Then there’s reading the work of others. Especially other artists.
I recently read Her Again, the Meryl Streep story, by Michael Schulman. Here’s what a great biographer does: he taps into the cultural context of his subject – in this case, the New York of the 1970s, where Streep landed after Yale – giving the reader a framework for understanding the development of the artist.
Streep’s story is inextricably linked to second-wave feminism, especially in her portrayal of Johanna in the iconic Kramer vs. Kramer, the history of The Public Theater/Shakespeare in the Park, and the actor John Cazale, with whom Streep lived in a loft on Franklin Street before he died of lung cancer in 1978. I’d completely forgotten about that year’s snowstorm to end all storms, which, when over that spring, left mounds of garbage and sludge on the streets of New York. The following is my favorite section, where Schulman shows the multiple sides of Streep’s feminine persona at the end of second-wave feminism:
“The Deer Hunter took her dangerously close to Hollywood It-girl territory, but she would soon do her best to unplant those seeds. After Cazale’s death, Streep threw herself into three projects simultaneously. She played the tell-all–writing ex-wife in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. In Kramer vs. Kramer, she was Joanna, locked in a reckless custody battle for her son with her ex-husband, Dustin Hoffman’s Ted. And she played Katherine, the lead in a Shakespeare in the Park production of The Taming of the Shrew. ‘Her life was like a one-woman repertory theater,’ Schulman writes. ‘Uptown, she was Joanna, the mother who leaves her son. Downtown, she was Jill, the wife who humiliates her husband. By night, in Central Park, she was Kate, the shrew to be tamed. Joanna, Jill, and Kate: three women who break the rules, leaving the men around them befuddled, cowed, and furious.’ ” – Vogue Magazine
As a native, such stories add richer layers – who knew there were more? – to the glory and madness of my own New York-in-the-1970s childhood.