In particular, Millard presents Garfield as a remarkable man who may have made a remarkable president. He rose from childhood poverty to become a scholar, a Civil War hero, a congressman, and, although reluctantly, a president of the United States. He was a great orator but essentially a humble man. He faced his slow, painful decline with courage and equanimity. In an article on the writing life for the Washington Post (September 15, 2011), Millard said, "If I have learned anything about nonfiction writing, it is that the challenge is not in finding a great story to tell. More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel. The difficulty lies in understanding the people you are writing about--not their actions, or even their thoughts, but their deepest character. It is not the famous events, the dramatic moments of public triumph, that define them. It is when their lives are difficult, even desperate, that their true nature is revealed. In those private moments, even the greatest men become understandable because those painful emotions are a universal part of human life--something that all of us, sooner or later, must face." Millard drew upon the example of character offered by her first nonfiction subject, Theodore Roosevelt, and the little-known story story she tells in The River of Doubt of his trip along an Amazonian river during which his party lost three men and Roosevelt contemplated suicide to save his son, as she learned during her second pregnancy that her unborn daughter had a rare form of childhood cancer. After her daughter's treatment and remission, as Millard was working on Destiny of the Republic, she also found Garfield to be a source of inspiration: "Perhaps no one seemed to capture my feelings as well as Garfield himself, a supremely insightful thinker who often seemed to be explaining my life to me, even as I was attempting to explain his life to others. 'I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health,' Garfield wrote. 'As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man.'"
Millard also describes why we all, perhaps, like to read memoirs and biographies: "As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer. In their moments of private agony and doubt, which we all share, we can see through to the depths of their character--to the bed of the sea--and begin to understand." In other words, we learn through reading about the lives of others how to live ourselves.
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, September 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
