SOURCE: King, Francis. “Painters and Self-Portraits.” Spectator 261, no. 8349 (16 July 1988): 31-2.

In the following review, King analyzes the plot and style of The Truth about Lorin Jones, claiming the book makes interesting points about the nature of biography.

Every biographer—Michael Holroyd with Strachey and John, Victoria Glendinning with Victoria Sackville-West and Rebecca West, even (dare one say it?) Ariana Stassinopoulos Huffington with Callas and Picasso—is bound, willy-nilly, to fall victim to some degree of self-identification, however unconscious, with his or her subject. It is this self-identification, carried to remarkable extremes, which provides the theme for Alison Lurie's The Truth about Lorin Jones. Lurie's is a straight novel; but it is also, in a sense, a detective story, since every biographer must play the detective—coaxing out unflattering and even disreputable truths from the survivors; on the look-out for minor but crucial indications of what I call ‘creative...