There’s a new Elliott Smith biography out next week

Is Elliott Smith on brand for Language Arts? Not no…but what you have to understand is that Elliott Smith is my hometown hero, that I’ve listened to “Needle in the Hay” (and the Vanessa Carlton cover) thousands of times, that every time he sings, “falling out/ 6th and Powell” I think about driving past the strip club on my way to elementary school and feel a pang of longing for an arterial cluttered with needles, both hypodermic and pine.

I was once at a rave and whispered to the guy I was dating that I “kind of wish they’d just put on Elliott Smith.” He raised his eyebrows. “Needle in the Hay?” I hadn’t told him I even liked the song and took it mean we were soul mates. (Spoiler alert: We weren’t!) That same summer, I walked in the door of my house in Portland, picked up my dad’s guitar and played the first three chords. “Are you okay?” He asked me. “I am now,” I said.

When I got an email about Jamie Fisher’s new Elliott Smith biography, I knew we had to cover it, brand be damned. Also, I learned yesterday through a company-wide email that Jamie and I are colleagues at The New York Times. She’s an accomplished researcher for the Magazine :)

Anyway, read on for the biographies that inspired Jamie as she chronicled the late, great Elliott Smith. You can order Nobody Broke Your Heart here.

As I started working on my biography of Elliott Smith, I thought about it less as a music biography and more like a biography, full stop.

It was partly because I didn’t want to be bound by the conventions people associate with big rock biographies and partly because I found so much to inspire me in the broader world of biography, from books about writers and directors to cultural studies that doubled as memoir.

Ultimately I also brought some of the tools of magazine profile writing with me, bringing the reader into the room for intimate conversations that tell you something about the speaker—their expressions, their mannerisms, their personalities. There was a wonderfully expansive palette to work with. Some highlights below:

Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris - Penguin Books, 2022

My rule of thumb is that I’ll read pretty much anything if I love the writer. (Exception: zombies.) I didn’t have any special attachment to Mike Nichols before reading this biography, but I’m an enormous admirer of Mark Harris, and what he pulls off here is magical. I knew I was in good hands from the moment in the first chapter when we learn that Nichols’s nanny used to give him baths in the kitchen sink, where he played with newspaper boats. It evokes an era but also signals a certain attention to detail—not detail for the sake of detail, but the kind of careful detail that brings someone to life. The fact that this happens in a book where Harris also casually interviews everyone from Elaine May to Meryl Streep was wonderful. The nanny matters as much as Streep, and Harris knows it.

Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts of Means by Brendan King - Bloomsbury, 2016

This is one of the first books I ever reviewed and I still keep it on my desk. As I wrote at the time: “The biography draws on materials from Bainbridge’s British Library archives, her beautifully expressive correspondence and her laboratory stores, but also King’s decades of working as her assistant, from 1987 until her death in 2010. The difference this makes amounts to the distinction between someone who studies French for a few years in college and someone who is born to it: His language is richer, his understanding more acute. He speaks Beryl natively.” It’s rare to see a biography so rich and patient written by someone who really knew the subject.

The Amplified Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad - HarperOne, 2023

I don’t know any biography like this, and it’s a miracle that we have it: Azerrad revisits his 1993 book on Nirvana and annotates the original text, remarking on what he understands now that he didn’t then, things that have become clearer with time or muddier. The biography was written under punishing time constraints, and Azerrad looks back with sympathy for his younger self. “Getting close to really charismatic people is kind of exciting, but it’s easy not to notice that it’s also sucking the life out of you,” he writes—even as he acknowledges his shortcomings. This is a book about memory and perspective as much as it’s a book about Nirvana. Essential companion text: the essay Azerrad wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago, a beautifully intimate memoir of his friendship with Cobain.

Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne - W. W. Norton & Company, 2025

The best book I read last year, hands down: an exploration of Plath’s life and cultural legacy grounded in personal experience. As an abuse survivor herself, Emily Van Duyne realized that scholars were repeatedly overlooking or dismissing the abuse that Plath suffered, making the argument in a narrative that feels both well researched and deeply tender. This biography will always have a special place in my heart; I read it as I was approaching the end of mine, wondering if anyone would really want what I was making, and Van Duyne provided an object lesson. Yes, there’s a place for biography with the author written in; no, it doesn’t need to feel distracting or indulgent. There’s a special honesty in this kind of writing, and you finish the book feeling closer to Plath but also to Van Duyne. It’s magical.