“I don’t think that helped me,” she says wryly. Another made them write essays in the manner of Francis Bacon and Michel de la Fontaine. She still recalls the name of the tweedy Barnard professor who, with a few slashes of the pen, reduced to nothing the thoughts ventured by the “girls” in his class who fancied themselves writers. In conversation, as well as in her writing, Johnson’s sharp memory serves her well. You’re drawn towards it psychologically.” That’s why, she says, “You can read many different biographies of the same person and they’ll all tell a somewhat different story.” “You’re drawn to a certain subject because of some affinity you feel.
Objectivity, she maintains, is impossible even within the so-called objective genres.
As the author of two memoirs, including “Minor Characters,” her most famous work, Johnson was disappointed by the workaday writing in most of the entries she read, describing it as “a way of getting from one big quote to the next big quote.” Johnson read them as judge of last year’s PEN award for biography. A hefty stack of biographies lines the entryway-work. These days, Johnson, 81, spends most of her time in a cozy, plant-and-painting-filled apartment near Central Park West, the sounds of the city filtering through the open windows. She was fleeing her conservative 1950s upbringing and stultifying Barnard education for a downtown world, one filled with art, poetry, madness, and sex. Sixty years ago, uptown was the least likely place you’d find Joyce Johnson. Joyce Johnson talks about coming of age as a writer in the 1950s and her long career supporting women in publishing.
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