Reading Larry Hagman’s obituary provoked one question: do people tire of being friends with a professional biographer who may become too entrenched in their subject’s life to not talk about anything else?
For example, if I were working night and day on a biography and my job was to talk to hundreds of sources (friends, colleagues, bosses, family fo that person), the subject’s life would invade my own. A friend recently ordered someone’s travel journal of the former Yugoslavia from 1934. This diary is a self-described “old man’s” narrative whose itinerary starts somewhere in Serbia, and ultimately ends in Zagreb over the course of three weeks. The language is Serbo-Croatian and the style is poetic and casual. My friends and I become quite enchanted by this hand-written work and now it has become a core interest of mine.
I would think it would be the same as being too obsessed with any kind of work to be able to socialize properly–something about which I must guard against, since I’m in one of those career paths where it’s all work all the time and occasionally meet real humans from time to time.
Also, it may become temporary. I’ve noticed several biographers lose some love for their subject when they discover the failures of their protagonist.