Suggest me a Biography

What this tool does

Sometimes you want a true story instead of an invented one. A real person, a real life, and the strange comfort of seeing how someone actually got from the start of their story to the end of it. This tool hands you a biography at random from a hand-picked list of lives worth reading, so you can skip the search and get to the reading.

Press the button for a life. Press it again for a different one. Ask for a few at once if you would rather choose from a short list. There is no sign-up and nothing to install.

How to use it

1. Number / Quantity. How many lives to pull at once, from 1 to 100.
2. Generate. Pulls a fresh biography, or a fresh set if you asked for several.
3. Starts with, Contains, Ends with. Optional filters that narrow the shelf before it picks. Leave them blank to draw from all of it.
4. Copy. Puts the listed lives on your clipboard as a plain list.

A pick is on screen the moment the page loads, so there is nothing to set up first.

How it works

The shelf is fixed and each press pulls from it at random. Ask for several and you get that many different lives, with no repeats in a single set.

The filters let you aim. Contains keeps any line where your text appears, the author included, so typing isaacson brings up Walter Isaacson's lives of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. Starts with goes by the first character of the line and ends with by the last, which here lands on the author rather than the subject.

Whose lives are on the shelf

It is a wide spread of real lives. Leaders and thinkers like Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom and the young Anne Frank in The Diary of a Young Girl, builders and founders like Phil Knight in Shoe Dog and the women of Hidden Figures, and a strong run of recent memoir like Educated, Born a Crime, and When Breath Becomes Air.

The shelf mixes three things that often get lumped together: biography, where someone researches and writes another person's life, autobiography, where the person tells their own, and memoir, which takes one slice of a life rather than the whole span. A random pull can land on any of them, which is part of the range. Take it as a strong starting shelf, not a full library, and use the Contains box if there is a particular name you want.

Why read a life at all

A real life does something a novel cannot, which is to remind you that the person on the page actually lived through it. The doubt, the bad years, the lucky break, all of it happened, and watching someone find their way through is steadying in a way invented stories are not. That is the pull of the genre, and it is worth the hours.

The only thing in the way is the choosing, and there is real research on why that trips us up. In a 2000 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that people offered twenty-four jams in a shop were far less likely to buy one than people offered six, since too many options leave us stuck. A long list of lives does the same. Barry Schwartz made the broader point in The Paradox of Choice, that more options tend to leave us less content with what we pick. Letting the tool choose clears that away, and one good life to start beats a list you keep scanning.

Memoir or biography, and where to start

Once you have a pick or two, a couple of things tell you whether to dive in. The first is which kind it is. A memoir is usually shorter, written in the person's own voice, and close to the bone, so it reads fast and personal. A full biography is longer and more thorough, with the research and the context filled in, so it asks for more patience but gives you the whole arc. Neither is better, they are different moods.

The second is plain curiosity. A life you already wonder about will carry you through a slow chapter, while a life you feel you ought to read but do not care about will stall every time. Pick the one you are actually curious about. Length matters too, since a life can run six hundred pages, so for a busy week a tighter memoir is the safer bet. Read the first chapter, and if the voice pulls you in, you are set.

Questions people ask

Is it free, and does it save anything?

It is free with no sign-up, and nothing is stored. The picks run in your browser, so use Copy to keep one before you leave.

Can I see a few at once?

Yes. Set the quantity to the number you want, up to 100, and press Generate for that many different lives in one pull.

Are memoirs and autobiographies included, or only biographies?

All three are on the shelf. You will get lives written by others, lives told by the person themselves, and memoirs that cover one chapter of a life rather than the whole of it.

Can I find a particular subject or writer?

Type the name into the Contains box. It searches the whole line, so it catches both the subject and the author, and the shelf narrows to the matching lives.

Are these all true stories?

They are works about real people, drawn from the historical and biographical record. As with any account of a life, they carry the writer's point of view, so two books on the same person can read quite differently.

References

1. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, "When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, the study behind choice overload. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11138768/
2. Barry Schwartz, "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less", his talk on how more options can lower satisfaction. https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice