For some reason this book was the first I felt I was reading slowly enough. Maybe because it wasn't riveting. Maybe because I find biography such a strange genre that I did a lot of thinking while I read. I am very used to biography, mostly of the A&E sort, which is a sordid one, overly interested in finding reasons for the great one's success in childhood interests/rebellions/hardships/luxury. Then of course there is the burst of glory and the horrifying anticlimax. All successful people look the same in biographies. It is the biographer you get curious about.
I find David Hajdu as biographer to be sensible and kind, bewitched by Mimi F and envious of Richard F, greatly turned off by Bob D, who would not be interviewed for the book, and admiring of Joan B in the way you admire someone strong and powerful with whom you don't connect even though you've eaten lunch together several times.
The lives of the 4 as they were around and for and beside each other make for a good story. Considered side by side, the romances of the 2 sisters with their men, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan never-quite-hot and Mimi and Richard lusty and fast-acting, are interesting, and not just in a gossipy way. I was very taken also with the story of RF's first wife, Carolyn, whom R abused pretty well but who escaped him and looks all the better for it. We do get a little from Dylan himself, taken from an extensive interview conducted by another journalist. In the quotes from this interview, Dylan denies his emotions a lot, denies ever having been sincere, which seems a natural enough reaction to having millions of strangers feel intense and earnest about your life and work.
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