Because the Light Was On

The assumption with elegy is that the composite of remembrances and anecdotes comes together to form a single, unmistakable portrait of the deceased. Yet any attempt at a faithful rendering of the comedian Norm Macdonald, who died in September, aged sixty-one, leaves little more than a jumbled sketch. The man was publicly unknowable. Fiercely anti-confessionary, his jokes were constructed so that they yielded a splintered image of his private life, with each shard refracted paradoxically through another. “In any art, the key is concealing,” he told Esquire back in 2016. “It’s not revealing.”

When art and artist become inseparable, it’s usually because audiences care more about the creator than about the work. Some writers and performers have turned this shift in interest into opportunity, eagerly leading us on tours of their private lives and, especially, their struggles. Such...