Hope. By Pope Francis with Carlo Musso. Translated by Richard Dixon. Random House; 320 pages; $32. Viking; £25
His Holiness Pope Francis—the 266th bishop of Rome, supreme pontiff of the Universal Church, sovereign of the Vatican City State—is a man with fancy titles, a simple soul and simpler prose. He likes punctuality (“I like punctuality”), does not feel worthy (“I feel unworthy”) and thinks war is stupid (“War is stupid”).
He reveres humility, his grandmother, football, God and pizza, probably not in that order. His great sadness on becoming pope was that he could no longer pop out for pizza but must order it in to the Vatican instead (“quite a different flavour”). He is very nice, very kind and very, very boring.
Pope Francis is a good man who has written a bad book. This hardly matters. It is the first autobiography by a sitting pope and will probably sell millions of copies. Spiritual memoirs are often big hits: St Augustine’s “Confessions”, written in the fourth century, still attracts faithful buyers.
Autobiographies of the very famous sell better yet: Prince Harry’s “Spare” was the bestselling autobiography of 2023 in America, and Melania Trump’s was top of the charts in 2024. Meanwhile, in Britain one of the most popular books over Christmas was “A Pawtobiography”, the memoir of a celebrity dog called Ted (ghostwritten by a human, of course). It contains phrases like “We all love a lamppost.”
The pope had intended “Hope” to be published posthumously—perhaps even popes fear reviewers—but he has brought it forward because of “the needs of our times”. Less the “life story” promised by the blurb than a sermon, its evident aim is to make readers question such things as inequality, poverty and war. But “Hope” also raises other questions, such as: surely the pope can find a way to go out for pizza? Is it a good idea to have a book title that rhymes with your own title? And above all, what makes a good autobiography?
Bestseller lists offer some answers. They tend to feature lives that have gone very right or appallingly wrong (in the past couple of years two memoirs by Holocaust survivors, Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl, have been in America’s top ten). Or, better yet, both: the memoir of Matthew Perry, an actor who died of a drug overdose, sold well in 2023 and 2024. Mere fame is not enough, says Jonny Geller, a literary agent who represented John le Carré and Nelson Mandela: “It’s got to be a good story.”
This is tricky for a pope. Almost by definition, if you are a good candidate for the papacy, you are a bad one for biography. “I’m not sure it’s possible in that position to write a frank book,” says Robert Harris, a novelist, who was inspired by Pope Francis to write his novel “Conclave” (now a film). A great memoir should be “intimate, genuine and revelatory”, and that would “hardly be compatible with the job”.
There have been fun papal biographies; most are contained in a book called “The Bad Popes”. This offers lashings of sin, a sprinkling of Borgias and a good dose of Pope Benedict IX, who died around 1050 and was “a demon from hell, in the disguise of a priest”, accused of rape, murder, simony and hosting orgies. Pope Francis, who stopped watching television for 35 years after seeing an (alas unspecified) “sordid scene”, cannot compete.
Chapters and verse
He does not even try. Part of the problem is that the pope did not use a ghostwriter, who might have taken more control. (Instead he worked with a co-author, Carlo Musso, an Italian writer.) This was a mistake. Holy fathers are better with holy ghosts. “People can be exceptional in certain fields,” says Mr Geller, “then write very wooden prose.” Not everyone uses ghosts—but many do. Both ghost and author are often haunted by the experience. Andrew O’Hagan, a novelist, wrote an excruciating account of ghosting for Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks fame), who he said “talked as if the world needed him to talk and never to stop”.
“Hope” still offers some nice moments. The pizza is one; Pope Francis’s refusal to wear the usual papal white trousers (“I don’t want to be an ice cream seller”) is another. But far too much of this is too abstract to be gripping. Consider the contents page. In a good autobiography this can—and should—be telling. The memoir of Rupert Everett, an English actor, offers chapter titles including “An Escort Called Joe” and “Nude Sunday in Berlin”. Readers instantly know what they are in for.
The first pages of First Ladies’ memoirs are also revealing—if less thrilling. One of Hillary Clinton’s has chapter titles such as “Africa: Guns or Growth?”; Michelle Obama’s offers the almost equally earnest “Becoming Me”; and Mrs Trump’s goes for less philosophical, more practical titles, such as: “Lights, Camera, Model”, “My Husband, the President” and “Why Was the Speech Not Vetted?”.
Even philosophers can be clear: Nietzsche’s autobiography has chapters called “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Am So Clever” and “Why I Write Such Good Books”. But Pope Francis’s chapters are vaguer. His introduction is titled “All Is Born to Blossom”—an ominous start. Things get little better from there. One chapter is called “Life and the Art of Encounter”; another is “I Am Just One Step”. Most feel like quotes from Paulo Coelho, an indecipherable Brazilian novelist, which have been translated by ChatGPT. Some are baffling; some are biblical; many are both. Chapter one is titled, mystifyingly, “May My Tongue Stick to My Palate”—a wish that raises more questions than it answers.
One reason autobiography is so hard is that people assume it is easy: everyone thinks he is an expert about his own life. But as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at the University of Oxford and author of his own memoir, “Metamorphosis”, points out, you are not. “The one person that you can’t watch is yourself.” You are your own “great blind spot”.
Nor is all of what you see usable. Much of life is what Virginia Woolf called “cotton wool”: mere wadding, nondescript non-moments that, almost unnoticed, pad out a life (tooth-brushing, tax returns, Tuesdays). Tell a story that is truly like life, and it will be “just one damn thing after another”, says Mr Douglas-Fairhurst.
The very best autobiographies do more: they take the humdrum daily detail of life, fillet, shape it and so, says Mr Douglas-Fairhurst, “redeem all that chaos”. The pope’s biography does not do this. It gives the reader a mass of detail: trousers, pizza, his parents’ first address. But it does nothing with this. As a result, this biography of a pope offers, ironically, no redemption—and precious little sense of the man himself. The devil, as always, is in the details. The pope, alas, is not. ■
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