There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.

Fitzgerald’s remark suggests that the best novelists are fundamentally plural—able to inhabit many selves, voices, and moral positions in order to create convincing fiction. Because biography typically seeks a coherent, continuous identity and a stable narrative of motives, it struggles to capture an artist whose working life depends on self-division, role-playing, and imaginative projection. The line also implies a defense of the novelist against reductive “life explains art” readings: the writer’s true identity is dispersed across characters, styles, and invented experiences. In that sense, any single-life account will miss the essential multiplicity that makes the novelist “any good.”