"Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense"
About this Quote
Curiosity, for Brodie, is not a polite mental itch; it is a bodily takeover. The line turns the reader’s desire for story into a physical reaction - “my flesh begins crawling” - as if narrative suspense were a kind of fever. That phrasing matters: it refuses the genteel idea that biography (Brodie’s home turf) is merely instructive. It’s voyeuristic, intimate, even slightly indecent. If a life truly intrigues her, the response isn’t admiration; it’s compulsion.
The specific intent is a manifesto for how she wants lives to be written: not as résumé, not as moral lesson, but as a sequence of pressures and revelations that make you lean forward. Brodie isn’t praising “interesting people” so much as defending a method. The biographer’s job is to locate the charged contradictions - the private motives under public actions - that convert a historical subject into a character with stakes. Once that happens, suspense follows naturally, because secrets and self-deceptions are plot engines.
The subtext is also a quiet declaration of authority: she trusts her own appetite as a critical instrument. If her curiosity is aroused, the subject is worth pursuing; if it isn’t, the “life” is just archived data. That attitude fits Brodie’s cultural moment - mid-century American biography edging toward psychological realism and, in her case, controversy (especially her psychoanalytic reading of Thomas Jefferson). The sentence frames that approach as not merely permissible but necessary: history that doesn’t make the skin prickle isn’t fully alive.
The specific intent is a manifesto for how she wants lives to be written: not as résumé, not as moral lesson, but as a sequence of pressures and revelations that make you lean forward. Brodie isn’t praising “interesting people” so much as defending a method. The biographer’s job is to locate the charged contradictions - the private motives under public actions - that convert a historical subject into a character with stakes. Once that happens, suspense follows naturally, because secrets and self-deceptions are plot engines.
The subtext is also a quiet declaration of authority: she trusts her own appetite as a critical instrument. If her curiosity is aroused, the subject is worth pursuing; if it isn’t, the “life” is just archived data. That attitude fits Brodie’s cultural moment - mid-century American biography edging toward psychological realism and, in her case, controversy (especially her psychoanalytic reading of Thomas Jefferson). The sentence frames that approach as not merely permissible but necessary: history that doesn’t make the skin prickle isn’t fully alive.
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| Topic | Writing |
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