Biographers for hire are being paid by wealthy former executives, business founders and families to turn contested personal histories into flattering accounts, according to an account of one freelancer working in the field.
The assignments are privately commissioned rather than written for a general readership. They include memoirs for retired chief executives, histories of prominent families and corporate accounts of Australian companies.
The clients, the account suggests, are often powerful men who fear that their achievements will go unrecorded. They want their careers presented as a legacy for their families, with business victories highlighted and failures placed firmly in the background.
For the writer, the difficulty is that clients who have spent their working lives exercising authority may expect more than an accurate history. They want a heroic narrative in which they appear courageous, decisive and vindicated.
That can put the biographer in conflict with the person paying the bill. A commissioned subject may reject accounts that contain ambiguity, uncomfortable facts or an interpretation that does not match the image he has of himself.
The battle over corporate histories
One project described involves a canning business founded by three brothers, each of whom reportedly wants to be recognised as the central figure while reducing the others to minor roles.
Another concerns a mining company and several former directors and chief executives who have supplied conflicting versions of its origins. Their recollections include competing claims about who was responsible for establishing the business, with the threat of legal action if disputed versions are printed.
The freelancer is also said to be dealing with allegations and uncomfortable episodes that clients want softened or omitted, including mistresses, bankruptcies, prosecutions and failed mergers. The challenge is to produce a book that remains close to the truth while satisfying people who are paying for a more favourable version.
When the writer met the biographer in a local café, he was described as exhausted by four stalled books. He had been left trying to reconcile contradictory accounts from powerful former business figures while refusing to turn the projects into outright praise.
By the second bottle of wine, the biographer reportedly said: “What a joy it would be to write of an utter nobody, like you do.”
