This is the first time I read a psychobiography and it wasn’t a pleasant experience at all. It was repetitive, confusing and -worst of all- biased.

In lists of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an asterisk sometimes appears next to the name of the entry for 1964. That year Jean-Paul Sartre declined the award because, among other things, a writer must “refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution.” The refusal cannot be called all that effective, in part because Sartre already was an institution (on an international scale to which, so far as I know, no author today really compares) and in part because the Swedish academy did not give the award to anyone else that year. He remains on the list, marked as a sore winner.

That same year, a future Nobel laureate issued his third and fourth albums, The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Another Side of Bob Dylan. The second title in particular hints at the ambivalence that the songwriter formerly known as Robert Zimmerman was beginning to feel toward his most ambitious creation -- to whit, “Bob Dylan,” a persona shaped in part through his own borrowings from various folk-music legends (especially Woody Guthrie) and in part by the felt need of segments of the American public for someone to embody the voice of his generation. In acquiring an audience, he took on the weight of its expectations and demands. (Reasonable and otherwise: Dylan had what in 1960s were not yet known as stalkers.) “By many accounts, he’d shed his boyish charm and had become moody, withdrawn and dismissive of those who either stood in his way or who wanted something from him,” writes Andrew McCarron in Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan (Oxford University Press). In public he sometimes had to wear a disguise, just to be left alone.

I found it hilarious and awful. So much psychobabble about nothing in particular.

Review: Light Come Shining
Andrew McCarron
Oxford University Press
2017

If you're a Dylan follower or just curious this book might be what you want. Psychobiography? A new term for me. Didn't exist back when I was taking psychology courses. It's an interesting way to approach a biography though and that kept me reading. What makes a person choose his direction that ends up being his biography?

I am aware that the reviews for this book haven't been stellar, and after reading it I can understand that since the author stops and explains what he's doing at every turn. Dylan is the subject of this study more than a person. But what makes a person? Some of what this author investigates like outside influences on his life and how he reacted to them as he matured.

The author prefers the idea of a script, a sort of predictable go-to position, that Dylan developed to handle significant life events like fame, injury, divorce, illness, death. The script forms and repeats, but is adapted to the different stages of life. He builds his case using interviews and other biographical material primarily to show a pattern in Dylan's life. Lyrics are used only to illustrate a point, but not as a guiding light to Dylan's actions motives. I think it works and seems more flexible than ways to organize an examination of what makes a person tick.

It is repetitive with some of the material and reminds me of the organization of an academic work more than a work for the general audience. It is quite accessible to that same public though which is why I think it was worth my time to read. Another point that disappointed me is that he wrote all this without his own interview with Dylan to verify his conclusions. Consequently, the case seems to support what the author has said, but lacks that final nod from his subject, unless allowing its publication amounts to that in the legal sense, at least.

I received this book through Netgalley from the publishers.

Could not finish. This started out heavily in psychology and it was all a bit much for me. I enjoy biographies that teach me a lot about famous or influential persons- but not so much when it's a stranger delving into their psychology.