On Biography: archive or interview?

One of the pleasures of being a biographer living with a biographer is that you spend a lot of time talking – often arguing – about the art of biography. Tonight it went like this:

Her: Looking back on the Ted Hughes experience, don’t you regret the extent to which you relied on interviews? All memories are fallible – and you kept finding that different people remember the same events in different ways.

Me: Granted, but it’s really important to get all the memories down before people die or lose...