[In the following excerpt, Toth discusses the plot of The Truth about Lorin Jones, noting the struggles of protagonist Polly Alter to write a biography of Lorin Jones—struggles similar to Toth's own in writing her biography of Kate Chopin.]

No feminist biographer ever starts out from disinterested, “scholarly” motives (if such motives even exist—which I doubt). Usually, we start out wanting to reclaim a sister. We want our subject to be our foremother and our friend, and occasionally even our reader-adviser. Certainly we want a mentor, or at least a cautionary tale.

But sometimes we find out that our subject did dumb things, or mean things. She may simply refuse to fit our definition of what a feminist ought to have done (my current subject, Kate Chopin, for instance, hankered after other women's husbands). And frequently our subject's living relatives can be even more politically incorrect. (After my biography of Grace Metalious appeared, her daughter gave an interview calling my feminist slant a “gimmick,” and bashing her mother's memory.)

So what's a feminist biographer to do?

Alison Lurie, in The Truth about Lorin Jones, presents the problems in clever fictional form; Carolyn Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman's Life, suggests some wise solutions. Both books are intellectual pleasures and feminist treasures—and should we ever run short of women's lives to appreciate, we should all write letters of praise to Alison Lurie and Carolyn Heilbrun. This is mine.

In The Truth about Lorin Jones, as in Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie gives us an unconventional heroine: not beautiful, not young, and definitely not charming. Polly Alter is a museum worker and sometime painter, newly divorced, who has decided there are no “good men over thirty in New York, only husbands and creeps.” Polly is now writing a biography of another painter, the late Lorin Jones—and Polly has an agenda. She will show that Jones was exploited and betrayed by men: by her husband, her lover and the patriarchal art world.

Knowing the pattern beforehand, Polly thinks she needs only a few months to gather the data to prove her hypothesis. (This is a common biographer's delusion, the belief that one can quickly wrap up someone else's life. I began my Kate Chopin biography in 1983 with that same idea—and as I write this, in December 1988, I'm still revising.)

Naturally, Polly runs into obstacles.

For one thing, her witnesses are self-serving. Most were, in their own opinions, innocent and generous and loving people who never did dirt to Lorin Jones. They go on at boring length about their own travails; they blame each other; they try to use Polly for their own vendettas and ambitions. One offers her a job, and two try to seduce her (also not an uncommon problem for biographers). Meanwhile, Polly's own life starts to change its shape. When her best friend moves in with her, they become lovers—and Polly, ever pugnacious, insists on announcing to semi-strangers that she is a lesbian. (She is very annoyed when they aren't shocked.) Polly also thinks that lesbian relationships should be perfect, and hers is not: her Marxist lover is an excellent housekeeper, but disapproves of biography as crass bourgeois individualism.

Polly, like most Lurie heroines, is a quirky character with rough edges who attempts to be a neutral observer of life, a fly on the wall, but often makes a muddle with her insistence on rude honesty. In the transcriptions of her interviews with those who knew Lorin Jones, we glimpse Polly's gross (and hilarious) tactlessness. Her prepared questions are “ranged in decreasing order of harmlessness”; she mentally translates her witnesses' responses to make them seem sexist, cloddish, or boorish. She thinks she loves the dead, and hopes to blow the whistle on the living.

But, inevitably, the late Lorin Jones turns out not to have been a very nice person. Polly has to abandon her hypothesis (Lorin as feminist victim) and instead follow the direction of her own research, which means admitting that many of the negative items in her folder marked “DOUBTFUL—NOT TO BE USED” are actually true.

Polly learns some patience and humility, in a story that is fast-moving, wryly-written and full of echoes for anyone who has ever attempted a feminist biography. Like Polly, we wonder whether to bury our subjects' faults, or trumpet them—and as our notebooks and tapes fill with “facts,” we wonder, as Polly does, whether we're writing about our subjects, or about ourselves. We grow suspicious of everyone's motives, especially our own.