Lessons from the lives of others

“I READ BIOGRAPHY as a kind of high-brow self-help. It’s how not to live your life. Or how to live your life and get over terrible circumstances of privation or tragedy or loss,” says bibliophile Caroline Baum.

“I love reading about other people we perceive as successful, and finding that they have faced the same mental health challenges and the same worries about money as the rest of us. It’s the connective tissue that I find with biography.”

Speaking from her home on the NSW south coast, Baum is talking to me about her podcast, Life Sentences, which started this year and has already finished its second series. A third, summer series will kick off in December, with a fourth planned for early next year. Baum is nothing if not prolific.

She is well known as an author and literary interviewer who has been the face of book programs and presenter at writers’ festivals around the country (and also a regular contributor to The Jewish Independent). In this venture, however, she’s restricted herself to Dewey number 921 on the library shelves: biography. 

While podcasts are sprouting everywhere these days, Baum hadn’t entertained the idea of doing one until the pandemic threw a spanner into her own biography writing ambitions.

“I was meant to go to France in 2020 to continue researching a biography of Lucie Dreyfus, the wife of Alfred Dreyfus, which has been causing me enormous difficulty for several years, but I decided I would go back and have another crack at it. The trouble with Lucie Dreyfus is, I can’t do it remotely because most of what I need has not been digitised,” she says.

Unable to get on a plane, she decided to, “invent a Covid project which gives me permission to interview lots and lots of biographers and ask them for tips”, so when international travel resumes, she’d be more prepared for the task.