‘After Lives’ Review: The biographer’s art

Megan Marshall. (Image: Supplied)

Mon, 21 Apr 2025

By Christoph Irmscher“We are all biographers from childhood,” writes Megan Marshall in After Lives, a short, incisive meditation on her career. We spend our lives, she claims, figuring out other people, hoping to learn from them “how to live, how not to live, what it means to live”. But surely there is a difference between trying to make sense of the man sitting across from us on the bus and deciding to write an entire book about people who lived long ago – and then devoting, perhaps, decades to that effo...

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