... an impeccably researched and deeply incisive account of Hazzard’s life and work, and the intriguing interplay between the two ... Olubas is not in the business of hagiography. She is in pursuit of the truth. She tells it straight and we trust her ... Her letters and diaries, and the biography itself, become a long list of writers and artists whom they saw in New York, Paris, London, Rome, Naples or Capri. For the reader, the onslaught is exhausting, even if it does mean hanging with Robert Penn Warren or Elizabeth Bowen or Saul Bellow. Hazzard’s diary entries during this time, Olubas writes, reveal the seriousness with which she approached these social occasions and her effort to learn how to carry herself in these circles ... Hazzard’s own books arrive in this biography whole and as mysteriously as immaculate conceptions, without a sense of having been wrestled into creation. The writer in A Writing Life is elusive. Olubas acknowledges that apart from occasional complaints about not finding time to work, Hazzard said little about her experience of writing.
As Olubas shows us repeatedly, sometimes in sections that get a little name-droppy...people easily fell in love with Hazzard ... Olubas also shows us the troubling disconnections underlying the social magic ... Hazzard's mother was a rageful and difficult woman, and Olubas leaves us to draw our own conclusions about the ways this shaped Shirley's character, or at least doesn't tuck in all the edges, which I rather appreciated ... Olubas does a fine job of showing how her work grew out of her life, as well as glossing the plots and summarizing the mostly ecstatic critical reaction at the time. Certainly one closes the biography eager to proceed to the fiction.
The Hazzard that emerges in Olubas’s exhaustive biography is rather like one of Hazzard’s characters: brilliant and cosmopolitan; living through historical events but strangely untouched by generational mores; at once supremely composed and eager to demonstrate her worth.
