Is biography necessary? Sigmund Freud didn’t think it was, or at least thought it wasn’t primary when it came to understanding a person’s true nature. Mark Twain felt that a biography is “but the clothes and buttons of a man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” Marcel Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, set out all the shortcomings of standard biography, “which consists, if you would understand a poet or a writer, in greedily catechizing those who knew him, who saw quite a lot of