Love Quote by Rebecca West

Biography gets sold as a truth machine, but West needles the genre where it hurts: the libido, the alibis, the stories we tell ourselves so convincingly they pass as fact. Her line is a sly booby trap. You begin thinking about the biographer's difficulty, then she swivels the spotlight onto you. If your own love life is a blur of selective memory, strategic omission, and half-confessed motives, what makes you think you can excavate someone else's with clinical certainty?

The intent is not merely to mock nosy biographers; it's to expose the comforting superstition that a life can be rendered accurately from letters, diaries, and witness testimony. Love affairs are West's chosen example because they're the highest-stakes zone of self-mythmaking. People perform for lovers, for friends, for posterity, and finally for themselves. The "real truth" isn't just hidden; it's unstable, revised in real time as shame fades, desire gets recast as destiny, or betrayal is rebranded as necessity.

Context matters: West wrote in a century when biography surged as both prestige literature and public entertainment, and when private life became fair game for public judgment. Her modernist-era skepticism lands like a corrective to the Victorian faith in character as a tidy moral narrative. The wit is in the arithmetic: count how many people know your secrets, then imagine the historian trying to footnote them. West isn't anti-biography; she's anti-certainty, insisting that intimacy is where documentation goes to die and interpretation begins.