Like a Box of Chocolates: A Brief Look into Indexing Life Stories
Whether or not biographies need an index was discussed a previous blog post, along with histories and “self-indexing” books — which will be featured in another blog post down the line.
Histories and other non-fiction books that are published by academic and scholarly presses typically include indexes, as they should. Biographies do, too, but I have run into a few that do not. One of the more recent ones I’ve seen was featured in the aforementioned blog post, and actually served as its inspiration.
Lack of indexes in biographies might be because the publishers of these books vary more in their specialties and it’s not always technically an academic or scholarly publication, even though significant amounts of research go into their creation.
So, what makes biographies special, why do they really need indexes, and why are indexes to biographic works so different from indexes to other non-fiction works?*
Biographies & Memoirs
Biographies and memoirs, including autobiographies, can come in many different forms and styles. The way they are written and edited will depend on several factors, and part of that variation involves the sequence of events. Does it cover the person’s whole life or just one period? Is it in the context of that person’s career? Is it a biography written or composed of stories from interviews with the many different people who knew the subject? Is it in chronological order?
The main subject of a work is, in indexing, commonly referred to as the metatopic. In biographies, the metatopic is the person of focus. Some biographies can get a little tricky, for instance, The Beatles: The Biography centers on all four bandmates.
Travel Diaries & Travelogues — Are They Biographies?
The history of travel writing dates back as far as people have been travelling. A brief history of travel writing is can be found at The Travel Tester.
Travel diaries tend to focus on the person in the context of his or her experiences, and they can feature events from one voyage or many. In these books, the line between metatopic and context (person and voyage) might become blurred, and the person may seem less the focus of the book than the places that are visited and things that are done.
This will impact the structure of the index.
(Clicking on an image from the gallery above will pop it out and show more detail.)
The cataloging from Martha Gellhorn’s “Travels with Myself and Another: Five Journeys from Hell," declares the genre to be biography, while Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach,” states that it belongs to the anecdotes genre. In Bourdain’s introduction, however, he calls it “a scrapbook of my life,” and indeed it is. Biography and travel record, rolled into one.
Indexing Life Stories
Life’s Little Details
Regardless of who the subject of the biography is, lives are full of rich details. If a book is being written about a person, it is sure to be packed with events, stories, and insights that readers will want to look up and turn to, directly.
It’s also possible that a biographic work may be unexpectedly used in university coursework. Authors can get ahead of the curve by requesting to the publisher that an index be included in the book.
In any case — regardless of who the publisher is — an index is an important tool that could result in more book sales and will definitely result in less reader frustration. Even if the biography is in perfect chronological order, a reader may not know when an event happened in the person’s life. When did Gellhorn take a trip to Suriname? And when did she adopt a kitten for a travel companion? An index will point to the answer.
Life in Context
Format aside, context of a story will impact the index structure. In The Most Fun Thing, a memoir of a person’s life is presented in relation to his skateboarding passion; it presents character development and life events centering around his favorite activity. Three Sips of Gin is another life story where the context — in this case, location and career — plays a central role. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, is about Hemingway and his life from the Spanish Civil War through his death in 1961. Abraham Lincoln’s Wilderness Years, a book I recently indexed (due for publication in 2023), focuses on Lincoln in Indiana but also includes Kentucky, and discusses how those years impacted his life, character, and presidency.
According to Hazel K. Bell in her book, Indexing Biographies and Other Stories of Human Lives (2004 edition), typical non-fiction books follow a familiar structure, they examine aspects of established disciplines or historical events, and carry standardized terminology that the indexer is likely familiar with, but,
“Biographies involve none of these. Biographies are just books about people, the lives they lead, their various activities and relationships, told in an author’s own way. They are absolutely non-standardized.”
With biographies, indexing the main character is essentially indexing the metatopic, and while there has historically been some debate among indexers whether this should be done, studies of reader habits have shown that the metatopic is expected to be clearly represented in the index.
Indexing biographic works, regardless of whether they are collections of personal letters, essays, or standard biographies, calls for careful treatment of the central subject and the people and events that played a role in his/her life.
“Mr. Brown, meet Mr. Brown.”
Names are important in any book, and even more so in biographic works. So is using qualifiers to distinguish between family members who might have the same or similar names to each other or the central character, or friends and neighbors, as well as those people who might not have their complete names stated in the text at all.
Depending on the context, of course, names that would otherwise not have been picked up in another non-fiction work might need to be recorded in the index of a biography.
Usually passing mentions are not recorded because seeing a term in an index indicates to a reader that substantial information may be found on the listed pages. Finding a name in an index only to see that the biographee almost met a certain Mr. Brown but didn’t, could lead to reader frustration in another context, but in a biography, it might be pertinent information.
Character & Themes
Character development of the central person is very important in biographies, and an indexer should keep in mind the impact of events and people on the subject’s life. Events, big and small, are important and should be included in index as appropriate, in a way that readers are likely to look for them.
Anecdotes and statements by the central personality, and perceptions of others might also need to be recorded in the index.
The Intended Audience
Personal diaries tend to be more casually written than other forms of biography, and the original intended audience may have been the author herself, as in Anne Frank’s diary. Similarly, with collections of letters, the audience is usually one person. Context may or may not be provided by author or editor, and private nicknames might be used without clarification.
Not Simply Non-fiction
Every book is a world unto itself. Each book presents a unique set of considerations to an indexer, and must be treated accordingly, and this is especially true for biographic works. They require a shift in the mindset of the indexer, and unlike with other non-fiction works, it is very rare that an indexer will specialize in the subject of the biography.
The Importance of Getting the Whole Story
Reading the book all the way through is almost a necessity with biographies, in fact, Hazel Bell recommends it, as do other authors who have written on the topic — some of whom state that they normally prefer to index as they read. To me, that feels like flying blind.
I always prefer to read the whole text (and take notes) before I begin indexing.
This process gives me the big picture and helps me to orient myself in the book; it helps me to know how the topic I am currently indexing relates to the rest of the text. It might make the first days of work advance more slowly, but ultimately it pays off and allows me to index faster, without sacrificing quality or missing important concepts and their relationships to other topics.
Biographies provide a window into a person’s life. They are a class unto themselves and provide indexers with a unique set of considerations that is different from other non-fiction books, and reading the whole text before starting work is especially useful when indexing lives.
There have been many books, chapters, and articles written by experts on the different issues that arise while indexing biographies. Anybody looking for more information on the topic should feel free to contact me.
*The biographic works I had in mind while writing this post are monographs. Multi-part publications come with their own set of complexities that will be examined in another blog post.
