“I’m interested in writing a book,” Lou Reed once said. “But not about me.” It’s this propensity toward letting himself fade into the background of his own story that makes Reed so compelling, and so hard to pin down. The narrative of his life and career seems to deal in contradiction—he was an unforgiving asshole and a generous supporter of the arts, a detail-oriented control freak who liked to make simple, three-chord songs, a rockstar who wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as a literary figure, an iconoclastic outsider always secretly searching for massive success, and a queer icon who married three women. He could write silly lines (“When people say her feet smell/They mean her nose”) and devastating ones (“I thought I was someone else/Someone good”) on the very same album.

Throughout his career, from the Velvet Underground to his vast, 30-plus years of solo work, Reed followed up commercial successes like Transformer with inaccessible artist statements like Berlin and Metal Machine Music. He was always negating the thing that his audiences assumed made up the real Lou Reed, as if to say, No, you don’t know me at all.

Though a breadth of biographical material on him exists, Reed himself never wrote an autobiography—he rarely seemed to even want to talk about himself, despite the rockstar image he cultivated and the confessional lyrics he put into the world. Maybe this is why there are so many biographies on Reed: They all want to definitively chronicle an artist whose essence was so difficult to find.

The selections below each offer different perspective on Lou Reed the artist and person. Alone, they might not be enough, but together, they begin to puzzle together some of the pieces. I’ve left some materials out—for instance, I’ve included no Velvet Underground-specific books, although the biographies mentioned go into great detail about Reed’s time with the band. Many of these books were published after Reed’s 2013 death; we can only imagine what the famous contrarian would have had to say about each of them after the fact.