To what extent do you view your book as a biography of a biography?

I think it absolutely is among that.

I really appreciate that comparison.

I find that flattering.

And I think that in addition to speaking to it earlier as I did and trying to get at the truth of Frost through Thompson, I would say a couple other things.

One is that there's a fascinating asymmetry of perspective between the biographer who gets to play Boswell and the biographer who doesn't.

And there are things that you can see when you are close to somebody in life and things that you cannot see by virtue of that intimacy.

To what extent did you follow Robert Caro's advice to turn every page when you had thousands and thousands of documents to read? I think

Mm

... be off in some way, uh, in order to be creative.

I actually think that the world is strange enough that, uh, you can have the most normal life and think about the wildest things 'cause existence is so wild.

But what he did wrong was making Frost seem explicable, and that he...

The sense, you know, the...

A word like pathologize I think is useful, not only because it ascribes, uh, negativity, but because it describes diagnosis.

And the pretense of understanding for any artist who is complicated sets you off on the wrong foot.

Mm.