co-founded in 1988. He is a regular contributor to the magazine Upstate Diary and has contributed as a feature writer and editor to numerous publications including Interview magazine, New York magazine, Air Mail, The Advocate, American Way, Art News, Dance Magazine, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Latina, the London Observer, Stagebill, and The New York Times online.
His new novel is The Woman Who Had Everything.
At Lit Hub Greco tagged six books that approach the question: "Was [Elizabeth Taylor] a great actress, a great beauty, the ultimate movie star, a creature of vulgar excess, or some magnificent combination of all four?" One title on the list:
Donald Spoto, A Passion for Life: The Biography of Elizabeth TaylorRead about the other entries on the list.
If you want to begin with Elizabeth rather than “Liz,” begin with Donald Spoto. His is the most conventionally serious biography of the bunch, and the one withthe deepest interest in Taylor as an actress—not simply as the proprietor of eight marriages, several world-famous diamonds, and a medical history that could fill a teaching hospital.
Spoto is particularly good on the strange doubleness of Taylor’s life: she was both the triumphant creator of an extraordinary public self and the first person it consumed. He sees the marriages not as a string of scandals but as attempts at transformation, each offering Taylor another part to play and another possible escape from the part she had been playing since childhood. At times, his psychological explanations may seem almost too orderly for a woman who lived so exuberantly in disorder. But no other biographer I’ve read gets as close to explaining how the vulnerable child, the formidable actress, and the reckless soap opera heroine could all occupy the same five-foot-two-inch frame.
--Marshal Zeringue
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