"This lack of evolution—the absence of a neat narrative arc of growth or liberation—admits an even deeper truth, not just about Sontag’s life but about anyone’s: Every life involves reckoning with the same dilemmas over and over again. It’s a truth that emerges most clearly from what’s frustrating about the experience of reading biographies: Every life is structured by repetition. As Jean Rhys’s biographer, Carole Angier, once lamented: “her life really was just the same scene repeated over and over again.” We just keep having the same dilemmas and epiphanies. That stubborn constancy—the ways in which we are gripped by our tendencies, and our patterns—holds a truth far more uncomfortable than the tidy arcs of realization and redemption to which we often turn for solace."