Fall

Shoutout to my lovely sister for this amazing Christmas gift from 2024! Took me two years to crack it open, but it was absolutely glorious.

I can count on my fingers the number of biographies I’ve read. However, every one of them has left me deeply affected in ways I can’t quite put into words, which, for a person of many words like me, is quite unusual.

Fall was such a good read. It pulled me into a rabbit hole of wanting to know more about Robert Maxwell, which inadvertently led me to listen to the author talk about the book and, of course, to realizing who the infamous Ghislaine Maxwell’s father actually was.

At the beginning of the book, I was in awe of Robert’s life, how he built himself from nothing into someone so renowned. The first biography that ever made me feel this way was Ulysses S. Grant’s. There’s something about lives that stretch from nothing to everything, and back again, that feels almost mythic, like a warning and an inspiration wrapped into one.

Robert really lived a million lives. He went from nothing, clawing his way to power, money, and influence, only to ultimately return to nothing, both in death and in fortune. There are so many lessons buried in this book, some of which would be painfully useful if I were to go into business tomorrow.

How do they say it? Experience is a good teacher (as long as it’s not your experience).

His death is a shame. Suicide? Accident? Speculating feels like a waste of time, but I think we can all agree that it was sad that he died alone and that his body was in the middle of the ocean for hours after, with no inkling of his absence by anyone. There’s something unbearably lonely about that, and the writer (John Preston) tries to show us just how lonely his life became toward the end.

It reminds me of that Doctor Who episode set during the Partition of India, where these ancient beings called the Thijarians bear witness to those who would otherwise die alone, so they don’t draw their last breath in total isolation. I hope that was true, and if so, I hope he got one of those.

If only he had read his own story before his death. Because just as I, the reader, could see where things started going wrong, he might have seen it too and changed something. Or maybe not. But he didn’t get that chance, just as most of us won’t.

While the beginning filled me with awe, as I sifted through the pages, I went through a wide range of emotions: sadness at his early life, amusement at his audacity and exploits, joy when things started going well, horror as the cracks widened, and finally pity. Deep pity. A life so adventurous yet ending badly. A life that touched so many, yet left a trail of destruction for his family, his employees, and nearly everyone who came close to him.

Betty believed he changed because he never forgave himself for marrying a non-Jew. Perhaps she was right; guilt is a crazy parasite. But I think, more than anything, it was his childhood that shaped, and ultimately ruined, him.

That early life of deprivation, instability, and constant scrambling for survival seemed to lock him into a permanent state of gratification-seeking, childishness, and perpetual hunger, as we saw with his empire and even his relationship with food. He grew older, yes, but in many ways he never truly grew up. The boy who had nothing never learned how to feel secure, even when he had everything. And so he kept reaching, taking, exaggerating, pretending, long after it stopped being necessary.

Reading Fall was like watching a storm gather and finally break. You see the clouds forming early, yet you stay, drawn in, even knowing what’s coming. As I imagine many people in his time felt watching him spiral out of control with a mix of fascination and revulsion.