Behind the Books

The subtitle of Judith Adamson’s charming memoir implies that she will be imparting tips to biographers. She certainly offers a few useful reflections on the art of biography, but her main title, Ghost Stories, is more precise.

On the life-writing spectrum, Adamson veered away from the pole occupied by biographers who reveal brutal truths and toward the one where sit the amanuenses, whose job is to write what others speak. That’s not to say Adamson merely took dictation. In works on the author Graham Greene, the publisher Max Reinhardt, and the feminist writer Charlotte Haldane, she helped to shape her subjects’ stories, and her memoir features both stylish prose and attention to detail. As she explains, she began each of those projects by developing close relationships with the person of interest or their friends, and she usually wrote the version of a life that they wanted to give readers.

Adamson, who carefully erased both her presence and her...