Right now in "Writing Biography" we're reading The Silent Woman, a sort of metabiography about the fight over the details of Sylvia Plath's life, especially her final year.

Near the end of the class period we got into a prolonged argument about who has the right to those details. I was of the admittedly radical opinion that any public expression is itself a form of autobiography, that what we write is a function of how we want to be perceived (is it obvious I was thinking about bloggers?) and that, therefore, biographers have the right to offer a counternarrative to our self-constructed narratives, which are often little more than hagiography.

This view was not shared by many in the class. A more rational version of this, defending the public's interest in useful information about voluntarily public figures, seemed to be the consensus. A few people, on the other hand, were concerned about the effect of this prying "public interest" on those whose fame is involuntary, like the Bush twins for example, and thought it was unfair that Ted Hughes had to spend the rest of his life attempting to defend his image because he'd cheated on Sylvia Plath.

The argument was not resolved, as far as I can tell.

What the people defending Ted Hughes didn't seem to get was that to a certain extent we determine what we hear. He didn't have to read the Plath biographies, or write to newspapers about her, or become the executor of her estate. He wanted to control the message, and that meant participating in a conversation he didn't like.

Six months ago my friend Manney committed suicide, and now someone has put his name on an online suicide wall. I understand that I can't control what's being said about him, but like Hughes (who famously burnt one of Plath's journals) I'd like to try and shape the conversation.

The trouble is that I've had quite a bit of difficulty talking about this. Our Bold Hero can jabber on all he likes, but I'm a very private person. I've always felt that the less people I talk to about something, the more important it must be to me.

For most of the first week I didn't even want to mention Manney's death to the Lawrentians, and when, knowing they would find out eventually anyways, I decided to say something, I wrote the simplest, most basic thing I could.

I doubted my abilities as a writer; I couldn't be sure that anything longer wouldn't just obscure what I thought was important.

Part of it, too, was that I didn't feel I could speak about Manney in the same way that some people could. I was one of good-time people, only around Manney in group situations, for the most part. I respected Manney, put a lot of weight on his opinions, and as strange as it sounds that made him intimidating to hang out with on a one-on-one basis, as I sometimes did during that last summer we were in B-town together. And so I didn't know him like some of the Hamlinites did.

Graham lived with Manney, they were hetero-life-buddies. As I've said before, his "Eulogy for Manney Anderson" says more about Manney than I ever could.

Through some fluke of blogspot, some of the posts at Manney's old blog are also online. He had an amazing writing voice; I was always wishing he'd blog more.

And I have my own stories about Manney, most of which you can't have.