Grievous Angel: An Intimate Biography of Gram Parsons by Jessica Hundley with Polly Parsons (Thunder's Mouth Press)

LET'S TALK, BRIEFLY, about what constitutes a biography. From James Boswell writing in the late 1700s about Dr. Samuel Johnson to Hunter Davies in the late 1960s profiling The Beatles, biographers have put in Herculean hours researching their subjects. They have conducted interviews, sifted public records, accumulated the facts. Anything less would not be biography – at least not good biography.