Like a Box of Chocolates...(part 1)
About indexing biographies
This was adapted from a 2022 blog post, “Like a Box of Chocolates: A Brief Look into Indexing Life Stories” — The biographic works I had in mind while writing this as well as the blog post are monographs.
Multi-part publications come with their own set of complexities that I hope to examine in a future post.
Types of Biographies
There are nine1 kinds of biographies:
political
military
historical
literary
general/cultural
sports biographies
survivor/extreme situations
hagiographies
autobiographies (these include memoirs and journals)
Biographies can vary largely based on subject matter — as in a political biography, focusing on a government official, or a sports biography that centers on one person or several group/team members as its co-metatopics.
Biographies can also vary based on scope — the book might cover the person’s whole life or focus on one aspect — “Abraham Lincoln’s Wilderness Years,” ed. by Joshua Claybourn, focuses on Lincoln’s life in Indiana, or “America’s Cold Warrior,” by James G. Wilson, which focuses on Paul Nitze’s career.
A biography may also vary by structure — “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,” ed. by Laurie Woolever, is presented as a series of interview responses.
Indexing Biographies
Just like any other non-fiction book, biographies benefit from having an index, but I have run into more than a few that do not include them. This could be because they are written for a more general audience, even though biographies can serve as valuable research resources2, and a lot of investigation goes into their creation.
The fact that they are often published for popular audiences is probably why they can get away with not including an index, but I would argue that even general readers should be given the opportunity to easily find discussion of specific topics via an index.
It is also possible that a biographic work originally intended for a general audience may be used in university coursework.3 Authors can get ahead of the curve by requesting that the publisher allow for an index to be included in the book.
In any case, an index is an important tool that could result in more book sales and — if done properly — will reduce reader frustration.
Indexing biographic works, regardless of whether they are collections of personal letters, essays, or standard biographies, calls for careful treatment of the central character and the people and events that played a role in his/her life.
Life’s Little Details
Even if the biography is in perfect chronological order, a reader may not know when an event happened in the person’s life, or when, for example, a young Abraham Lincoln took a job on a ferry.
An index will guide a reader to the right page.
Life in Context
In The Most Fun Thing, a memoir of a person’s life is presented in relation to his skateboarding passion; it presents character development and life events centering around his favorite activity.
Three Sips of Gin is another life story where the context — in this case, location and career — plays a central role.
Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, is about Hemingway and his life from the Spanish Civil War through his death in 1961.
Abraham Lincoln’s Wilderness Years focuses on Lincoln in Indiana but also includes Kentucky, with some discussion of how those years impacted his later life, character, and presidency.
With biographies, indexing the main character is indexing the metatopic4, and while there has historically been some debate among indexers whether this should be done, studies of reader habits have shown that the metatopic is expected to be clearly represented in the index.5
“Mr. Brown, meet Mr. Brown.”
Names are important in any book, and even more so in biographic works. So it is extra helpful for an indexer to use qualifiers to distinguish between family members, people with the same names, to indicate friends or associates, or to provide concise context for people who might not have their complete names stated in the text.6
Depending on the context, of course, names that would otherwise not have been picked up in another non-fiction work might need to be recorded in the index of a biography.
With good reason, passing mentions are generally not recorded because seeing a term in an index suggests to a reader that substantial information may be found on the listed pages.7 Finding a name in an index only to see that a person almost met a certain “Mr. Brown,” but didn’t, could lead to reader frustration in another context, however, in a biography, it might be pertinent information.
Since a biography is an examination of a person’s life, the importance of missed connections or brief encounters with people who appear only once in the text can have greater relevance to readers than they might in a standard non-fiction work. That being said, inclusion of names in the biography’s index depends very much on the context, potential reader expectations, and available space.
The Intended Audience
Personal diaries tend to be more casually written than other forms of biography, and the original intended audience may have been the author herself, as in Anne Frank’s diary. Similarly, with collections of letters, the original target audience is usually one person. Context may or may not be provided by author or editor, and private nicknames might be used without clarification.
Indexing these works will probably require some extra effort on the part of the indexer, since names will need to be presented in the index in a logical and consistent manner that is clear to readers. The indexer should also be careful that two different people who share a name are not mis-matched to page references.
Character & Themes
Anecdotes and statements by the central personality, and perceptions of others might also need to be recorded in the index more than they would need to be in a standard non-fiction work.
Some biographies focus more on character development and formative events than others. The indexer should be aware of this and reflect the information presented in the book in a way that will be useful to readers.
Not Simply Non-fiction
Someone once said that “every book is a world unto itself.”8 Each book presents a unique set of considerations to an indexer, and must be treated accordingly, and this is especially true for biographic works.
They require a shift in the mindset of the indexer, and unlike with other non-fiction works, it is rare that an indexer will have specialized studies in the history of the central character of a biography.
Biographies are a class of non-fiction unto themselves that provide a window into a person’s life and, as a result, come with some unique complexities, which, for those of us who do enjoy indexing biographies, is part of their appeal.
Further Reading
There have been many books, chapters, articles, and blog posts written by experts on the different issues that arise while indexing biographies. Some of those books and blog posts are cited in the notes, below the subscribe/share buttons.
Anybody looking for more information on the topic should feel free to comment below or contact me.
But while you’re here, this is a list of a few blog posts on the topic:
Indexing Biographies (indexers.org.uk)
Tightening Up Biography Indexes (potomacindexing.com)
This list is from a presentation by Kendra Millis, which I attended during ASI’s 2024 Annual Conference.
Even biographies of ordinary people have unique insights into what we know about overall culture and historical events.
According to an email conversation with the author, this was the case with Three Sips of Gin.
The term “metatopic” is noted by Nancy Mulvany, on p.60 of her book as being applied by Do Mi Stauber in 2004 [specifically, in chapter 1 of her book], with the definition being “the structural center of the index…” (Before then, I’ve seen the metatopic referred to as the “main subject,” “central character,” or “main character.”).
On p.22-23 of her book, Stauber states that biographies “always have a simple metatopic: the person who is the subject of the book,” but I would argue — and I’m not the only one — that sometimes it is not so simple; that a biography can have a complex metatopic or a co-metatopic, as in the previously mentioned book on Lincoln’s Indiana years, or Catherine Lewis’ book, Above and Beyond.
See the following resources for a foray into the discussion of the question of whether to index metatopics in biographies: ASI Webinar Replay: Biographical Metatopics, or, the Why of the Who (minute marker 17:00 to 24:30); Index It Right! (vol.1), p.33-34; Hazel K. Bell’s Indexing Biographies, p.61-68; and, more generally (for ASI members/subscribers): “Indexing the Metatopic: Bridging the Gap across the Pond—Melanie Gee,” Key Words v. 30(2):16–17 — article by Shannon Li.
Bell, Hazel K., “Indexing Biographies and Other Stories of Human Lives.” (Society of Indexers, 2004) p.32
Indexing Names: Passing Mentions | Potomac Indexing, LLC — blog post by Meghan Brawley, November 11, 2020.
I did not research this, but the times being what they are, I did find the quote, here: bookey.app