If you have any use for author biographies (and I do) and you are able to hold up five pounds of book with one spread-open hand in, say, the bathtub, you may enjoy Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography.

We’ve discussed Spark’s Memento Mori here. You can expect more of her novels to come up on this blog. And you can always catch the film version of her most famous book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, streamed on Hulu, but possibly on disc at your library. {Calling all Maggie Smith fans!)

Spark was born in Edinburgh, growing up in a flat above the shops while her father walked to work at the rubber factory and her mother often took in boarders. Envisioning an artistic future for herself, Muriel plotted her escape from this dreary “provincial” city.

As her work gained attention, she ended up writing for The New Yorker. And when she really got famous, she was the kind of writer who crossed borders, touching down in New York, until she tired of it and decided on Italy, until she tired of that and fell in love in with New York again, until she . . .

You get the idea.

But back to her writer-dom, her daily habits. How does my workday stack up against hers? I really wanted to know.

I don’t want to know anymore. The woman could work for hours on end. She churned out stories and novels with barely any re-writing.

How about her inspiration? Oh, my, but the kitchens and classrooms and city streets where she spent her real life tended to show up on the page. “Her friends were sometimes apprehensive of becoming a figment of her imagination.”

She defended her writing time, fiercely. (Yeah. Me too.) Often her travels were not about traveling at all, but about mining more story gold.

If a woman’s writing time is as precious to her as a drunk’s whiskey, how does that wear on her personal life? Does it fit in with marriage? Motherhood? Interruptions? The needy petitions of friends? Going about doing good in the world?

No.

Just no.

Not for Spark. Not for any of us. And though she managed to gather people around for dinners and nights at the theater, she also churned through friendships, both personal and professional, feuding, charming, discarding, needing.

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