Introducing This Long Pursuit (Harper Collins £25), his compulsive, fastidious journey through 50 years of his own notebooks, Richard Holmes gives an insight into his methods. In travelling in search of his subjects, Shelley and Coleridge and Robert Louis Stevenson and the rest, the great Romantic biographer suggests that researching any life was a form of “double accounting”: on the right-hand page of his notebook he made careful notes of the facts of a life – dates, times, births deaths and marriages – from archives and letters and diaries. The left-hand page he reserved for his own “personal responses, my feeling and speculations, my questions and conundrums, my travels and visions”. Holmes approaches autobiography in the same way – amassing the evidence of his obsessions, speculating deftly as to the cause.

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl (Fleet £16.99) employs a comparable method. Subtitled “a story of trees, science and love”, it traces the author’s journey of self-discovery through her vivid experiments in botany, and is a book that takes root in your mind and heart. It is, along the way, full of the poetic wisdom of plants, and the things they teach Jahren about life – “A vine makes it up as it goes along,” she will write; or “a cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet”. It is the perfect Christmas book for those already restless for spring.

Brian Wilson was hit around the head by a lead pipe as a kid in a playground fight, and lost his hearing in one ear

One of Jahren’s observations is that every seed is given exactly one chance to be, that every individual thing is both “impossible and inevitable”. The best biographies and autobiographies interrogate those twin facts, and are revealing in different ways. There seems something telling in the fact that even for his memoir David Cornwell insists on using his pen name, John le Carré. Elusive and frank and witty by turns, the spy master gives away just as much of himself as he wants to in The Pigeon Tunnel (Viking £20), tracing the story of his life through his walk-on parts in the history and mythology of the cold war, and the shape-shifting discipline of his imagination.

Jeremy Paxman, meanwhile, in A Life in Questions (Harper Collins £20), sets out to interrogate himself in the way that he once interrogated Michael Howard and the rest. Though he doesn’t convincingly ask himself the question that was always at the forefront of his mind when he addressed a politician – “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – there is just about enough honesty and anecdote about his chosen line of work to keep his self-scrutiny entertaining.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Auto-fictionaliser’: Beryl Bainbridge in Paris, 1981. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Posthumously, writers have less control over what we know. Brendan King was Beryl Bainbridge’s secretary and assistant for 23 years, and his affectionate but unflinching portrait of the author, Love By All Sorts of Means (Bloomsbury £25), dwells on heartbreak of all kinds as the source of her written worlds. King describes Bainbridge as an “auto-fictionaliser”, which is a way of suggesting that nothing she ever said or wrote was entirely factual (though a good deal of it was nevertheless true). The double-accounting method of biography is skewed by proximity, but King sheds some light on the pain of Bainbridge’s life, and sends you back to the novels for an escape from it.

Some lives are lived purposefully near the surface of experience, in the knowledge that the depths are likely to be hard to fathom. Brian Wilson’s autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson (Coronet £20), is a strange kind of surfing through the Beach Boy’s interior life. Wilson dwells on the damage his violent dad did to his childhood without revealing the psychological consequence, except in the voice of a book that, though ghosted, sounds like his own. His genius, like all genius, he suggests is accidental. He was hit around the head by a lead pipe as a kid in a playground fight, and lost his hearing in one ear. After that, he always felt he had to tune in to experience as if trying to find a radio frequency. The Beach Boys’ otherworldly sound, and the faltering attempts to locate its source in the deceptively simple sentences of this memoir, appear to be results of that distancing.

In a year in which Bob Dylan became Nobel laureate, and Leonard Cohen passed away, another songwriter with aspirations to a gruff kind of literature has essayed his leather-jacketed life. Bruce Springsteen’s inevitably titled Born to Run (Simon & Schuster £20) is less of a survival story than Wilson’s book. It was seven years in the writing, and though it has little of the craft and storytelling structure of Dylan’s Chronicles, say, it at least conveys a sense of the Boss’s indefatigable energy. Its publisher describes it as a book for “workers and dreamers, lovers and loners, artists, freaks and anyone who has ever wanted to be baptised in the holy river of rock’n’roll”. Try not to let that put you off.

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