Telling Lives by Marc Pachter
Published 1979 · 70,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Telling Lives to read?
Telling Lives scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Accessible practitioner-reflection prose; contributors write for informed general readers.
- Sentence structure: 53 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Contributors move between practical problem-solving and broader theoretical reflection.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Essays are substantive but not densely theoretical; readability is a priority.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Several contributors approach their arguments through anecdote from their own biographical practice.
- Symbolic density: 13 out of 100
- Edel's 'figure under the carpet' metaphor is the most symbolic element; prose is otherwise concrete.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Occasional irony about the biographer's illusions of authority and intimacy.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Individual essays conclude; the collection form leaves the central questions productively open.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Anthology structure with an editorial framing; contributors' essays are largely self-contained.
How Telling Lives is regarded
Telling Lives holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.