A review by pagesfromhome
Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown

Did not finish book. Stopped at 26%.

I really enjoy the concept behind this book (building who a woman was through small moments witnessed by others, but always feeling a littler distant because you can’t really know someone through vignettes much like you can’t know them even through the most exhaustive biography - so that’d really clever), but it feels so weirdly edited that you don’t feel like you’re really immersing in anything. I find that the best biographies feel like the biography itself is in control, rather than the author, but Brown is clearly clinging to control here. Chapter 11, I think, summarizes the exact problem of this style of biography: two different stories are told of the same moment, but Brown is left unsure which to include so he includes both, leaving it up to you as the reader to decide which story you want to align with. I’d recommend this if you’re looking for a unique supplement to another biography about Princess Margaret, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as your sole learning. By the time Brown got to the second factionalized chapter (one suggesting Margaret married Picasso and the other imagining an obituary for her if she had married Group Captain Townsend), I knew this wasn’t the book for me. It’s written well and moments are funny and enjoyable and like I mentioned, the concept is really quite clever, I think it just could have been done better.