. Dunkle and McMasters discuss Wilson’s accusations against Walter Isaacson, whom she says did not directly contact her for comment for his recent book about her father, although much of his book refers to her life. The group also discusses recent revelations that Alice Munro failed to act when she learned that her second husband had abused her daughter, and how authorized biographies often omit full accounts of the truth. Dunkle and McMasters read from their work. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel , Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel , and our website . This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf . MEGAPHONE EMBED * From the episode: Whitney Terrell: We all have been, and many other people as well have been, reading about Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged daughter. She does not want to be associated with him, like a lot of people… like me, for instance, but he’s not the only person she’s mad at. She recently posted – this is the literary angle of this – she posted a series of messages about Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, who she says behaved unethically in writing about her. She says Isaacson deadnamed her and said that when he tried to reach her, he deliberately failed because “you knew the angle […]
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Kiersten White is the #1 New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and critically acclaimed author of many books for
Kelsey Rae Dimberg is the author of Girl in the Rearview Mirror. She received an MFA from the University of
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