But many of the contents are expectedly harrowing, like Charles Jackson’s description of craving in “The Lost Weekend,” his novel that was later turned into a film that won the Oscar for best picture in 1946. “As for quenching his thirst, liquor did exactly the opposite,” Jackson wrote. “To quench is to slake or to satisfy, to give you enough. Liquor couldn’t do that. One drink led inevitably to the next, more demanded more. . . . His need to breathe was not more urgent.”

Quotable

“If you want to write an excellent sex scene, you have to liberate it from the idea of a sex scene. . . . You have to thread sexuality through every part of a character or a person’s life, rather than limiting it to a titillating few pages where something juicy happens.” — Lidia Yuknavitch, in an interview with Lenny

A Biographer’s Life

John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” has survived since the 17th century as a groundbreaking series of biographical information about notable English people, including Shakespeare and Milton. Now the scholar Ruth Scurr has enlarged our understanding of Aubrey himself, in “John Aubrey, My Own Life.” The book is being published in the United States this week after appearing in Scurr’s native Britain last year. Mary Beard, in naming it one of her favorite books of 2015 in The Guardian, called it “a game-changer in the world of biography.” The book takes the form of a chronological diary by Aubrey, created by Scurr from various pieces of his writing. “At one point I even thought I’d do it as a novel,” Scurr told Cambridge News last December, “but because he was so fastidious about the truth, I found it very difficult to start making things up about him.”