It’s easy to forget that such lives are more fun to read about than to live. Biographies tend to focus on the delirious highs, like Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra tossing empty champagne bottles out of their convertible and shooting out street lights with a pistol on their first date, and elide the years when the subject lies alone in bed drinking and watching her own old movies on late-night TV. The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.
